Recently, a USA Today article explained that most fights in baseball were between players of different ethnicities. Jason Whitlock, an ESPN employee who was tapped to run The Undefeated, a website that examines the crossroads of race and sports, was fired because the controversial reporter was deemed unfit to run the website.

These two events beg some questions: Are sports trying to run from racism? Is race a problem in sports today? Or are people making a big deal out of coincidences?

Take this. In a 2013 review, The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, or TIDES, gave the NFL, MLB, and NBA grades of A, A, and A+, respectively, for their diversity amongst employees. The report points to an increase in diversity among management/front office positions and a diverse player base, but it still sings the same song that we’ve been hearing for years: no one hires minority coaches. In the 2013 season, there were just 3 black NFL head coaches, 4 managers of color in the MLB, and only 6 African-American general managers in the NBA. Many point to this as an obvious sign of racism in a sector that has been dominated by white men for so long.

There’s also the issue of racism in the athletes who play the game. Whether it’s smack talk on the field or a poorly timed comment picked up by an unsuspecting microphone, the accidental racist remark by an athlete is almost not news anymore; fans see it so often that it is almost ignored (for a list of the 20 most racist sports statements, click here). Some wonder if racism can ever be cleaned out of sports, or if, since it’s so encompassing, we will never hear the end of controversial snippets from athletes.

Others point to exactly that: Sports include so many types of people that racism in that realm doesn’t exist. In that same report, TIDES shows a solid improvement in diversity among the three sports mentioned. More than two-thirds of football players are minorities, 81 percent of basketball players are “people of color”, and more than a quarter of MLB players are Latino alone.

That USA Today article displayed a graphic showing that 87 percent of baseball fights are between players of different ethnicities. That could simply be happenstance; since the baseball workplace is so diverse, it’s inevitable that most fights will include at least one minority. The NFL, MLB, and NBA are all consciously trying to bring their brand to the international level as well, which will of course bring in more diversity. To say that sports are racist just doesn’t make sense.

That doesn’t mean that there is no problem, that a melting pot workplace solves all of the racism issues in sports. Just because the employer tries to maintain equal-opportunity rights doesn’t mean the employees adhere to the same standards. It’s been an elephant in the room for decades, since the integration of most major sports; some athletes that play the games we love are racist.

There’s nothing that the major sports can do about it, either. As long as someone can hide their disdain of other cultures from the spotlight long enough to establish residence in a league, current company thoughts don’t punish racist acts. In the NFL, the penalty for screaming the “N” word at an opposing player is the same for certain pass interference cases on the field, and only frequent offenses merit off-field discipline. Former MLB pitcher John Rocker was quoted multiple times disparaging multiple races and was suspended for a total of 14 games with pay.

I wish I could say that racism will leave sports within 20 years. I’m just not sure right now, especially with today’s youth being exposed to what happened in Ferguson and Baltimore in recent memory. The way that some minorities were painted by the media will stick in their mind forever, and those thoughts will either go away or mature into more negative sentiments as these children age. The only way to stop racism in sports, and in the world really, is through pure education. Teach these young athletes that it’s okay to be white, brown, black, yellow, red, pink, magenta, of whatever color and ethnicity, because a human is a human, and an athlete is an athlete. Major sports companies need to do a better job of creating tougher policies to try to eliminate blatant racism by its employees.