Stereotypes live on in sports
WHEN I WAS 20, I was the only white guy on a very good team in a very competitive rec basketball league.
I was 6-6, lightning quick and could outjump most anyone in the gym.
One game, we were playing a team comprised of all black players. It was a physical matchup and I was getting hit hard almost every time I touched the ball. In the third quarter, I was basically tackled by the guy guarding me as a teammate passed me the ball at the top of the key. My right foot rolled onto its side as my leg remained perfectly straight. I nearly vomited from the pain. Moments later, as I was being helped off the court, my teammates said to me, “They are trying to intimidate you because you are white. They think you’re slow and soft. Yo u gotta show t hem you’re not.”
At the next whist le, I reentered the game and played the last quarter - and-ahalf on what I later fou nd out t o be a fractured ankle.
I had nothing to prove to my teammates — they were good guys who knew I wasn’t slow and or soft. But they also knew that these were the default — and accepted — perceptions of white players. Tw e nt y - three years later, not much has changed. Sacramento Kings rookie Nik Stauskas, after last Sunday’s preseason loss to the Raptors, had this to say about
his debut: “I understand that I’m a rookie and I’m white, so people are going to attack me at all times,” he said. “Just coming out there in the game, I felt it right away.”
Now, before the reverse-discrimination zealots try to hold up either example as rallying poi nt s for t hei r f lawed cause, understand
that neither my experience nor Stauskas’ is about the oppression of white men in America. Just the opposite — the problem is in becoming comfortable with stereotypes as a way of assessing people (in this case, athletes), and the bridge that provides to bolstering centuries-old discrimination and prejudice against truly oppressed groups.
Consider this: about a year before my broken-ankle incident, my father’s coworker — who was white, and had played with me in several pickup games — saw us on the street one day in my small hometown. He came up and gave my old man a hearty slap on the back. “Jeez, this kid can jump out of the gym,” he said, waving his thumb in my direction. “You sure he doesn’t have any black blood in ‘em?”
My father’s coworker didn’t think he was being racist when he posed that appallingly racist question. In fact, he probably thought he was complimenting me, my father and A frica n-A mericans all at once. Which is why spor ts stereotypes are so insidious. Think about his statement: Black blood. The connotations are sickening. There’s something inside those people that make them able to jump high. Or makes them fast. Or more athletic.. Or lazier. Or less intelligent. Or more likely to have children out of wedlock.
Or want to leech off the public welfare system. Or more violent. Or prone to committing crime. It’s in their blood. They’re all like that. That’s why Stauskas’ observations and candidness is important — he’s inadvertently called attention to the last publicly accepted realm for racial stereotyping — sports.
“Some people may have a problem with it, some people may not,” Stauskas said in defense of his comments about the perceptions of white players. “but if you’ve ever played the game of basketball, you understand that there’s certain stereotypes and certain reputations that certain players have and based on that, people are going to play a certain way against you.”
And if you’ve ever lived as a minority in this country, you know it doesn’t take much before “certain stereotypes” and “reputations,” lead to people living, governing and policing “a certain way against you,” too.