Remember how Obama was elected President, and race no longer mattered in America? Here's some proof of that: West Virginia, coached by Bob Huggins, stocked with your usual Huggins players, is the latest underdog to inspire us all by taking the piss out of some uppity bunch of future lottery picks. Take that, John Wall. You were shut down, and while those lazy pros who would never heed a coach's scheme won't do it, West Virginia did. That's a mark of shame you'll bear forever. You couldn't take it to the limit, you are mortal, and your whole career will be a sham. DeMarcus Cousins, big dude, you can't handle the triple-team. But they won't throw that at you in the pros because they don't have the heart. Or too much ego. Those two are opposites.
Okay, let me stabilize myself, this boat is awfully rocky on the high seas of knowing what I need and want. West Virginia. What state says America more than that one? They've had the shit shot out of them for striking (I've seen Matewan for the acting!) and otherwise just die in the mines. But they keep on. Just like those Mountaineers. They refused to quit. You know why? Because they didn't need the NBA. They knew they might be playing the last game of their college careers. And since they were Huggins guys, they weren't getting a degree, either. Some might say "oh, they are just a bunch of wannabe NBA players, how can they be so noble?" The answer? They saw the light. They might as well be white people, the way they put Kentucky in their place. No way Ebanks declares this year, he's got unfinished business—and real men take care of business.
Coach Cal, shut the fuck up. Huggins made his team work, and drew up the X's and O's to make you sweat. Fucking Italian. Go back to Africa with your fucking team. I have to say, I never liked the Bearcats, or whatever the mascot of K-State is. But Huggin is the real deal. Appalachia is the heartland, just higher in the air. God's country. You lead a horse to water, but in the end, you need a real cowboy with his hands on the pump. Who was that black dude at the Tea Party rally? He was post-racial America. Go Mountaineers.
A brief word about the last one: An earlier draft contained a reference to Martin's light skin, which I cited as another reason some people might be under the impression that he wasn't an aggressive player. But as Q McCall pointed out in a chat, in a context like AOL, it's hard to broach the concept of skin tone stereotypes without either:
1) Appearing to condone them 2) Having to exhaustively lay out the phenomenon 3) Giving a reader the opportunity to say "I don't think that way", thus weakening the argument 4) Meet with steep resistance to the very idea that such prejudice exists.
I finally decided that this point, and the meta-media question surrounding it, belonged here on FD—where, I think it's safe to assume, most of us have at least heard of this form of prejudice. But it was strange to realize how hard it was to write that sentence about Martin in a way that the general audience on FD would have found accessible, and would have had the desired effect.
Speaking of Martin and skin tone, I think we've seen something similar happen with Stephen Curry. Now that Curry's gotten comfortable, we're seeing what his game will look like at an NBA level, and it's pretty nasty. He penetrates, shakes defenders, crosses over at random, and doesn't fear disaster. In some ways, he's not that different than Monta. But since members of the media never watch the Warriors, they talk about him as a pure shooter with stellar basketball IQ and a airtight sense of right and wrong on the court. The Kevin Martin-syndrome, as much as anything else, explains the disconnect between the discourse surrounding Curry and the player you see on the floor.
Just the other day, the high school I work at held their annual MLK assembly with English classes from each grade presenting speeches about what MLK meant to them. I stayed for a bit, but left at about the time that I assumed I would have to finish preparing for class. So I made copies, set up the classroom and waited.
And waited.
I returned to the auditorium about 20 minutes after the bell for class had sounded and found the assistant principal outside waiting for the students to exit (in perfectly orderly fashion of course). “Are we on an alternate schedule today?” I asked another teacher as the AP walked away to respond to a call, demonstrating my naivete as a part-time teacher at the school. “No,” the woman laughed facetiously. “They’re just running late – you know how these things go.”
Right.
So I returned to class and relayed the story to my co-teacher: the irony of cutting class time at a predominately black inner-city school that is soon to be subjected to state control for failing to make achievement-test based progress is troubling enough. But it’s as though in the process of celebrating the man, we have forgotten that he was not just a figurehead but a highly educated individual who actually committed himself to school and received a PhD before joining a movement that pre-dated him. It was one of many reasons for tension between King and Fred Shuttlesworth.
When our students finally did return to class another 20 minutes later, we asked how the assembly was. “It was good,” said one student, with that kind of indifferent dismissiveness that adolescents pull off so well. “Somebody spoke about knowing him.” The other students had similar responses until the last one: “It was a waste of time,” he said sitting down confidently. “It’s just the same old stuff every year. And we still ain’t learning nothing.” At some point, the watering down of King’s life and the way we pass off these annual events as “education” year after year has to become a source of concern rather than a comfortably accepted reality.
Earlier today, Bethlehem Shoals passed on the article he wrote about MLK Day for FanHouse, which led to an interesting discussion between the two of us about that very issue – the watering down of his legacy and our unthinking acceptance of it as a singular day of service. I would argue that it’s the best treatment of race I’ve seen from him, especially considering it’s an angle on MLK Day that some people – see the comments -- would rather dismiss. And Shoals is right – there is a massive contradiction between the NBA and King’s vision. But there’s more to it than that – our whole approach to MLK Day is somewhat ironic given that King essentially committed his life to challenging the contradictions in our society that perpetuated racism.
Early in his career, the contradictions he challenged were those between the constitutional ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the reality of life for blacks in the U.S. Case in point:
I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.
Later in his career – the point when his rhetoric was suddenly received as more dangerous and threatening to the U.S. way of life -- it was the blatant contradiction of redirecting our attention from the plight of the poor in the U.S. to sending poor young men to Vietnam to fight another impoverished society.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans. Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Regardless of what we make of King’s assertions – either before or after he turned to his Poor People’s Campaign – the fact remains that this is what King was about as much as anything else: resolving our moral contradictions.
Sociocultural learning theorist Yrjo Engestrom writes that the tension caused by these contradictions is what leads to learning – the process of working through the anxiety caused by blatant discrepancies in our ways of thinking and resolving them leads us to refine our understanding of our own circumstances. It’s uncomfortable, but, as Gert Biesta describes, in some ways learning is an act of violence – destroying one’s pre-conceived notions and building a new way of thinking….over and over again.
Of course, that’s impossible when we have whittled King’s entire life down to one or two soundbytes, commodified them, and annually celebrated a watered down memory for so long that it’s hard to even discern what his life was about. A day of service or quietly engaging in service throughout the year without taking a public stand is in direct opposition to what King stood for. It’s comfortable – as comfortable as watching the game on the day off granted to us in memory of King – and we should not confuse that with honoring King’s life.
The title of Garrow’s book about King is Bearing the Cross, a biblical reference and described participation in the struggle in his writings (p 148): “I know this whole experience is very difficult for you to adjust to,” King wrote, “but as I said to you yesterday, this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people.” The struggle is difficult, but “I am asking God hourly to give me the power of endurance.”
