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The Wall Street Journal says the National Hockey League must diversify or die.
The NHL is overwhelmingly white. In 2011, it was 93 percent white. It’s roughly the same today. There are 50 black NHL players, which is apparently an outrage. There needs to be much much more diversity, according to supposedly the right-leaning Wall Street Journal.
The NHL, unfortunately, agrees.
“Now, more than ever, hockey communities and its leaders must focus on the drastic demographic and cultural change that is coming. It is incumbent upon those currently in the game—for the sake of the game’s future—to ensure that the sport is perceived as welcoming to all,” a league policy brief argues.
The policy brief authoritatively states: “The diversity explosion that the country is now experiencing will alter all aspects of society in ways that can help the nation prosper, make it more inclusive, and increase its global connectivity.” Even the NHL has to say “diversity is our strength.” (The brief was written by a black NHL executive.)
The league hired William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, to help them predict their future without a progressive-approved level of diversity. The Brookings Institution is the epitome of arrogant neo-liberalism. Frey essentially offered the league Dissident Right facts about demographic replacement.
“[O]f the 21 metro areas with NHL franchises, seven have minority white populations and 10 are minority white among their child populations,” he wrote in his report. “Among the 24 U.S. franchises, 10 are located in metros with minority white populations and 13 are located in metros with minority white child populations. Some of these have shifted quickly. In 2000, only 3 of these metros had minority white populations and just 6 had minority white child populations.”
He concluded, “This is something a lot of people don’t really know. This is a very different country than we were even 15 years ago.”
You don’t say . . .
This report would be deemed a “conspiracy theory” if Frey said these changes were negative. However, the demographer only notes these changes to argue for more diversity. Frey’s analysis assumes that NHL team demographics must properly represent their respective cities. If that’s the case, the Detroit Red Wings must have an 80 percent black team to properly represent its city. There’s no way that will ever happen, but the argument requires that if taken to its logical conclusion.
Experts quoted in the Journal article imply the NHL may need to lower its standards and ignore more talented white players to satisfy the diversity cult. Neal Henderson, who founded America’s first minority youth hockey program, said the league should go out to the ghettos to find talent. He said the scouts should give constant encouragement to these non-white athletes so they’ll stick with the sport.
It should be noted that the NHL is diverse when it comes to national origin. The league has players from 19 different countries, and the vast majority of its stars are non-American. This shows the league does include players from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures; diverse you might say. But diversity complaints are never about the inclusion of people with different backgrounds—it’s all about making an institution less white.
The NHL is unbearably white to its critics. To normal people, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a sport meant for northern climates is predominantly white. Africans and Hispanics aren’t exactly people of the North nor are they fond of the cold. Most American blacks live where hockey is not part of the local culture, and most blacks prefer basketball and football. The culture around hockey is also incredibly white. For instance, the Winter Classic game features bagpipes and the players marching on to the rink like medieval warriors. Most of the players come from outside of America—it’s unlikely urban blacks will relate to Finnish players with odd names and funny accents. The few black players are very “white.” P.K. Subban, arguably the best black player in the league, sounds and acts like a white guy. He is very different from NFL stars who speak in Ebonics and obnoxiously dance in the endzone.
The NHL can spend a fortune on minority outreach and still not increase its black player count. Major League Baseball has tried to increase its share of American black players for years to no avail. American blacks constitute less than 7 percent of MLB players. This is in spite of the league pouring millions into minority outreach programs. Like the NHL, the MLB is accused of being too white. This complaint popped up famously during the 2013 World Series when both the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals boasted nearly all-white rosters.
However, major league baseball isn’t disproportionately white when compared to America itself. A little over 63 percent of its players are white, which is roughly equivalent to 62 percent of Americans being white. The league makes up for its lack of blacks with a large number of Hispanics. Over 27 percent of players are Hispanic and most of them are non-Americans. Still, the league is not diverse enough to liberal critics.
The two other major American sports leagues never come under fire for its player diversity in spite of being overwhelmingly black. The National Football League and National Basketball Association are 70 percent and 74.4 percent black, respectively. Those figures are grossly out of proportion with the American population and even their own fan bases. (Despite blacks being only 13 percent of the population.) The NFL’s fan base is 77 percent white. The NBA’s fan base is plurality black, but 40 percent of its fans are white. Neither league accurately represents its fans on the field or court. The NHL does reflect its fan base in the rink; 92 percent of its fans are white.
Now the NFL and NBA do receive diversity complaints. It’s not about the number of black players—it’s that there are too many white coaches.
