Blogger Jim Pomeranz takes N&O Public Editor Ted Vaden to task for a comment in a recent column. Vaden, after writing about his newspaper’s coverage of the Duke lacrosse investigation, adds this:
Why does Duke abide a 47-member sports team that has only one black player?
Pomeranz is amazed, as am I, that Vaden could make such a statement. Pomeranz calls it a “stupid, uneducated question.” My characterization would be similar. Vaden responds that he once played lacrosse so he knows what he’s talking about, as if playing lacrosse makes one an expert in human resources issues.
It is ironic that Vaden would criticize the sport of lacrosse for a lack of black participation when newspapers are notoriously lacking in enough blacks to even come close to the percentage of minorities in the population as a whole. Newspapers are obsessed with this (as Vaden’s knee-jerk non sequitur demonstrates). Never mind that, as with lacrosse, it is a supply problem, not a discrimination problem.
As someone familiar with the game of lacrosse in North Carolina, I can count on one hand the number of black lacrosse players who have played at Durham’s Riverside High School in the past 10 years. There are two on the team this year, and that probably is as many as on any high school team in the state.
At the college level the situation is the same. This photo taken last Friday at the Queens University of Charlotte vs. Mars Hill game is an example. That player, Deandre Ingram from Southeast Raleigh High School, is the only black player on the team at Queens. Not an unusual thing at the college level, as Pomeranz pointed out.
The next time Vaden attends a minority job fair desperately trying to up the N&O’s minority numbers, he should remember that.
p.s. Another supreme irony: The mainstream media have used terms such as elite, posh, preppy, prep school, all-white, rich-boy to describe lacrosse in recent weeks. And then Vaden wonders why there aren’t more black lacrosse players! It takes a very strong-willed and courageous young black kid who is a good athlete to choose lacrosse over basketball, football or track and field, given the peer pressure and the cultural expectations.
