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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Indiana Attorney General’s office is suing the state’s high school athletic association over a requirement that some of its board seats should be reserved for minorities.
Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office said Thursday that it wants the Indiana High School Athletic Association, or IHSAA, to immediately eliminate a requirement that two seats on its board of directors should be reserved for minorities.
“Hoosier students should not be governed by a sports association that picks its leaders based on race,” Rokita said in the written statement.
An IHSAA representative said in a statement Thursday evening that the association was disappointed the lawsuit was filed “despite our willingness to consider the Attorney General’s concerns through our established governance and bylaw review processes.”
The representative also said the IHSAA “disagrees with any suggestion that our bylaws violate federal and state civil rights laws or in any way constitute an abuse of its nonprofit status.”
The requirement targeted in the lawsuit is one of several reservations the association makes for its 19-person board. Its bylaws call for 12 seats to be open, two to be reserved for women, two for minorities, two for people representing urban schools and one for a private school representative.
The lawsuit focuses only on the reservation for minorities.
Rokita’s office said it initially demanded that the reservation be eliminated in April. It said the IHSAA refused to act and said only that it might consider bylaw changes next May.
The attorney general’s office calls the minority requirement “an express, discriminatory racial classification,” in the complaint it filed Wednesday evening in Marion Superior Court.
“(The requirement) categorizes all individuals into two groups — those who are ‘white’ and those who are not — for the sole purpose of allocating seats on IHSAA’s governing Board,” the complaint states.
It adds that the association is teaching “a wrong and dangerous lesson — that the color of one’s skin, rather than one’s character, qualifications, or merit, is a proper basis for allocating positions of authority — to the students it purports to serve, and it suffuses the entirety of its operations with the stain of racial discrimination.”
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