What is more difficult to prove is the existence of subconscious racial bias: a white man crossing the street as a black man approaches, for example. The white man may not even realize he is acting in a way that assumes the approaching stranger means to do them harm, but is acting on a racial bias nonetheless. Are sports announcers guilty of this sort of bias, and are viewers unknowingly absorbing them? To answer this question we dispatched a group of ten people to combine to watch every single television broadcast of a Major League Baseball game for a week last season—95 games total, and nearly 200 separate broadcasts, since nearly every team fields its own broadcast for every game. We analyzed these games for the words announcers used to describe players, with the goal of finding out whether broadcasters spoke about white players and players of color differently. Our analysis shows that while black players are not discriminated against, foreign-born players—of which the vast majority are Latino—find themselves at a disadvantage.
A paper studying how announcers talk about baseball players of different races.
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