Revisiting Racial Bias in NBA Refereeing: First So Back, Then So Over

Influential studies by Price and Wolfers (2010) and Pope et al. (2018) documentracial bias among NBA referees and suggest that heightened awareness canreduce it. Using an independently assembled player–game dataset for 1988–2025that links box scores to referee crews, I replicate the original findings and extendthem. Racial bias is present in 1988–2007 and largely absent in 2007–2014,reemerges in 2015–2019, and disappears again from 2020 onward. Merginggames to county–day measures of Black Lives Matter protest activity, I findlower bias when local protest intensity is higher. These associations are consistentwith awareness-driven reductions in discrimination.