As I watch the underdog Golden State Warriors use grit and guile to battle the mighty Dallas Mavericks, I cannot help but think what a great game basketball is — and how, despite its many shortcomings, the NBA showcases one of the purest forms of competition we have.

In many ways, basketball is the most simple and eloquent of American sports — just a team, a ball and a couple of nets (much like soccer, that other “beautiful game”). In no other sport can a team get so far on effort.

Or so I thought.

While I pride myself on an awareness of our many cultural constructions of race, I was genuinely shocked to hear that a recent study reveals pervasive racial bias in NBA officiating: white officials are more likely to call a foul on an African American player than a white player.

My shock reveals my own bias, I guess, as I unconsciously try to maintain some imaginary space safe from the messiness of the real world.

Two experts who read the study — Ian Ayers of Yale Law School and David Berri of California State University — take a more studied view, according to Alan Schwarz of the New York Times:

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”

At the moment, the NBA is getting defensive, refusing, as I did, to accept this corruption of its ideals. Let’s hope it soon realizes that it is very much a part of the real world.

Update 5/4: NBA Commissioner David Stern has been very active today in disputing the study’s findings. In fact, I just caught him being interviewed about it from the sidelines of the Nets-Raptors playoff game. He is claiming that the NBA has done its own, more thorough study and found no bias. And he accuses the New York Times of jumping on a study that had not been peer-reviewed. You can sense his anger in this NPR interview.

Stern seems to have valid points — or, at least, points worth investigating. And certainly Stern has a stellar reputation in addressing issues of race and gender in basketball (as can be seen in his fervent support and protection of the WNBA). But to assert, as he does in many of these interviews, that the basketball court is a place completely free of bias is to perpetuate that old American liberal fantasy that we can just wish racism away.