If we set aside whatever qualms we have about organized religion, the point here is that King was more than speeches and sloganeering – it requires people to stand up and publicly assume a heavy and burdensome responsibility for enacting change. The civil rights movement was indeed a struggle that forced many people to make sacrifices that we have not just forgotten but ignored. So while people often wonder where our great leaders have gone, perhaps a better question to ask is where are the people willing to stand up and assume responsibility for moving us forward? It’s not at all that they don’t exist – I work with and know many of those people. It’s that far too often, we look for others to “bear the cross” while we continue to live our lives of comfort.
Today we still sit with blatant contradictions that we refuse to discomfort ourselves to resolve, partially because of our refusal to deal with the discomfort of race talk, as described by Latoya Peterson:
Sadly, the progress hoped for by many in minority communities has not materialized. Instead, our conversations about race and its impact on American life are no more insightful or sophisticated than before, as evidenced by the discomfort we have in discussing racial issues in anything other than a superficial form. The newly appointed Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to have an honest conversation about race and racism with his colleagues at the Justice Department last February.
People get excited about the prospect of a post-racial, color-blind society when black professors are harassed by police and senators making poorly worded observations are somehow linked to segregationists. The racialized disparities in public schools are boiled down to a matter of non-white students needing to work harder and raising test scores as class sizes stay at 25+. Globally, there is a brief outpouring of support for Haiti after a major earthquake in which the damage caused was only exacerbated by our blatant neglect of their problems across administrations. Should athletes be solely responsible for challenging all of these contradictions? Of course not. And neither should the NBA. However, it’s also problematic to pretend that we’re honoring King with a bunch of watered down tropes and silly memes. As Chris Hedges describes, it’s representative of a world, “informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.”
None of this is to say King’s own life wasn’t full of contradictions – people often credit him for the entire movement when he only reluctantly joined the movement because organizers needed to use his church for a meeting. His treatment of women in the movement as second-class citizens is well documented by historians David Garrow and Barbara Ransby. He was against the formation of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commission that Ella Baker pushed for fearing a loss of control for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Contradictions are part of being human – we cannot expect to anyone to be free from them, even those that we mythologize and turn into figureheads of an entire movement.
Nevertheless, Shoals is right – there is no reason to boycott the NBA or reactively accuse them of abdicating an imagined responsibility to fight for social justice. His point – at least as I read it – is that we’ve lost sight of what MLK was really about. One way to correct that would be to take this day as an opportunity to better understand his legacy – committing ourselves to revisiting his speeches, discussing their significance, and having honest discussions about where we are now with regard to the very contradictions he addressed. But it’s gotten to the point where the contradictions between what we’re saying about him and our actions are becoming clear.
And even a 15-year-old -- who has probably known nothing other than a watered down version of the King narrative – can see that.
Jay Caspian Kang thinks John Henson should wear a muu muu and a fat guy hat. Follow him at twitter.com/maxpower51
In the summer after graduating from college, as part of my introduction to New York City, I took the A train down to the fabled West 4th Street basketball courts. All melancholy literary types are required to vividly remember, and then write about, their first encounters with The City and so I, too, can recall the heat that day and how it curled the edges of the wheat-pasted posters, pushing those sight-bending currents of hot air out of the subway exits. When I got to the courts, a middle-aged man with a camera around his neck told me that the league games had been delayed on account of the heat. Two lines of massive men in jerseys leaned up against the chain-link fence, occasionally looking up at the cloudless sky for some form of absolution, occasionally looking out at the court where some teenage kids were playing three on three. Two of the kids—how could I have not noticed?—were Asian. The game was a fundamental mess, just six guys scrambling around until one could find a dunking lane. After about five or six failed tries, one of the Asian kids managed to throw one down, eliciting a half-hearted chorus of oohs and aahs from the assembled crowd.
After a decently choreographed strut, this kid turned towards the chain-link fence and screamed, “Fuck yeah, n***a! You see me just dunk on that n***a?” Then, turning to his fellow Asian, he puffed out his chest and said, “N***a, this shit is over.”
No one the fence seemed to think this was strange or even worthy of comment. I, as they say, shat my pants.
Later, while wandering around an empty street in Flushing, I overheard two kids talking to one another in Korean. When I turned around, I saw that the kids were Black. They must have read the disbelief on my face for what it was—an ignorant outsider who was about to take a mental photo for his cultural tourism scrapbook—because they gave me a dirty look and crossed the street.
How did I, who, prior to moving to New York, had lived in Boston, North Carolina, Maine, Los Angeles and Seattle, make it to the age of twenty-three without having ever met an Asian-American kid who had grown up much differently from me? It’s true that I spent my childhood in nice, college towns and that my exposure to other Asian-Americans was limited to bi-monthly potluck dinners where all the alumni of my father’s high school would sit around and discuss God knows what, but I cannot help but wonder if this vacancy of identity might be the inevitable product of an entire generation of kids who were pushed directly into the structures of American success. Almost all the Asian-American kids who grew up with me have lost the ability to speak the native language of our parents. Our conversations with our grandparents are conducted in shouted commands and hand gestures. When we watch Old Boy or In the Mood for Love, we alternate between an unfamiliar, displaced pride in a connection we cannot quite delineate and the shame of having to access it through subtitles. This distance, at least for me, came from a desire to duck out from the traditional immigrant shelter of family and culture, and although it felt like a conscious choice at the time, I sometimes look around at my Asian-American friends who suffer from the same blind spots, and wonder if we might have had any say at all.
The truth is, I really don’t know.
If we, indeed, tell ourselves stories to live, the children of immigrants find themselves with the odd task of having to make one up as they go along. The stories projected upon me by my parents were episodic and told in a language of destinations. On the first page, my sister and I sit with the other pilgrims at the tabard. On the next page, we arrive at the Archbishop of Harvard’s door. What happens between those two markers is what a friend of mine once referred to as, “our leg in the blind sprint towards whiteness.” For him and me and the Asian-American kids I grew up with, the verbs and the adjectives in our narratives are disposable, circumstantial. What matters is the tyranny of nouns. If we see another Asian kid in the classroom or in the workplace, we simply assume that they got there the same way we did. Why bother asking? We are the Son-at-Harvard or Nephew-at-Columbia or the Son-who-works-at-Goldman or the Daughter-who-just-got-into-Stanford Medical School. When the weight of our common hyphens forces us into naming some other connection, we summon the only metanarrative we know, collected from our own memories and the commonalities we assume—fathers who are computer programmers or dry cleaners, insane mothers who only shop at Costco, piano lessons, Asian Church, pickled immigrant foods and 1500s on the SATs. For the most part, the metanarrative is enough.
