A former colleague just emailed me this (he's white):
I find it fascinating how
narratives of "big data" and "analytics" and "objectivity" are continually employed to give credence to various racist tropes lauding white successes and black failures, even when the actual, objective results suggest strong reality-based counter narratives.
However, any numbers and results that run counter to people's preexisting beliefs and desires never seem to gain much traction...
Try convincing a white dude that Andrew Luck is no better than Cam Newton:
In both sets of value-over-replacement rankings, Luck narrowly places ahead of the Carolina Panthers’ Cam Newton, who makes for a particularly interesting point of comparison. Statistically, the two quarterbacks offered similar production a year ago, but their reputations couldn’t be more different. Luck is widely known as a “
winner“; Newton has been dogged by criticism as a “
stat-padder” who doesn’t deliver in big moments. Those sentiments probably played a large role when Sando’s execs placed Newton in the third tier despite having a quantitative résumé similar to Luck’s.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-good-is-andrew-luck/