Willie O’Ree was the first African-American NHL player — for the Bruins. So let’s hope a good series by P.K. Subban doesn’t become a racial thing for Boston.

I’m a big fan of the Canadiens right now — they’re Canada’s best (read: only) hope, for chrissakes — and the rest of the playoffs, minus the Wild and Rangers, feels like a bunch of teams that won it all… Continue Reading

Tucker County, West Virginia is the least diverse place in America. Cue the eye rolls.

Randy Olson — a true “data visualization” guy — put in some work on the diversity of every county in the United States. There’s some detail on it here, and on his own blog here. Here’s how the process worked:… Continue Reading

Lest we forget in the midst of all the racism discussions, Donald Sterling is also quite the misogynist too

Donald Sterling is (currently, at least for the next several hours/days) the longest-tenured owner in the NBA; he’s been in that role with the Los Angeles Clippers for 33 years. Normally, that would be a major badge of honor — think of… Continue Reading

Is there a racist undertone to attitudes about the death penalty in the United States?

There has long been discussion about how the death penalty in America is quite possibly racist, and there’s even been discussion about how there might be a gender bias (only 14 women have been executed since 1976). There’s an element… Continue Reading

What exactly is happening at Ole Miss in terms of the racism these days?

Couple of major incidents have transpired at Ole Miss in the semi-recent past: a noose appeared around a statute of James Meredith, the university’s first black student (a fraternity was basically expelled as a result of that), and there was… Continue Reading

African-Americans don’t own the welfare rolls, and do more community service than almost anyone. Can we start having a more real dialogue about race?

That video above is hopefully an outlier, but it’s also some guy telling Nightline that blacks and Jews are, disproportionately, “predators.” This is 2014. We have an African-American U.S. President — and have for about five years — and we’re probably going to have… Continue Reading

Marcus Smart (black) pushed Jeff Orr (white). Smart is a top college basketball player, but is he now a thug? No.

First, this happened: Then stuff like this happened: Marcus Smart is a thug and seriously lacks composure 👋👌 — Olivia Coiro (@livcoiro) February 9, 2014 Then the Internet dug deeper on the fan in question, and this happened: There’s more info here on Jeff Orr (the… Continue Reading

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The real issue with the Richard Sherman interview is that (a) contextually he basically just had sex and (b) he’s black

Been a million theories on this one (1, 2, 3) and Richard Sherman has weighed in on it himself, so this doesn’t need to be a really long post or anything. Let’s keep it simple. 1. Dopamine. The media loves to… Continue Reading