The only stories that might make us pause and reconsider the paradigm of endings are the ones that provide us with an alien set of destinations—the stand-up comedian, the police chief, the mass murderer, the potential first round pick in the NBA Draft. In other words, those stories that belong to other races.
The lineage of Jeremy Lin isn’t found in racial pie charts or in the history of unlikely minorities in big-time sports. Yao, Ichiro, Wat Misaka and Eugene Chung are not his context. Neither is Hines Ward. Instead, to understand Jeremy Lin, we must look to Jin, the diminutive Chinese emcee from Jackson Heights who, for seven weeks, dominated the Battle Stage on BET’s 106th and Park.
As is true with Jeremy Lin, it mattered that Jin was American born, it mattered that he was competing in front of a mostly Black crowd on BET and it mattered that he was doing it with lines like, “If you make one joke about rice or karate/NYPD be in Chinatown searching for your body.” When Wyclef ruined his career by trying to turn him into a dance-happy club bopper, it mattered that Jin told ‘Clef to fuck off and went straight back to battle raps. More than all that, though, it mattered that Jin was legit, succeeding in the closest thing the music industry has to a meritocracy. And although Ruff Ryders probably envisioned some DOA Eminem experiment when they signed him, it mattered that Jin was better than the pigeonhole. He wasn’t a short-lived anomaly or even some college radio act fueled by a disastrous vision of cultural tourism. He was a battle rapper and even after his run on 106 and Park and his album flop, he kept appearing on battle DVDs and he kept winning.
Yes, he probably inspired a few Asian kids to see a rap career as a real possibility, but Jin represented more than another against-all-odds Asian success story. He wasn’t Connie Chung or Gary Locke or Jerry Yang, who, regardless of their intentions, confirm the country’s racial math. Jin went Black. In doing so, for those of us who were heeled on the mantra of assimilation, who have grown weary of the race towards whiteness, who have lived our lives in the strange space of identifying with hip-hop’s stories of racial oppression, but who have never really felt that our own stories could live up to the comparison, Jin’s bravado and skill offered an alternative interpretation of what it meant to be an Asian-American.
Try to understand, most of us, at some point in the race, have wanted to turn around and start running the other way.
What, then, do you do with Jeremy Lin? Through no fault of his own, Lin stands at a bombed-out intersection of expected narratives, bodies, perceived genes, the Church, the vocabulary of destinations and YouTube. The Son-at-Harvard of a computer programmer from Palo Alto by way of Taiwan, Jeremy Lin is the metanarrative, and yet, without having done anything but dunk a basketball, his unwitting doppelganger waves a flag on the other side. If basketball doesn’t work out, Lin has said he would like to become a pastor, citing his family’s long-time devotion to the church. But in the spray-shot saloon of professional athletes and public assumptions, no place is more sinful than his first career choice: the NBA. Of course, it doesn’t even need to be said that none of these things, are, in fact, contradictory, but Lin’s story has already been taken over by writers, bloggers and fans who feel the need to distort, tweak and primp him up into a perfect metaphor.
In those hands, we are all absurd and riddled with contradiction. As perfectly as Jeremy Lin might fit inside our expectations for Asian-Americans, the reason for his sudden celebrity goes outside of the cultural matching game his fans play when they compare Jeremy Lin’s story to their own. There have been other Asian-American athletes who have excelled in other sports, only to elicit little to no response from the community. Across the Bay from Lin’s hometown of Palo Alto, Kurt Suzuki just turned in the best season of any position player on the Oakland A’s. A little way down the 101 in San Luis Obispo, Chris Gocong’s Philadelphia Eagles jersey hangs in the locker room at Cal Poly. Hines Ward was Super Bowl MVP and a possible Hall of Famer. So why does Jeremy Lin, shooting guard for the Harvard Crimson, repeatedly sell out gyms across the country?
It’s mostly about the dunks. The attention surrounding Lin has exploded this year, not because he’s playing any better than he did last year or because anyone cares about Harvard basketball, but because of the clips that have started circulating around youtube and sports websites that show Jeremy Lin dunking all over Georgetown, Boston College and UConn. Without this footage, which is studied with an almost anthropological zeal on some Asian-American sports blogs (yes, they exist), Jeremy Lin would be nothing more than a nice human-angle story, another kid from unexpected origins who was making the best of his God-given ability.
In one of his most watched YouTube clips, Lin sprints back on defense and swats a dunk attempt by UConn’s Jerome Dyson. In the clip’s caption, Dyson is described as “Jerome Dyson, projected 2nd round pick in the 2010 draft.” For the author of the caption, the equation is clear: Jeremy Lin not only can play, but he has the hops to youtube a guy who will one day be playing in the league, and not some white kid from Dartmouth, but a bona-fide African-American athlete.
Therefore, by the transitive property, Jeremy Lin can also play in the league.
With its giants in skimpy uniforms, basketball allows us to see, clearly and plainly, the differences between us, the fans, and the athletes on the floor. Our perception of those bodies is driven by antiquated, but overwhelmingly accepted ideas of race. Dwight Howard is described as the winner of a “genetic lottery.” Lebron is either “otherworldly” or “superhuman,” whereas Steve Nash’s success comes from his ability to “overcome his athletic limitations.” When confronted with the task of placing their man on either side of the divide, Jeremy Lin’s fans, who have spread their research out across message boards and sports blogs, point out his breakaway speed, his vertical leap, his deceptive height. What they do not discuss is his jump shot, his free-throw percentage or his ability to throw a crisp bounce pass. Somewhere in the endless comparisons, odd personal anecdotes about meeting the man, and obsessive odes to Lin’s musculature, these fans have placed an implicit caveat onto his story: if he makes it to the league and plays a White game, this will all be for nothing.
Unfair, yes. But those of us trapped within the metanarrative have been conditioned our entire lives to imagine White. Like Jin before him, what Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black supermen.
Within that singularly American calculus, it’s not about basketball at all. It’s about our fucked up anthropology.
The morning after Iverson's press conference, I referred to AI as "the athlete least likely to bare his soul, admit mistakes or appear in the least bit sympathetic unless you bought into his rhetoric." My friend Q. McCall took me to task for it, and after a lengthy chat, I recanted and convinced him to do a guest post. You can also catch his writing over at Swish Appeal.
I once lost a job over an argument about Allen Iverson’s cultural significance.
Actually, it was more a mutual agreement to part ways because things clearly were not going to work out, but that’s beside the point—a dispute over Iverson was ultimately the reason I lost income.
I was a 23-year-old black graduate student at a research university working with a professor at a smaller university on a project designed to “empower” an economically distressed de-industrialized black community. For me, the project embodied exactly the type of community work that I had always wanted to do – bringing together my academic knowledge with the budding activist impulse I had developed during undergrad. It was one way to participate in the ongoing post-Civil Rights struggle for racial equality that my parents (both from Virginia, father from Newport News) had convinced me was the responsibility of an educated black man.
