While observing the recent NCAA basketball tournament and the recently begun NBA playoffs, I marvel at the diversity that has broken through in the game of basketball. Not too long ago (in fact, only three years after Jackie Robinson broke the MLB color line), Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton became the first African-American player to sign an NBA contract. The league has been expanding in terms of diversity and global exposure ever since, so much so that for the past 20-30 years, the league has been composed of mostly African-American players; more recently, an influx of European and South American basketball players has occurred.

This booming diversity raises an important question: What has happened to the white American basketball player? Why has he become so rare? In last year’s NBA finals, the Miami Heat and Dallas Mavericks had a combined total of 3 American-born white basketball players. If white males make up a majority of the population, then why is it so rare to find one playing professional basketball at the highest level?

A major consideration to this inquiry concerns the stereotype of white basketball players. A stereotype is a generalized, exaggerated description of an entire group. Perhaps the most popular stereotype of white basketball players is the notion that “white men can’t jump”. Certainly that is not the case for all white basketball players: anyone who has ever watched Tom Chambers or Brent Barry or David Lee win slam dunk contests can attest to that. Why, then, does this stereotype persist?

The answer to that question is, I believe, that the game of the NBA is a game where those athletes who are most athletic have the biggest advantage towards success. However, it is interesting to note that the differences in the typical qualities associated with white basketball players as opposed to black basketball players are astounding. Black basketball players greatly tend to be characterized with descriptions such as “athletic body, can jump out of the gym, extremely fast, etc.” This is not the case, generally, with white basketball players. They are typically noted as players who have “Intelligence, craftiness, effort”, which, essentially, are antithetical to those “natural ability” characteristics. Thus, it is widely believed that black basketball players rely on natural ability for their success while white players have exert great effort and intelligence to succeed. We know that these are greatly exaggerated stereotypes. Yet they have become the norm, essentially, for dividing white and black basketball players. Very few white players have been characterized with the attributes typically associated with black players, and vice-versa. Therefore, as a consequence, aspiring white basketball players tend to pigeonhole themselves as players who are only capable of being smart, crafty and hardworking. This greatly hinders their performance, and thus very few of them rise to the level where athletic ability reigns supreme.

This is a perfect example of the stereotype threat, a theory postulated by sociologist Claude Steele. This stereotype threat is the fear that one’s behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of the group which one identifies. The white basketball player, no matter what his particular skill set is, fears that he will be grouped with other white players, because he might exhibit those characteristics commonly associated with them (perhaps a legitimate fear). According to Steele, this may greatly affect his performance. In a basketball sense, a white basketball player with just as much or more athletic ability than his black counterpart will fail to perform in many instances because he is aware of the stereotype that “white men can’t jump”.

On a big scale level, this leads to the white basketball player becoming discouraged at the fact that no matter how hard he tries, or how smart he is, the athletic black basketball player will always have an advantage over him. This has significant societal implications. Those white athletes who fail to perform at more athletically oriented events like basketball or football move to those sports that are less so, for instance baseball or hockey. This goes to great lengths in explaining the preponderant majority of whites in these particular sports. The stereotype threat also works in reverse in these sports: blacks, who fear that they will never be intelligent or hard-working enough to succeed at these “less athletic” sports because of their race, make the move to basketball and football.

Thus, like Steele observed in his experiments with white and black children taking academic tests, white basketball players will tend to do worse than black basketball players if they are conscious of the stereotypes that surround them. Furthermore, this stereotype fear could indeed propagate these negative stereotypes: white players will tend to play like everyone expects them to and black players will do them same. Yet black players will win out almost every time because they will exhibit those attributes which are most coveted at the higher levels. Unless a game-changer comes around (in the sense of a white player exhibiting exceedingly obvious athletic ability), then the white American basketball player will gradually slide into extinction.