Is minor hockey racist?

Or are mainstream media posting more leftist tripe?

On the news tonight, I saw a clip that claimed minor hockey in Canada was racist since only a small fraction of the players were black and efforts to include more Black, Indigenous and People of Colour on the hockey rosters were being met with resistance from teams that claimed they should continue to choose players based on skill. CTV has been airing a documentary called Black Ice that claims there is “systemic racism” in hockey. The claim is backed up by data that show 90% of hockey players are men and only about 9% are black. While the data are from the United States, the Canadian experience is not much different according to CTV’s reporting.

Is that evidence of racism or just a preference as to what sport to play and selection based on skill? Let’s review a bit more data and see if that helps. If there is “systemic racism” in minor hockey you might expect the data to be skewed towards “whiteness” wherever hockey is popular. Brampton is an Ontario city with a high degree of youth participation in hockey and a couple of dozen players from Brampton making it into the National Hockey League. But in Brampton, 30% to 40% of the City’s “travel program” team hockey players are visible minorities. “Travel Program” teams are those that compete on behalf of the City including out of town games. How do kids from a “visible minority” background predominate hockey teams in Brampton if minority hockey is “systemically racist”? Could it be they are good at hockey?

According to Statistics Canada, “visible minorities” made up about 15% of Canada’s population in 2017, the latest data I could find. It seems that in Brampton at least any “systemic racism” is anti-white if we are to use relative proportions as “evidence” without looking any deeper, you know, into things like interest, skill, etc.

Black Ice and the CTV coverage seem more like left-wing tropes than solid reporting of a social problem, and anyone who thinks the proportion of people in any particular avocation or career should mirror the percentages in the population at large are deluded.

If the ratios were in fact “evidence of systemic racism” you would only need to look to the National Basketball Association (NBA) to find proportions way out of whack with the population at large. The percentage of NBA players who are “black” is over 80%. Proof of racism against whites? Nonsense. Basketball has been a favorite sport of kids in black communities for decades and if you watch any NBA game it would be hard to argue the black players lack skill. The high proportion of blacks in the NBA reflects nothing more than skills and interests.

Hockey and basketball provide counterpoints to the “sytemic racism” trope the CBC, CTV and mainstream media in general promote to keep dividing Canadians and Americans into “identity groups” and then pitting those groups against one another by pushing a left wing ideology. Underneath it all is a desire to promote socialism and foment discontent.

If minor hockey is “systemically racist” when only 9% of the players are from minority groups who comprise about 15% of Canadian society, then professional basketball is demonstrably and unredeemably “racist” with 80% of black players when only 13% of American society is black. Of course, both claims of racism are specious and grounded in ideology, not in fact. The “Black Ice” documentary just ignores the reality that only 3.5% of Canada’s population is black and blacks comprise a proportion of minor hockey players not far from that percentage. To the extent it differs on the low side, perhaps the others chose basketball.