However, a tension quickly emerged between the lead professor and I during the course of the project due to competing definitions of “blackness”.
The week prior to “the Iverson incident”, he sat me down in his university office after I presented him the results of a community survey that suggested we should slightly alter the direction of the project. He responded by telling me how the “white knowledge” that I brought from my university—in this instance, the use of a survey to determine the opinions and needs of the black people we intended to serve—didn’t apply to the folks of this community. My counter-argument—that we cannot understand the needs of the community simply by assuming we know what all black people need—fell on deaf ears.
The image of him wearing a dashiki with his doctoral robes hanging on the door of his office in the comfy confines of the ivory tower while telling me that I didn’t understand the struggle as a young academic is something that will remain forever etched in my memory. It was at that point that my admiration of his work was officially overcome by skepticism over his intentions.
In some ways, the interaction is representative of a generational disconnect that so many who lived through “the struggle” justifiably lament: while they fought and died for increased opportunity, we post-civil rights babies either didn’t take advantage, didn’t appreciate the newfound opportunity, or sold out. Within that framework, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was the sell out based solely on the fact that I attended a “white university”, was using “white methods”, and was honestly just sort of “square”.
It was within this broader context that the job-ending Iverson argument occurred. It was not at all random but an extension of this tension over “blackness” and “authenticity” between us.
The argument began at a dinner party he was hosting. He claimed that he could identify “conscious brothers” merely by the fact that they were wearing dreadlocks and not walking around with sagging pants and cornrows. I chuckled at the simplicity of such an assertion—regardless of what it means to wear dreads, the idea that one can could so confidently assert knowledge about a person’s identity based merely on their physical appearances strikes me not only as bizarre, but anti-intellectual. The statement was even more troubling given our collective investment in improving the conditions of one small black community many of whom have chosen not to sport “conscious” hair styles.
As we went around in circles evaluating a multitude of rappers and other public figures as “thug” and “conscious”, we eventually came to then-Sixers guard Allen Iverson, who had recently come off an outstanding run to the 2001 NBA Finals.
He claimed that Iverson’s swagger, sagging pants, do-rag, and chains hanging from his neck (“bling” was not really part of the lexicon at this time) clearly indicated that he was a “thug”. No longer worried about keeping the job at this point, I blurted out, “That’s ridiculous.” At that moment, the other graduate students in the room—all white—gasped and everyone got quiet waiting for him to respond. Which he of course did.
After he and his more loyal graduate assistant—a white man a few years older than I who had grown up around black people and had thus established his “street cred”—explained to me the strong relationship between sagging pants and thuggery, I responded with a simple question that ultimately got us nowhere: “What has Iverson done to constitute being a thug?”
I listened to him rant, was accused of not understanding the struggle by a white assistant as the professor’s white wife chuckled, and I eventually left early with no intention of working for the man again. I had no desire to have my “authenticity” judged by a university professor wearing a dashiki, nor did I care to listen to him categorically dismiss others based on a priori assumptions of who they are all under the guise of “racial uplift”.
What I found “ridiculous” was his apparently simplistic categorization of black people—whether it be calling me a “sell out” (yet simultaneously surrounding himself with educated white people), dudes wearing dreads “conscious”, or Iverson a “thug”, not to mention establishing his own “revolutionary blackness” by wearing a dashiki in a university office. It was simply too convoluted, contradictory, and hypocritical a standard to tolerate given the nature of the work we were doing.
I probably need not explain at length the problems with casting people into epic characters without granting them the dignity to possess multiple character or personality traits that might fluidly create a unique identity (and not necessarily fit our preconceived notions of who they should be). That’s what makes us human, if you accept Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work. Of course, there are times when that can go too far; “liberal individualism” that demands unlimited freedom to define and express oneself disconnected from larger structures can be damaging. Nevertheless, as human beings, one would think that we should all assume responsibility for respecting that there’s an internal world within any person that cannot be accessed simply by seeing them in one press conference or walking down the street.
When we look at representations and personas of black men in particular, it would be naïve to believe that our judgments of them are formed by what we see alone. As bell hooks once said about “rappers like Snoop Doggy Dogg” in 1994, “…it is essential for everyone to remember that they are not only more complex than the way they represent themselves, they’re more complex than the way white society represents them as well. This notion that Snoop Doggy Dog defines himself 'as he really is' is something I reject. He clearly defines himself with a persona that works in cultural production in this society.”
In other words, we must acknowledge that both black male celebrities and the white society that consumes them have a role in the creation of these personae. However, to then take those personae as universal truths that can be applied to anyone, anywhere, without any attempt to understand them on their terms, is problematic at best.
Yet mainstream society has somehow managed to mindlessly conflate “being a thug” with record studio manufactured images of thuggery. It works well for entertainment executives that sell albums to suburban youth with an interest in romanticizing “thug life” as an exotic counter to their own lives, and who possess disposable allowance to support the inquiry. However, the fact that Iverson “fits the manufactured description” is by no means evidence that he consistently exhibited the violent criminal behavior that would constitute thuggery.
Yes, he’s had run-ins with the law, but the facts in the most egregious cases were so unclear that they are almost inadmissible as evidence to substantiate the claim that he is in fact a “thug”. The usual way that people even begin to associate Iverson with being a thug is by linking his image to these artificially manufactured images of “thug life” and our lingering fears of the black “super criminal”.
More than anything, this demonized “AI” persona is the personifcation of stereotype convergence: that of the hypermasculine black male athlete and a record industry manufactured “hip-hop” bravado that has lost its “utopian impulse”, as once described by Cornell West. It is ultimately a shallow caricature of the “hard”, hyper-individualistic, misogynistic, narcissistic, simple-minded, swaggering black male.
It is sad example of how our perceptions are shaped not only by what we see, but also by conceptual frameworks that we draw upon as short hand to “make sense” of the world, as described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their classic book Metaphors We Live By. The problem is that to the extent that we draw upon pre-existing metaphors to make sense of people, we strip them of the agency to represent themselves as human; while these metaphors frame expectations for behavior, they also irrationally justify us assuming that our perceptions are universal common sense and those who don’t fit can be demeaned, dismissed, mocked, or vilified.
In other words, the idea that Iverson is a thug is a fictive reality conjured up in the racialized imagination of a society that remains fearful of young black men in spite of electing a black man president. To the extent that Iverson’s image resonates with a set of racialized metaphors we live by, he never had the agency to truly be understood.
