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Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Coin Tosses are Biased and Racist

By amajamus

If there is one thing that Americans are good at, it's racism. But why can't we keep our racism at home? The 2018 Winter Olympics showed the world that whether at home or abroad, whether at play or at rest, whether in glory or in ill repute, Americans love to play the race card.
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The Olympics always seems to be spectacular. Records are broken and new records are set. Relationships are forged and renewed not only by the athletes and coaches, but by the spectators as well. Some would argue that these relationships are worth more than the gold medals themselves . . . I am one of those. The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea was no different.


I enjoy the winter Olympics a little more than the summer Olympics but I have to be truthful, I’ve lost interest in the Olympics in the last few. The Olympics have become more and more political ever since the 1936 Olympics (and maybe before) when Adolf Hitler supposedly snubbed Jesse Owens (Owens denies Hitler snubbed him but rather Franklin D. Roosevelt snubbed him).

But in the 2018 Winter Olympics, Americans and the world learned an important lesson in the unlikely field of Statistics and Probability from such an unlikely person, Speed skater Shani Davis. The lesson being that something as unbiased can be in fact biased . . . and racist.

The most fair, unbiased, and equal way to decide an outcome of a situation is to use a coin toss. The coin toss is used in most every situation imagined. It is used on playgrounds and little league sports where sportsmanship is stressed over winning and coin tosses are even used in the NFL to determine which team will kick or which team will receive.

It's apparent that Davis’ little league coaches failed him when it came to sportsmanship.

In a unbiased or fair coin toss, each side, heads or tails have the same probability of showing up: 50 percent. An unbiased coin toss means that the probability of heads is the same as the probability of tails. 

Outcomes though, are not equally likely for either side.

What deemed the coin toss as racist? A coin was tossed to determine who would be the flag bearer in the 2016 Olympics. The coin toss was to determine if Luge star Erin Hamlin or Speed skater Shani Davis would carry the flag. It’s not that simple though, Hamlin was a white woman and you guessed it, Davis was a black male. A black male was “snubbed” by a white woman AND during Black History month.

Shani Davis never explained how this could be determined as racist, it just is. We Americans should know that if a black man loses anything to a person who is white, even a woman it has to do with race. I have a theory on how the coin toss could be determined as racist.

Since we don’t know what coin was used for the coin flip and the coin flip was to determine which American would be the flag bearer for Team America I would have to say the an American issued coin was used: a nickel, a dime, a quarter, and dare I say a Susan B. Anthony coin.

All these coins have something in common. The commonality is that one of the sides has a white supremist, slave owning, oppressor of a white man on it (and a white woman on the Anthony coin). But to be more specific, the coin most likely used doesn’t have a black man on it.

People are saying that Davis has shown the world how racist America is and what should be taken away from this. Well, all Davis did was show how simply race can be injected into everything. Shani Davis has made a mockery of something as simple as a coin toss. Will Davis be remembered as a great athlete? Maybe. Maybe not. At worst he will definately be remembered as the person who didn’t get his way and boycotted the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

At best Shani Davis will become a simple question in trivia nights at a bar or restaurant to attract more customers or a square on Jeopardy: for one hundred dollars, who is Shani Davis?

What is next? The laws of physics is racist? Gravity is racist? The solar system is racist?