On Getting An "A" In Diversity

The University of Central Florida College of Business Administration is the home for something called TIDES - The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. TIDES claims to serve "as a comprehensive resource for issues related to gender and race in amateur, collegiate and professional sports."

So far, so good. Ethics are usually a good thing - witness the recent uproar over DeflateGate. And diversity isn't necessarily bad, unless it is forced diversity solely for the sake of diversity (i.e., quotas). But Lord God Almighty, this place has a very twisted view of diversity. For example, TIDES recently gave the National Basketball Association an A on its 2014 Racial and Gender Report Card. Here's some data on which that grade is based.

For the 22013-2014 season, 80.5 percent of the NBA's players were people of color... Both Asian players and players categorized as "other" races each remained at 0.2 percent of all players. The percentage of white players was 19.5 percent...

That doesn't seem very diverse to me. The league is dominated by one segment of the population: players of color. How did it earn an A? However, when you look at the grading criteria, it becomes clear.

Currently, 24 percent of the U.S. population is comprised of people of color, thus an A was achieved if 24 percent of the positions were held by people of color...

In other words, as long as the NBA reaches its quota of diversity, then all is well, even if one particular cohort overwhelms the rest of the ethnic categories. It doesn't matter that whites, Asians, or "others" are underrepresented in terms of their proportion of the general population, as long as the people of color are taken care of.

What an absolute load of crap.

The NBA, and sports in general, are for the most part a great example of a meritocracy. A person's race is largely irrelevant as long as they can perform. That's the way it should be, in sports as well as in other walks of life.

Too bad the people at TIDES, and the administration at the University of Central Florida, who are wasting taxpayer $$$ on this nonsense, don't get that.