As such, “AI” can never be separated from the fact that his persona was created in a U.S. society that was built upon racism, that never figured out how to deal with racial diversity at a structural or interpersonal level, and has a tendency to dismiss the very mention of race as a factor in public life as “playing the race card”. However, it doesn’t take much thought to recognize that even in our treatment of athletes, we cannot really escape racialization much less expect that we might reach the post-racial promised land when race is used as a cheap ploy to sell everything from records to detergent.
Iverson is thus simultaneously romanticized for and trapped within a racialized “thug” image: some disaffected inner-city black youth can draw inspiration from him while others lament the burden his image causes in their daily life; some affluent blacks have looked down upon him with self-righteous disdain while others see him as an example of a meritocratic myth in the U.S.; some well-meaning whites have seen him through a romanticized lens that masks fears of an urban lifestyle their families fled long ago while others claimed racial neutrality; fans can cheer his dominant scoring when he’s winning and blame his ball dominance when he’s losing.
What is often—not always—lost is that AI is a product of circumstance in a world that demonizes black men more often than not. In that context, it becomes unreasonable to assume that he would even want to cater to a media that merely perpetuates a distant and shallow racialized portrait of who he is to a mainstream audience that mindlessly consumes shallow images.
So fine, even if Iverson can't play like he used to, doesn't really work with the Sixers current coach or cast and is superfluous once rising star Lou Williams returns, there's this breakthrough, which is as much about us—and for us—as it is Iverson. After a decade of being the athlete least likely to bare his soul, admit mistakes or appear in the least bit sympathetic unless you bought into his rhetoric, Allen Iverson hasn't just come home. He's finally made himself accessible. But that's only part of the equation, because now we might have to try and better understand what Iverson really meant during all those standoff-ish years.
It would be pathological for someone to bare their soul to people who have repeatedly torn him down without any genuine attempt to make sense of him. Within the historical context of this country, it makes even less sense for a black male who is consistently misunderstood and boxed into a manufactured “thug” persona.
Nevertheless, to say that Iverson didn’t appear “the least bit sympathetic”, is now more accessible, and less “standoff-ish” completely ignores the honest ways in which he has indeed demonstrated directness, honesty, and passion in his interactions with the media. Shoals refers to former Sixers teammate Eric Snow in the article, describing how outsiders—us fans and members of the media—never really got to know him. However, it’s also difficult to ignore the many occasions in which he was nothing but honest, opinionated, and passionate. The only reason to dismiss those moments when seeking evidence of a sympathy and accessibility is that they might not have come when or how we expected.
How could you ignore his repeated expressions of gratitude for Georgetown University coach John Thompson? How could you ignore his expressions of respect for former Sixers coach Larry Brown? After his ranting about his frustration with the disproportionate attention to him missing practice, how could you dismiss the Detroit press conference in which he lightheartedly laughed at himself? Even in the infamous practice rant, the point was clear: the man wants to win games.
Ultimately, the evidence does not amount to an unsympathetic, inaccessible, ruthless figure but a human being forced to struggle with a complex set of life circumstances. Even if it did, how much can you legitimately claim to know about a person’s character sitting at home and reading the accounts of a few newsmen and watching a few press conferences?
It shouldn’t take a heartwarming homecoming story and on-camera tears to make it clear that Iverson is a man who loves basketball and most of all loves to win. Unfortunately, that has simply been lost as people continually attempt to cast him as an epic character who fits what they want to believe.
The argument that a superstar athlete should expect this type of treatment is indicative of a sick and ugly sense of voyeuristic entitlement in U.S. society. It’s almost irrational to expect someone to take all that and continue to cater to people who make no attempt to understand him as a person because they’re confined to their own metaphors. In that sense, it’s not so much that he’s inaccessible, as much as truly accessing him would cause a form of cognitive dissonance that would force people to challenge their racialized assumptions. The idea that he is inaccessible speaks more to the inability—and even refusal —of some people to make sense of Iverson as one representation of “blackness” in the U.S. than anything having to do with Iverson himself.
While Shoals rightly suggests that “now we might have to try and better understand what Iverson really meant during all those standoff-ish years”, why does it take him choking up on camera for us to make that attempt? If people have to see him publicly overwhelmed by emotion to feel as though he’s safe, what genuine desire is there to understand the man?
When I chatted with Shoals, he said, “I don't think Iverson was capable of being someone he wasn't, but he kept a lot inside.” If that is so, then the very people who have demonized him penalize him for being neither superficial nor a transparently simplistic person. We could certainly smugly sit back and say, perception is everything and Iverson has merely been caught up in his perception. But commenting on Iverson as though his blackness is not somehow implicated in that perception is either naïve or anti-intellectual.
That’s not to deny that Iverson has some responsibility in the creation of his own image—he has dressed and behaved in ways that certainly seem to resonate with a manufactured “thug” representation. In my present role as teacher, I certainly do my best to prepare young black men for an unfair world not by telling them to hate or embrace it, but to acknowledge it and figure out how to navigate it. Has Iverson navigated the public sphere perfectly? Not necessarily. But at some point we, as observers, have to take some responsibility as intelligent life forms to do more than point fingers and make simplistic assumptions.
As Shoals also said in our chat, “Real thugz don't stick around to have HOF careers.”
Like many athletes before him, Iverson forced the sports world to confront a manifestation of blackness that is bound by both his origin and particular time. Race is the elephant in the room that people are normally frightened to discuss publicly, with friends, or at the dinner table. Perhaps it’s time to start discussing that rather than making clearly racialized assumptions from a color-blind stance—or claiming to have the capacity to evaluate one’s character based on how they dressed.
Neither is a particularly valuable way to proceed toward the post-racial society that so many people yearn for to relieve them of the burden of shielding themselves from the reality of race.
Today, the all-seeing eye of Bethlehem Shoals put this gem "on blast" (to use a phrase from the younger generation) over at The Baseline. Because this moment is vintage FD "racial semiotics," it requires a full reprinting here, and a close reading: Wizards swingman Mike Miller wore James' Nike shoes to practice and was told by teammate DeShawn Stevenson, "We don't wear these around here."
James said he didn't care. "Mike is a good friend of mine," he said. "He named his son after my best friend, Maverick (Carter). We have a good history."
James said Miller should lace up his sneakers, though. "For an unathletic white guy, these are the best shoes to wear," James said.
A few things of note:
(1) Mike Miller and LeBron James are very good friends. This is strange. Hardly as strange as, say, the Tyronn Lue-Kevin Garnett bond of brothers, but it is strange in a "how the f did they meet in the first place" way (Team USA, presumably). This also leads one to wonder the mechanism by which a friendship gave birth Miller's famous profession (via Twitter) of a man-crush on LeBron back in May.
