There are many reasons why the number of minorities that participate is sports vary from sport to sport. Race plays a big part in sports as well as in our society. Why is it that a group of people can harass and abuse a young black male for raping a white female, but on the next Saturday at the big football game cheer him on and hope that he has a great game. Over the years there have been some great black sports players, in almost all sports. Michael Jordan, OJ Simpson, Mohamed Ali, Bo Jackson, just to name a few. When players like these come along that are black and sort of take over a sport, many white male sports fans say stuff like, "He's black, he's faster than the white players." This tends to be true, blacks dominate the speed of sports while whites dominate the power positions of sports. In the NFL today most of the specialty positions (wide receiver, running back) are dominated by black players, and power positions (mainly the offensive line) is dominated by white athletes.
In today's professional sports there is great diversity. In almost any sport you look at there is people of all colors. The three major men's professional sports leagues, the MLB, NFL, and the NBA all had pretty good percentages when it came to minorities. The MLB had 60% white players, 10% African Americans, 28% Latino, and 2% Asian Americans. The NFL had 33% white players, 65% African Americans, < 1% Latinos, and 1% Asian Americans. The NBA had 20% white, 78% black, < 2 % Latino, and < 1 % Asian Americans. All of these numbers came from a study conducted by Richard E. Lapchick in 2001. Although there is not much wrong with the numbers I just shared with you, there is a big problem in some othe ...