How Stereotypes Explain Everything AndNothing At All

April 08, 2014 11:02 AM ET

by GENE DEMBY

Code Switch

Why Aren't Asian-

Americans Getting

Their 'One Shining

Moment'?

A few days ago, I wrote a post in which I was

mulling just why so few Asian-Americans

played Division I basketball in the 2012-2013

season. The numbers were striking. Of the

5,380 men's players in the top tier of college

basketball, only 15 were Asian-American. Asian-American ballers

weren't just underrepresented. They were practically invisible.

While asking that question, I posited a number of easy explanations

for why this might be so, and explained why none of them was

sufficient to explain why this might be.

But a few people defaulted back to them, anyway. Asian-Americans

are too short. They're just too busy studying and excelling at school

to be concerned with basketball.

"How many sons of Jewish immigrants are playing basketball?" one

commenter asked, presumably because Jews are another group

often held up as overachieving models of assimilation.

I want to answer that question by telling a funny story that reveals a

lot about stereotypes and how once they become fixed and widely

accepted, it becomes difficult not to use them as explanations for

everything.

So let's rewind a bit.

Way back in the early part of the 20th century, leaders at the big Ivy

League schools were deeply concerned that people they

considered undesirables were crushing the Ivies' entrance exams

and becoming an ever-larger presence in the student body.

According to Jerome Karabel, the author of The Chosen, Harvard's

president Lawrence Lowell knew that a straight-ahead quota

wouldn't be popular among his faculty. So he came up with a

workaround by instituting a whole new admissions process for

potential students — a process that will sound familiar to anyone

who has applied to college since:

Lowell agreed to limit the size of the entering class and to

institute recommendation letters and personal interviews. Yale

and Princeton followed suit; and soon came the whole panoply

familiar to this day: lengthy applications, personal essays,

descriptions of extracurricular activities. This cumbersome and

expensive process served two central functions. It allowed the

universities to select for an attribute the disfavored class was

thought to lack — i.e., "character" — and it shrouded the

admissions process in impenetrable layers of subjectivity and

opacity, thus rendering it effectively impervious to criticism.

"Character" was vague and squishy enough that it could mean just

about anything those administrators wanted it to mean. And what

they wanted it to mean was Not Jewish. The leaders at the Big

Three were aghast at the numbers at New York's Columbia

University, which by 1920 was almost 40 percent Jewish. The

number of Jewish students in the next incoming classes at those

schools fell dramatically. Their plan to fix "the Jewish problem" had

worked.

But there was one unforeseen wrinkle: the new admissions policies

crushed the Ivies' ability to recruit and retain top basketball talent.

After the Yale Bulldogs finished dead last in the Ivy League after the

1922 season — and were trounced by an amateur Jewish club team

— some angry alumni demanded that the University stop

discriminating against Jewish applicants to their schools. One star

Jewish player, Sam Pite, left the Yale team because he felt he had

been mistreated by his bigoted coach. He eventually came back

after a coaching change, and the Bulldogs won the conference title

the next season.

That's right. In the decades before World War II, basketball was

dominated by Jews. (Or, if you prefer, the sons of Jewish

immigrants.) The first bucket in NBA history was scored by a Jewish

player named Ossie Schectman. There were amateur leagues in

Jewish communities all over, and especially in big cities like New

York and Philadelphia, where many young Jewish boys saw hoops

as their way out of poverty.

New York Daily News Archive/New York Daily News via Getty Images

i

Writing in Philadelphia Magazine, Jon Entine laid out the backdrop:

"Basketball is a city game," notes Sonny Hill, a local icon who

has run a high-school summer league for more than 35 years.

"If you trace basketball back to the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, that's

when the Jewish people were very dominant in the inner city.

And they dominated basketball."

Not even New York could challenge the City of Brotherly Love

in basketball talent. From 1918 onward, the South Philadelphia

Hebrew Association team, or SPHAs (pronounced "Spas"),

barnstormed across the East and Midwest, playing in a variety

of semipro leagues that were precursors to the NBA. [...]

"Every Jewish boy was playing basketball," said the late Harry

Litwack, who starred for the SPHAs in the 1930s before going

on to coach Temple for 21 years. "Every phone pole had a

peach basket on it. And every one of those Jewish kids

dreamed of playing for the SPHAs."

"It was absolutely a way out of the ghetto," added Dave

Dabrow, also deceased, a guard with the original SPHAs. "It

was where the young Jewish boy would never have been able

to go to college if it wasn't for the amount of basketball playing

and for the scholarship." Sound familiar?

Entine writes that the main reasons Jews dominated hoops were

sociological — owing to the makeup of inner-cities and the lack of

economic opportunities therein. But that didn't stop observers like

Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News from positing some other

more, uh, colorful theories about why that might be.

"[Basketball] appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,"

he wrote, according to Arieh Sclar, the author of A Sport At Which

Jews Excel. Gallico added that it sat well with the "temperament of

the Jews" because it "places a premium on an alert, scheming mind,

flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart alecness."

To Gallico, the existing widely-held (and cartoonishly anti-Semitic)

stereotypes about Jews also conveniently explained why the sport

was dominated by them. And it wasn't just Gallico. Coaches back

then also tended to view Jewish players — who were perceived as

shorter — as better suited for the game, because the game's rules at

that time actually disadvantaged taller players. After changes in the

rules and changes in the ways Jewish communities were organized,

basketball's demographics rapidly began to shift.

People tend to thinkthat stereotypes arehonest reflections ofwhat they see in theworld. But instead,they often shape howwe see the world.

“ People tend to think that stereotypes are honest

reflections of what they see in the world. But

instead, they often shape how we see the world,

how we metabolize the data in front of us. It's

confirmation bias: if people see a lot of Jews

playing and dominating basketball, and the

common stereotype is that Jews are crafty

schemers, in the popular imagination, the sport

becomes about crafty scheming. And if

someone were writing back then about why so few blacks were

among the game's biggest names, they'd probably fall back on

hoary stereotypes about black players lacking the necessary

intelligence or craftiness or work ethic.

It says something that when people explain why there are so few

Asian-Americans in college basketball today, they summon the very

tropes that once were used to explain why there were so many

Jewish players. Jews are so crafty and short; of course they'd

succeed at basketball! Asians are so intelligent and short; why

would they be playing basketball?

Stereotypes rest on observations that appear to be superficially true:

a lot of top basketball players are black. But over time, stereotypes

transform from observations of patterns into rules, and eventually

into self-reflexive explanations for those rules. Stereotypes become

self-reinforcing. A lot of top basketball players are black because

black folks are innately better at basketball. Eventually, they actually

blind us to the complex mix of sociological, economic and historic

circumstances that undergird those patterns.

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It's why a question like that — "Why are there so few Asian-

Americans in Division I basketball?" — is worth asking. It's the type

of question that exposes where our stereotypes have disguised

themselves as explanations, and lets us search for the real

explanations, in all their complexity.

Chuck Stone, Pioneering Black Journalist And Professor, Dies At 89

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