(2) Mike Miller named his child after his friend's best friend/business manager, which is equally strange. This gesture suggests one of three possible types of intended closeness (a) a respectful distance--like, "Yo dawg don't worry, I'm not gonna name my son 'LeBron Miller,' but I will name him Maverick Miller," (b) sniveling brown-noser status, as in, "Hey LeBron, guess what cool I thing *I* did." (c) stalker-level fatal attraction obsessional closeness, as in, "If it was a girl, we were going to name it Gloria."
(3) Typically LeBron is not humorous. Here he deadpans a perfect "white people drive like this" joke, and just prior makes a crack about the Braylon Edwards situation, stating, "You guys haven't asked me before about any other trades in the NFL."
(4) LeBron's shoes are ugly as sin, and wearing someone else's shoes (EXCEPT JORDANS) is almost as bad as Iverson (or was it Sheed) wearing another team's throwback to the game, in the pre-dress-code days. Who else wears these in the NBA?
(5) Mike Miller is getting twice sonned here, once by DeShawn Stevenson for laying down the law, and once by Bron for seemingly giving Miller "permission" to wear the shoes.
(6) An MJ moment? Brown Recluse, Esq. wondered whether this is LeBron's take on MJ's famous, "Republicans buy shoes, too" aphorism, given that, in the Recluse's words, "most Republicans tend to be unathletic white people" (No Schwarzenego).
(7) STEREOTYPES ARE FUNNY. Even though LeBron's air-tight personal PR game slipped, in this instance, we like him all the more for it. This comment--small as it is--redeems something I've always loved about the NBA in particular (see John Kruk's "Lady, I'm not an athlete..." for the counter)--that athletic guys beat nonathletic guys in everything including cool points (no racial subtext), and they can joke about it and be technically racist but in a non-offensive way, and we chortle back and then a moment like this lights up the internet like fireworks on Guy Fawkes day.
I really need to be working on this chapter about the integration of the NBA, and I did post something on FD today, right? But I am about to explode over accumulated energy and angst over some race/sexuality/basketball stuff, and I'm sick of carrying on 15,000 chats at once about it, while trying to provoke some reaction over Twitter.
Exhibit A: Brendan Haywood: If you don't know this story, I have no idea how you found your way to this site. Newsflash: Pro athlete is not entirely comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, uses language that might offend some. I might even include the fact that Haywood is black, since it's relevant later. My reaction yawned at these comments, instead choosing to focus on what might make Haywood retreat into such a defensive, reflexive position. He brought it up, remember. No one said "what do you think of that effeminite Marbury."
Exhibit B: Tim Povtak, FanHouse columnist, clowns O.J. Mayo for wanting to return a diamond bangle. Now granted, Povtak admits he just might be old school, and does mention Bill Russell and Joe Dumars as dudes who wouldn't wear flamboyant jewelry. And I by no means wish to imply that a desire for excessive ice is a genetic trait inherent in all young African-American men. But I read this as basically questioning the manhood of any present-day athlete who dresses flashy, which by and large applies to black players.
It has as far back as the 1970's, when Earl Monroe rocked high heels and Clyde wore mink on the subway. To regurgitate somethng I remember hearing in grad school, it's a form of racism that also manages to be sexist, since it puts down an ethnic group by feminizing it. EDIT: Yes, that does also make it implicitly homophobic, too.
I know Tim Povtak is no Brendan Haywood, in terms of visibility or just plain mattering to most people. But why is it that Haywood—whose attitudes are par for the course everywhere in sports, including on the web—is being criticized for saying what most athletes think anyway. It's also no secret that, culturally, the question of homosexuality in African-American communities is even more thorny than in your average predominantly white enclave. That's worth considering when Kevin Arnovitz mentions that he's overheard one of the NBA's most "enlightened" players spout homophobic cliches. That doesn't excuse it, just makes it unexceptional. At the same time, Povtak writes something that, at least to me, was not only uglier and more layered but also less expected. And yet no one's freaking out about his column, as far as I can tell. It's just some grouchy white guy complaining about the younger generation.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for peers like Kelly, Kevin and Ziller who have written about Haywood as part of a bigger problem. I don't for a second disagree with that assessment. I do wonder, though, why the blogosophere—which I'd argue is usually on the surface more homophobic than racist—is so quick to condemn Haywood (and itself?), while Povtak's column, which turns over a new leaf as far as yuckiness is concerned, drew little criticism. Is homophobia an easier target? Are we that scared to talk about race? And should it matter that much more when an athlete says it, than when a writer—supposedly the "smarter" side of the equation—puts his foot in his mouth?
I assume all things are wrong at all times. If we've moved on to prioritizing, picking our spots, or working with the demon we know best (as in, would like to admit we know best), please tell me.
Very special episode of FDPDOCNBAP here, as Dan and Ken seek refuge from the NBA dog days by chopping it up with Bomani Jones on those intertwined subjects of sports, race, media. You know, that easy stuff that total strangers always get together to discuss over Skype. Thanks to Bomani for coming on—I sat this one out mostly because I just wanted to sit back and listen to the finished product.
Music:
"Loving" — William Shatner and Ben Folds "Pot Kettle Black" — Wilco "Will It Go Round in Circles?" — Billy Preston
I never get the sense that anyone likes Antoine Walker. Somewhere around his thousandth three-point attempt in the NBA, perception appeared to have turned against him. After that, it never changed back. He was branded as a counterproductive chucker, someone not especially preoccupied with winning, and a lazy disappointment. Boston almost made the Finals once, and that helped him a little, but ultimately it didn't take. It might be the idea behind disappointment--seems like people expected more, didn't get it, and became eternally frustrated, if not angry. None of this is meant to sound derisive because I shared in the pain. We're not headed down a Rasheed path here; I've not come to rattle about with the notion of Antoine succeeding in his own way. Nor is this a post about his redemption. Toine usually left me upset, just as he might have left the rest of you.
This is a post about demise, actually. Antoine's recent arrest highlighted just how quietly he left us. Had you thought about him this summer? This year? His final seasons in the NBA were spent as some itinerant sideshow with an overeating disorder and historically comical shot selection. He was on teams like Minnesota and Memphis, Siberian outposts that matter on FD and few other places. (At least, given recent history. No offense, DLIC.) He sort of vanished, first exciting, then relevant, later curious, and ultimately just gone. That he bounced bad checks in casinos didn't even strike me as especially odd, as though there were a logical progression from what he had become on the court to what he is now off of it. Shoot some threes, work up a sweat walking across halfcourt, retire to the bench with those calf-highs the only things reminiscent of former pride, and then hit the Alaskan king crab buffet at Harrah's in between hands. For a few moments, I was puzzled by whether any team would care, and I was sad to realize that none would. The Walker arrest had the feeling of a Mickey Rourke movie, Wrestler or not.
