Study claiming racial bias draws critics

Kobe Bryant said he’s never noticed any evidence of racial bias when it comes to NBA officiating.

“I think I’ve gotten more techs from black refs than white refs,” the Los Angeles Lakers star joked Wednesday. “That’s reverse racism probably.”

Bryant, LeBron James and four other NBA players dismissed an academic study that found evidence of racial bias in referees’ calls, saying they’ve never experienced it.

According to an upcoming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell graduate student, white referees called fouls against black players at a higher rate than they did against white players.

Their study also found that black officials called fouls on white players more frequently than they did against blacks, but the disparity wasn’t as great.

“We obviously discuss officiating and our feelings toward it,” said Utah Jazz guard Derek Fisher, president of the NBA players’ association. “But I don’t ever recall it being a racially motivated type of conversation where we felt like there were certain guys that had it out for me or him or whoever just because of the color of our skin.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever really felt that there was a racial component to officiating.”

That misses the point, said Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School and co-author of the study.

“This is not a view that one set of people hates another set of people. This is implicit, unconscious biases,” said Wolfers, who conducted the study with Joseph Price, a graduate student in economics at Cornell.

“You see two players (collide) on the floor and you have to call a block or a charge. Does the skin color of the players somehow shape how you interpret the signals your brain gives you?”

Analyzing NBA box scores from a 13-season span running through 2004, the study found that black players received fewer fouls per 48 minutes than white players, 4.33 to 4.97. But it also found that fouls on black players could increase as much as 4.5 percent in that time period “when the number of white referees on a crew went from zero to three.”

Though the NBA is made up of predominantly black players, less than 40 percent of its officials are black and they are randomly assigned to games in three-person crews.