Players can’t count on NBA to back their fight
Black basketball players are synonymous with the NBA, but they are not indispensable to the league as it evolves into the future.
It’s not outlandish to consider a future shift away from the centrality of the Black basketball player, even when they make up over 74 per cent of the league, according to a 2015 study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
NBA players have risen to the forefront of athlete social activism in light of this year’s global reckoning on racism in America and beyond. Now with the season finally over and jerseys marked with phrases like “Black Lives Matter,” “Education Reform” and “Say Their Names” retired for the year, the question that now looms is, where will they go from here? And what impact will athlete protests and political outspokenness have on viewership as leagues fight to recover sports ratings, which have reportedly taken a historic dip across the board during this pandemic?
Even the most well-meaning of people can become protest weary and susceptible to what bestselling author Carol Anderson describes as “white rage” in her book of the same name.
“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement,” Anderson writes. “It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather, it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal
citizenship.”
William C. Rhoden, in his book “40 Million Dollar Slaves,” refers to the way white rage plays out in sport as the “Jockey Syndrome.” It occurs when the establishment attempts to change the rules of engagement in certain sports to end Black dominance. This began with the expulsion of Black jockeys from equestrian sports in the early 1900s and examples of this, he argues, have echoed throughout sports history.
It may seem impossible to imagine the NBA with a minority Black presence, but so too did the Black jockey dominate late-19th-century racing. In fact, 11 of the first 20 Kentucky Derbys were won by Black jockeys. Most notably, Isaac Murphy won his third Derby in 1891 but died five years later at 35, having been run out of the sport after years of a white counterattack that consisted of physical interference with Black riders on the track and owners refusing to hire Black jockeys.
“The hysteria over this ‘Black rise in sports’ betrayed a deepseated fear among whites of being overtaken by African
Americans,” Rhoden wrote. “This fear triggered a mostly unconscious, knee-jerk reaction to Black success by mainstream society: changing rules and changing relationships to either eliminate or mute the Black presence, whether by gentlemen’s agreement, racial quotas or globalization.”
With spectator sports a major part of society’s leisure lifestyle, there are many who believe that protests in the NBA and other sports won’t be tolerated for very long outside of the 2020 season.
“You want (activism) to continue beyond this seminal moment, but if every sports event becomes a political demonstration, I think that in the long run that will be off putting even to those who are in substantial agreement with the cause itself,” sportscaster Bob Costas said in a CNN interview during the NBA restart. “In this moment, have at it ... but after that, players have a platform beyond the field or beyond the court and they can use that effectively.”
Not everyone will be ready to hear that, but it is the tough truth and NBA executives and players know it. The league is in fact a business, and any good business seeks to keep customers happy. Although it’s hard to determine at this point what kind of impact the NBA’s embrace of athlete social activism has had on viewership, if any at all, the possibility of a growing uneasiness amongst sports fans is certainly something to be tracked.
In the comments section of just about any sports story that mentions racism or even Blackness, you will find an abundance of variations of the question, “Why does everything have to be about race?” or “I can’t even enjoy watching sports anymore.” It’s apparent that these are not the kind of folks who have taken the time to do their own anti-racism work or attempted to understand the grievances of Black, Indigenous and other People of Colour.
This is particularly frustrating to see as a Black journalist because it’s clear these people never actually read the stories they criticize. While they may express abhorrence of highprofile incidents of police brutality, for them, the message of protesters is lost in the cacophony of voices leaving them longing for the days when athletes would just “shut up and dribble.”
While the NBA is widely celebrated as the most progressive of the big sports leagues when it comes to diverse hiring practices and allowing for freedom of expression from its players, it largely maintains a business structure dominated by white owners and executives. The labour force of players is overwhelmingly Black, echoing the plantation model, despite the multimillion-dollar player salaries.
It is without question that this generation of millennial ballers is determined to right the wrongs of the Michael Jordan generation, which has been heavily criticized for doing little in their height of influence to move the needle forward in America’s journey toward racial equality.
With a pivotal election coming up and a divided America grappling with an identity crisis under a current president who refuses to acknowledge even the existence of systemic racism, athletes seem resolute on pressing forward.
“We all know that we want to see better days and when we leave here, we gotta continue to push that,” LeBron James said as he accepted 2020 NBA Finals MVP honours and pleaded for the continued fight against voter suppression, police brutality and “everything that is the opposite of love.”
Informed and determined, NBA social justice champions like James and others will continue to find ways to use their collective resources and personal platforms to define the next phase of this journey.
As the basketball world tries to figure out how to recover ratings in the age of the coronavirus and political unrest, how the future efforts of NBA athlete activists will be received remains to be seen.