Oddly, this particular melancholy resonated with me, almost literally. I felt it in my chest, through my body. Involuntarily, my shoulders went up, my brow wrinkled up, and my mouth turned down, the posture you adopt as you mull over something perplexingly sad, or nearly unspeakable because it's just that unpleasant. I don't know Antoine Walker, of course, and he always seemed decent but nothing more. His color, to the extent that he had any, was washed out and unremarkable. I think that's what makes me so uncomfortable.
Before Antoine, there were forwards who could pass, and forwards who could shoot. There were tall men who could drift outside. And since Toine, there have been men who do those things better than he ever did them. Standards have changed, though. Big men who played like Walker before there was Walker were not so common, and I don't only mean that the three-point line irrevocably altered basketball. I mean that James Worthy was swooping to the hoop if not occasionally popping out for a mid-range jumper, and that Karl Malone was throwing his elbows into you. (Or hooking with his off arm before spinning away from a defender and the ref.) I mean that every year, now, we look at drafts filled with tall guys who must improve their post games because so many have dedicate their respective youths to developing a guard's skill set. We celebrate Kevin Garnett and Dirk Nowitzki for being the standards of non-standard, and every team seeks to find some non-standard of its own. The perception of what forwards can do, and how they should play, has changed in many ways.
Walker may not have been a true originator, but for me, in the stream of my own basketball consciousness, he was emblematic of the evolving style that a forward could effect. Antoine was a symbol, no light distinction given the company among which he stands for a 27-year-old. He was a true hybrid--he had guard skills and guard range (plus that crazy-person shot selection), but he also was naturally gifted around the rim and a wonderful rebounder. Not a lanky giant and not a small man trying to play a big man's game, he had the true hybrid body, too: the ass of a guy who could post up, complete with a sturdy base (which those socks may have reinforced, ever so slightly), yet he was nimble enough to run a little (when he still ran), and his upper body was not muscle bound or an impediment to his shooting.
And, of course, he was propelled toward stardom by excelling in a college system that encouraged someone like him to bomb from three and press all game. His combination of varied skills, multipurpose body, and atypical doctrine was truly different, and it came at a time when a critical mass of forwards who play a different kind of way was only beginning to build. Now, we take for granted that there will be tall men who can play inside and out, but Walker was a key figure in helping the orthodoxy arrive at such an assumption. I do Toine a disservice when I write this, but there is no Skita-as-bust without Walker, because no one's looking for some soft-ass Euro named Nikoloz in the first place.
Certain players serve as cultural touchstones, and Antoine was one of them, both good and bad. He embodied an archetype of innovation that enjoyed out-sized notoriety because of its intrinsic qualities and extrinsic influences. The intrinsic has been touched upon--Walker was among a new class of forwards who were neither "The Next" anything nor wholly divorced from the past. Toine and his set were, and are, an amalgamation of parts meant to conjure progress. The extrinsic was a function of time: Antoine et al. arrived (as in, emerged, not just "were drafted") as the first players charged with governing the NBA after Michael Jordan. Almost too perfectly, he debuted as Allen and Kobe reached these altered shores. Toine's game was laid as part of the foundation for this new era.
So, consider all of that. Really take some time to appreciate who Antoine Walker was. First, the star pupil of a masterful coach, and not just a mere beneficiary of Rick Pitino radicalism. Rather, Walker enabled it. He was a paradigm, and no small reason why 1996 Kentucky stands as one of college basketball's most talented and all-time greatest. Next, a member of a new oligarchy which came to the NBA with a mandate for change. He appeared with a game that expanded the boundaries of our thinking, and a body perfectly tailored for the way he was supposed to move.
Antoine Walker was a revolutionary figure, and that was lost along the way.
Also: Recent events compel me to make mention of a few other things:
First, I find the NFL's treatment of Michael Vick odious and racist. You can read about it here. The post quasi involves eschatology, if that's any incentive. That said, as Shoals has pointed out, there is irony in the fact that despite everything, Vick is more likely to find employment than Allen Iverson.
Second, when it was reported that Iverson might be signed by the Clippers in a desperate attempt to sell tickets, my heart sank. Not because I am such a huge fan of AI's game, but because I do tremendously value AI's meaning in the sociocultural continuum. Reducing Allen to the NBA equivalent of a carnival attraction immediately summoned sad notions of minstrel things. For several years, now, I have been unable to stop thinking about Iverson and his unforgivable blackness, to borrow the the Jack Johnson term. Whatever else he was or is, and however sincere it might have been, Iverson's identity has always counted his blackness as a primary component. Seeing a symbol of the black experience he has been held out to represent reduced to a sorry gimmick would feel horribly gross. Though maybe Allen crossing that threshold would necessarily entail leaving behind whatever we claim he represents and emerging as just the latest broken-down mercenary.
Third, the Stephon Marbury saga. This is not a desperate athlete's contrivance meant to court attention in the wake of an unwelcomed retirement. (At least, no solely, or even mostly.) This is, rather, a legitimately deranged person who has always used basketball to forge an identity. Bereft of basketball, and no longer pigeonholed into the rote selfish-malcontent narrative that may have obscured his eccentricity, Steph is being Steph. Really, the only thing that has changed is that he now has much more free time and much less sense of purpose. I've always maintained that there might be something Mike Tyson-ish about him. I hope not.
What a little honesty can do. Obama suggests that it might be stupid to arrest a cranky old public intellectual in his own home, and it overshadows the most important facing the (non-voting) American populace today. Stephen Marbury sustains 24 hours of online rant 'n' rave, and comes out on the other end provoking a range of emotions . . . if you consider disgust, annoyance, amusement, bemusement, and meta-voyeurism range. Here you go, your hybrid media event of the week, both sides manufactured, both ultimately very revealing.
To repeat something I said on Twitter: Marbury plays basketball for (roughly) the same city that Skip Gates was humiliated in. That's when you realize how, in their utter disparity, these two stories end up contradicting and reinforcing each other.
Dr. LIC called to my attention the following Stanley Fish passage, in today's NYT:
When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
There was some internal debate over whether U.N.L.V was desirable because they represented the antithesis of Duke—including in all matters of style, culture, and race—or simply because they weren't Duke. Dr. LIC and I came to the consensus, though, that it didn't matter. The Times was never going to skew that radical, or near-essentialist. But I almost wish that Fish had, one way or the other, definitively let us know. Not because I think that important African-American figures owe us a daily update on their version of "Blackness," and relative relationship to the latest definitions of the terms.
No, I just think this kind of inkling would make the story more intelligible to members of the public who see Gates as having left himself behind and flipped out. Who don't see how the PBS figure connects to this outrage and belligerence. On the one hand, it's evidence of certain "tendencies" in Gates that could be used against him. But it also serves to undermine the myth of the good/bad Negro. Gates could be the paragon of respectability, and yet still have this sense of alienation simmering inside him—without it showing through except under the most exigent circumstances. That's proof that not he flipped out, but that anyone assuming that an angry Harvard professor is acting erratically just doesn't get it.
