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aren't as heavily-represented in baseball. There are two primary factors, to my mind, which are even greater than the aforementioned social issues (those aforementioned issues being the gap between Little League, and the lower percentage of involved fathers in inner city households).
The first is a simple one: the need for more complicated, and expensive, equipment than any other major sport. With basketball all you need is a ten dollar ball, a hoop, and a relatively miniscule patch of pavement. With baseball, everyone needs a glove (the Latin American kids actually use milk cartons, but I digress), and there are several different styles of gloves which serve different purposes. And the catcher, if you're going to play the game for real, needs additional protective gear to keep from getting annihilated. You also need at least one bat, preferably aluminum, in addition to at least a couple of balls. While none of these things is super expensive by itself, they do add up. With football, you can stuff a flag in your back pocket and all you really *need* is a ten dollar ball to get a pick-up game going, and you can even play on pavement. Even tennis only requires a pair of fifty dollar racquets and a handful of one dollar balls, and there are tennis courts everywhere.
Which brings us to the significantly larger obstacle to inner city youth baseball involvement: the size of the playing field. Some of you will protest, "But there are plenty of baseball fields, football fields, and soccer fields where they could play!" That's true enough, but how is a kid supposed to hone his or her skills when they're not at the field? Baseball was embraced by the USA precisely because it was a game that people could go play in any relatively flat field. For a long time, our cultural identity was one which proudly represented the fact that agriculture is what made us great. Nowadays, it's all about tech companies and entertainment media.
I had a chocolate lab we picked up from the pound, and she would go retrieve my batted balls whenever I would go take swings in my front yard. My front yard just happened to be about three hundred and fifty feet deep, so it took a bit of practice before I could routinely send balls over the fence and onto the road. But even after I got to where I could do so, my dog would run into the field on the other side of the road and retrieve the ball. I'm not sure how you're supposed to practice hitting without such a large area (and, yes, I understand there are batting cages. but we're still talking about a genuine obstacle to practice/engagement when kids have to physically go to the cages, and then pay money to practice their swings. ask benihana just how badly a relatively minor bit of friction - a comprehensive signup form, compared to a quick signup form, for example - can impact a website's traffic...)
In conclusion, I really don't think this is a black vs. white thing, although that is a glaringly obvious symptom of the real issue. The real issue is that so many people today are growing up in cities, and that there are significantly simpler/easier sports to access than baseball for a kid who has options. Any kid can have a hoop setup on their driveway or in a parking lot no more than two minutes' walk from where they live, and he or she can do the vast majority of basketball training activities in that tiny area. That's why basketball is the number one sport in the Philippines, even though the median height for men here has to be around 5'4". It's because all they need is a piece of plywood, a hoop, a ball, and a coconut tree to play the game. You probably think I'm kidding about the coconut tree, but nope ;-)