The NHL’s belief it needs to diversify to survive is just not true. Both the MLB and NFL also have overwhelmingly white fan bases and thrive. The NHL doesn’t need to appeal to everyone who lives in a city with an NHL team—it just needs to appeal to white people. Its audience is growing, and TV networks expect the audience to expand during the current season. There’s no evidence that more black players will grow the audience or make ghettos brim with hockey jerseys. Depending on a black fan base also causes problems for revenue. Some NBA franchises privately grumble about how their black fan bases aren’t reliable revenue sources.
Some identitarians may have scoffed at most of the article. “This is just about sportsball . . . er . . . puck! Who cares? Our people are dying. Whites need to turn off the tube and march in the streets!” Identitarians like to criticize professional sports as the opium of the masses, solely designed to lull the cattle into a false sense of contentment. Obviously, sports are entertainment and offer an escape from life’s troubles. But it’s not the worst thing in the world. The people will always desire amusements, and sportsball is better than opioids and porn.
The NHL is the superior sports league because it’s the last sport of the white man. Baseball is too slow-paced and indulges conservative fantasies. The world never changes in baseball, and conservatives can pretend it’s still 1950 every summer. Hockey is much more fast-paced and aggressive. It celebrates white machismo in a way that no other sport does. Many of the white football and basketball players would count as “wiggers.” Hockey players rarely exhibit aspects of black culture. NHL arenas are more likely to play thrash metal than rap. The sport’s most famous commentator is Don Cherry, a Canadian who stands up for his nation’s silent majority and opposes mass immigration.
If one must choose a sport to watch, the NHL is the least pozzed choice. That’s why the Left wants to ruin it. Whites are not allowed to have white sports, white music, white institutions, or white spaces. They must be made so diverse that whites can no longer claim it as their own.
Hockey is a particular affront to liberal taste. Not only is it too white, it celebrates a white masculinity firmly rooted in white culture. That’s a big no-no, especially when big corporations sponsor the game. The elites’ ideal hockey league features players straight out of a Key and Peele sketch and exclusively plays rap.
Fortunately, meritocracy still rules sports leagues. Only the best players make it to the pros. For hockey, those players are white.
13 Comments
Why not take over Sabot racing too?
White people indeed have to get off the tube, rejecting sports is foolish. I find that attending local sports events clears my head and embeds me deeper in my community. Those of us on the youngish side also must start playing sports if we are to be useful to our nations. Team sports in particular build character and discipline.
I am, however, surprised that everyone, from the anti-white detractors, to Mr. Hampton himself passed up the opportunity to call it the National Honky League.
I hope that the NHL, with or without diversity, goes kaput, and boys return to playing pickup hockey on rivers and lakes. This is supposed to be a winter sport. NHL teams in warm Amerikan states is nuts.
NHL (like NBA and baseball) is a bloated capitalist project controlled by multimillionaires including Gary Bettman. WTF is someone named Gary Bettman doing as chief boss man in what was once a rural winter sport?
The NHL quit being about hockey some time ago. You can’t watch a game live or on TV without be inundated with advertising and wokeness. The woke players garnering attention for themselves by claiming victimhood for bullying and toxic locker room culture are going to force the league into the social justice morass, and the fans will leave. The NHL gave an inch on diversity and respect, and so as it goes, the Left demands the rest.
I’d suggest hockey fans support their local minor league teams instead. They actually play the game for longer than two minutes uninterrupted by marketing and propaganda.
This is fascinating. Again we see the Left doing that thing Douglas Murray has pointed out they continually do with regards to demographic change:
1- It isn’t happening.
2- It’s happening, and that’s a good thing.
It’s so incredibly dishonest. I think that all this NHL diversity thing can do is wake more people up. Whenever I see the Left engage in something like this, I always wonder if it’s a troll. But they appear to genuinely mean it.
It always only works one way for these diverisi-cultists – anything whites enjoy must be destroyed and negrified. You’d never see an article in the supposedly “conservative” WSJ denouncing the NBA for not being “diverse” enough (except, as you note, for coaches being “to white”).
It’s sickening. Nothing but prattle about “diversity and inclusion” (which is simply code for “anti-white) for anything and everything all the time, and always at the expense of anything whites might happen to like more than others. So what if more whites like hockey than blacks (for what it’s worth, I don’t care a whit about hockey)? So be it. Real diversity would celebrate different people enjoying different things, but what the diversi-cultists want isn’t real diversity, but rather homogenization and a miscegenated globalist monoculture.
Diversity is the codeword for “Anti-White”, and what the diversi-cultists want isn’t real diversity, but rather homogenization and a miscegenated globalist monoculture.
Well put sir! Bravo!!
Every sane and commonsense-possessing White man and woman in America needs to know this!
