Arguably yes. The NBA itself is an irrelevantly tiny portion of the economy. But it creates a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.
What do you mean "arguably yes"? What are we losing by having blacks be over-represented in the NBA?
>But there is a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.
BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person.
Professional Hockey is dominated by White Canadians and Russians. Baseball is over-represented by Latino/Hispanic players. Asians, who are 5% of the US population, account for almost 25% of all Physicians. Which industry has this perfect ratio of races that should serve as a model for us all. And you conveniently side-stepped the issue of 1) why it is race/ethnicity where proportionality should be prioritized over (for example) religion, and 2) is it even reasonable to expect that such a ratio to be achievable in a society where people are free to choose and 3) what the heck is the actual gain to society if it is versus the cost of brainwashing people to want things they don't actually want.
How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?
How much do you? How much do middle-class black Americans in New York know about the personal experiences of poor black teenagers in rural Louisiana? How much do you know of the personal experiences of second generation Polish Americans in Chicago? Or recent Chinese immigrants in San Francisco? Or poor White Protestants in Appalachia.
What is your point?
Would you support limiting professional teams from hiring black people to allow for a certain number of Asians?
Would you support universities reducing their intake of Jewish students to stop over-representation?
Would you support hospitals hiring a maximum 5% Asian doctors?
It's a symptom of one.
> And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?
Deal with the problems that deny so many black youth any better opportunities than the lottery-ticket of aiming for success in sports.
The other point is that in a free society, you cannot guarantee equality of outcome because people are going to make personal choices that will be magnified and influenced by whatever sub-culture they are immersed in. Professional basketball in the early days was over-represented by Jews, because it just so happened that interest in the game went viral in that sub-culture.
Tech has an over-representation of men because it grew out of a particular nerd sub-culture. There's nothing wrong with doing outreach to get non-traditional sub-groups developing an interest in programming, just like there's nothing wrong with the NBA running clinics in China to get Chinese kids into basketball. But it's not racism that the demographics are the way they are! In a free society you should expect that!