tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
Socio economic does not include race, gender, sexuality at all. It only looks at four factors - occupation, education, income, wealth and where someone lives.
That’s a very narrow definition.
![www.apa.org](https://www.apa.org/images/socioeconomic-status-topic-landing-page-tile_tcm7-310412.jpg)
Socioeconomic status
Socioeconomic status is the social standing or class of an individual or group. It is often measured as a combination of education, income, and occupation.
![www.apa.org](https://www.apa.org/Content/Images/launcher-apa-144.png)
“Socioeconomic status is the position of an individual or group on the socioeconomic scale, which is determined by a combination of social and economic factors such as income, amount and kind of education, type and prestige of occupation, place of residence, and—in some societies or parts of society—ethnic origin or religious background.”
Frankly if you’re going to only go on wealth indicators, you may as well just drop the “socio” because you’re really just talking economics.
In the case of promoting hockey diversity the main ones would be to ensure you are looking at providing advantages to lower income people and try to make sure you are targeting geographic locations that have diverse makeups.
To give you an example, providing hockey scholarships to only people of a certain skin colour is inherently a discriminatory policy. The idea behind it may be noble but the same goal can be achieved by specifically targeting those scholarships to diverse locations whereby there are lots of minority groups or targeting lower income families, which afterall are disproportiatly made up of the minority groups that people want to help.
So you’re going to deliberately target racial groups but… not admit to it?
I don’t think anyone disagrees with providing support to the economically disadvantaged. But it’s a matter of fact that even after economics are accounted for, there are still other disadvantages at play.
If you address only the economic issues but ignore the others, you’re tacitly saying the others don’t matter enough to need addressing. I hope the problems with that stance are self-evident.
Your premise that people feel more comfortable around people of their own race has some kernel of truth but doesnt really matter. Every culture has different interests resulting in large congregations of one culture for certain events or sports. This kind of disparity does not require fixing, the only thing required is that there is no impedement or discrimination against other cultures from participating. Do we really need to have a quota system for NBA teams to make sure the one white guy on each team has fellow caucasions to feel comfortable? I reject that premise.
… ok, so maybe it isn’t self-evident.
To make this as brief as possible — you seem to be operating on a belief that there are no racial impediments or discrimination in hockey. By all evidence, that is incorrect.
In the end, the goal of inclusivity and diversity (to the extent that it will naturally happen as you cannot force diversity by forcing people that have no interest in your sport to be involved) can be achieved by targeting programs at diverse locations, target diverse economic backgrounds, and by promoting of diverse role models to incentive kids of different backgrounds. That is it.....anything else is simply going into a discrimantory territory that has no possible end point.
I think this approach has merit, and I’d be all for it.
I think there’s also a harder core issue of racism than you’re acknowledging, and that’s not going to be addressed unless it’s addressed.