Last year’s Stanley Cup final game (St. Louis vs. Boston) hit a 25 year-high for viewership: https://dailycaller.com/2019/06/13/stanley-cup-game-7-bruins-blues-tv-ratings-25-years/
The NHL TV viewership was up about 2% in 2019 over 2018. Ratings and attendance are up this year as well. Most other sports leagues are down in viewership – NBA is way down. Keep in mind that NHL does not have ESPN to draw in viewers either (they have a contract with NBC Sports).
NHL is kind of a metaphor for whites in general. Leave us alone and we will prosper. But they ain’t gonna leave us alone, unfortunately.
“This is just about sportsball . . . er . . . puck! Who cares?
That is the problem with American sports: it’s one corporate team playing against another. If you guys would just play football rather than handegg, you could wave the Stars and Stripes around when you were facing off against Germany or Russia, rather than waving corporate bling with cutesey cartoon animals.
This is what football in Poland looks like:
https://i.imgur.com/7cv4zdA.jpg
And lest you think “oh, they’re Ossies”, here are Danish fans submerged in a patriotic flagfest:
https://www.roligan.dk/images/danske-fodbold-roligans.jpg
Outside of America the GAA in Ireland have done a fantastic job of linking local and national identity with its sports. still amateur as well keeping it very much grassroots organisation.
It would be a really hard sell, I would think, to get Black teenage girls into ice-skating rinks anywhere in America, and if they aren’t there, I bet most Black guys would have no interest in going either. When I was ice-skating for fun back in the 1960’s and early ’70’s, I never saw any minorities there at the ‘public skating hours’ in the evening. I doubt that has changed. I think of ice-skating as definitely a ‘white’ sport, though Asian figure-skaters and speed skaters of both sexes predominate at the competitive level. But since I haven’t been there in 40+ years, I stand corrected if things have drastically changed. However, I would think that somewhere in their minds they would feel out of place.
I had mixed feelings after reading this undoubtedly interesting and thought-provoking essay. On the one hand, I completely agree with the author’s comprehensive analysis of the status of Ice Hockey League including both the insidious attempt of leftist managerial class and media to “diversify” (de-White) it and ice hockey being an inherently, predominantly, and rightfully White sports that needs to be cared about and defended against the leftist onslaught and sports-engineering; on the other hand, based on all the facts and realities presented by the author, in the end I can’t help arriving at a sobering fundamental conclusion which I believe constitutes the root cause to the problem, that is the blind, undiscriminating, and addictive obsession of most of White fans with the terminally commercialized and vulgarized professional spectator sports in general (the Whiteman’s hockey included) for the sake of entertainment and thrill of the sports per se and nothing else, which make them helpless hostages subjected to whims and will of the anti-White leftist sports management and media and their manipulation.
Imagine if enough White fans rise up and rebel against the tampering and diversifying of their beloved sports, they don’t really need to speak against it openly and loudly as that involves considerable risks in today’s multicultural and politically correct social environment of America, they simply can and should cheer for White players all the more, snub teams that promote non-White players, and silently boycott the games with their tickets by simply refusing to go to watch games played by teams that kowtow to the leftist maneuvering and hire unqualified black players. That alone would send an implicit but potent signal to the managerial class, consign their agenda to limbo and even bury it for good. But of course most White fans do not possess that healthy and much necessary racial consciousness, having been submerged in the leftist social norms and intoxicated by the “color-blind” (read: anti-White) propaganda of the vulgarized and commercialized professional sports world for long.
White people must be reeducated and awakened to put their collective and distinct race interest over anything else, watching and supporting a professional sports team included, and learn to have the awareness to select for White sports players and Whiter teams to watch and support, instead of blindly and idiotically watching and cheering for any professional sport team for its own sake like mindless and obedient sheep and feverishly buy all the merchandises peddled by the clubs management that secretly, or openly, despise them and wish to dispossess and displace them in a long run. This is of course an extremely tough and long uphill battle, but it must be fought and won or the White race will become more and more enervated and die out eventually, chewing potato fries and watching professional sports.
Let the bell of truth ring and the army of truth march on, into the White minds and households. This is exactly why the intellectual wing of our White Nationalist movement, such as Counter Currents and other similar websites, plays such a crucial and indispensable role, in spreading truths, cultivating minds, and encouraging right and self-conscious actions that will enable the White race to survive and thrive in the future physically and culturally, politically, economically, and yes, sports wise as well as a collective racial stock, rightfully so both in our own perception and in the eyes of the enemies, in this dangerous and ruthless era against the anti-White political and socio-cultural macro-background.
If race doesn’t matter how can anything be “too white” -?