Back to saying all that you mean, and putting stock in the idea that the world need know that we exist on multiple levels, or registers. One can override most, and keep us secure. However, without those strains of dissent or self-contradicton, it becomes all the easier for a public figure to be portrayed as "lost" or "ruined" when he goes down that avenue. Show that they're connected, and people start to understand how these strains can co-exist. This, and not the politics of post-racial blandness, is Obama's most important political gimmick.
When I wrote that piece on Iverson and shifting definitions of authenticity, I spend way too much time explaining what I thought about AI. That really was neither here nor there. I also was wary of bringing hip-hop into the picture, because everyone knows I don't count there at all. But that's the analogy I was going for. Iverson was hip-hop to the core because, from a young age, he learned to make his public and professional face almost formally, or at least over-determinedly, fiery and uncompromising. Say what you will about his heart, or his production on the court, but as an athlete and public figure, Iverson never backed down, believed primarily in his own self-determination, and in that, met that era's fairly intentional, inorganic definition of "realness."
If that gets murky in basketball terms, just think about it vis a vis rap. One can be earnest, or know how he got to a point of playing a part, while still having to suppress contradictory strains of personality or behavior. Or creativity. Or style. So fine, argue about Iverson's career all you want. As an icon, he's associated with that strange space where fierce honesty can lead you down the path of self-limitation. Like Richard Nixon.
All of which brings us back to Marbury. In that Iverson ditty, I concluded that his stubbornness/integrity had given way to something more fluid, flexible and, if not complex, at least more stem cell-like among athlete images. Twitter brings us athletes watching their manners, sometimes, acting like themselves, mostly, and all in all, makes the Jordan/Iverson struggle seem like two prehistoric gods who battled to the death and left only pragmatism in their wake (note: any and all propositions that involve Obama and Twitter together are true.). The dark—for lack of a better word—side of this new access is UStream, which seems to attract only players who have the most to lose by having an unfiltered camera on them (or sprung on them) for hours on end.
J.R. Smith, we got you. Brandon Jennings may have been blindsided, but it's not accident he was mixed up in that world of new media marketing. And now Marbury's marathon spazz-session which, at its best, hammered home for me Dr. LIC's comparision of Steph to Tracy Jordan/Morgan, and how our inability to tell the difference between the two Tracys was something far more sad than just "dude playing himself." The tragedy of Iverson is that, while he spent so much time doing what he thought steeled him best against adversaries, and gave him the greatest, can't-trust-no-one chance for survival, he's also funny, charismatic in the grand warm sense of yore, and known for taking his art seriously, and game as art.
"Allen took psychocybernetics to a new level," [high school athletic director] Kozlowski recalls. Today, Iverson doesn't like to talk about how he does what he does on the basketball court. "I just do it," he says. Partially, like any artist, he is wary of overanalyzing his gift. But it could also be that he's known since high school that the real explanation defies easy answers, that the answer is, at heart, both beneath and above the level of language, and connected, on some level, to his psyche.
Cybernetics has to do with learning to understand a higher dimension after you break your nose, or something, and really, this plus the "unplugged" Iverson is one of the great lost opportunities of the modern marketing age. Did he jump or was he pushed? Remember those adidas bloopers that got yanked from YouTube once they blew up? Adidas eventually put some factory-sanctioned ones up for T-Mac, but Iverson's never returned.
Then, there's Stephon Marbury, whose last 24-hours speak for itself. Like it or not, that's Marbury. Try and position his performance in opposition to his career, or write it off as a stunt. But the very conception of it is totally weird. The mainstream media pushes binaries, or at least set models, and we buy into them. Marbury may have all along had the warning signs of a grade-A weirdo, but we were too busy trying to decide if players were Iverson or Jordan to connect the dots. The behavior with the Knicks certainly helped things, and yet that was taken as "acting out" in the same way that ultimately, Gilbert Arenas's persona served to make him seem more sane than the initial anecdotes that came out.
Staring into the abyss, sailing into the heart of darkness without you calling me racist. That's the shock, and retroactive head-slap, that this Marbury thing brought for me. Where have all the truly odd people gone in sports? We squelched them out as much as the corporations did. For better or worse, now there's nowhere for any of us to hide.
If people like Skip Gates were not only allowed, but expected, to have layers to them, the range of their personality would be harder to dismiss or reduce to an unflattering photo. If sports culture more often took into account that jocks are a sample of the population at large (some gay, some depressed, some indecisive) then this Marbury thing would've been a close-up on a landscape we'd known had been there all along. And instead of our judgments being cynical, we would know that the cynicism rested purely within our own hearts.
The days are not good for Allen Iverson. The one-time beacon of personal integrity, triumphal dysfunction, and "fuck the world" stylistic rights currently sits out in the cold. He's hoping some team will look past his recent disappointments, figure several accelerated half-lives have made his legacy less radioactive, and give him a chance to make a roster like a blaxploitation Kevin Costner character. So perhaps now is not the time to launch an entirely new critique of AI.
However, the rise of Twitter has me rethinking that foundation of Iverson's NBA being: his authenticity. Allen Iverson, above all else, was his own man, did what he wanted, and forced the world to accept him on this own terms. This was where he picked up momentum as a hip-hop icon, which is to say, while others screamed "thug", he simply brushed them off as ignorant or sheltered. There's a tendency, even a need, to separate AI the world-historical figure from AI the athletic performer. In both cases, however, Iverson exemplified "realness"—perhaps to a pathological degree, but nonetheless in a way that informed the direction of the league and the players who came up idolizing him as much as Jordan.
Hence, as much as we speak of the post-Jordan days, I myself had become accustomed to the "post-Iverson" age. In this (gulp) dialectic, there seemed to always be a hard edge, or uncompromising bluntness, to be reckoned with. There was Jordan's universal appeal, met head-on by Iverson's populist bluster. The players spat out of this maelstrom were some combination of the two; Allen Iverson came to symbolize a mish-mash of unapologetic ghetto roots, "wrong way" ball, not taking shit from no one, and a wary intelligence that could often be its own worst enemy. Carmelo Anthony, post-Iverson because he was hood plus Magic Johnson's effervescent charm; Gilbert Arenas, idiosyncratic and disruptive as a player and person, but writing his own script with all the whimsy of a Saturday morning cartoon.
Jordan was a sales pitch, Iverson a doctrine. Except that, at the risk of offending a bunch of people, Iverson's persona was itself a posture. This may sound pedestrian, or simplistic, but at what point did we decide that Iverson (or Tupac) wasn't, to some degree, faking it, putting it on, selling us a bill of goods based around a very deliberate refusal to play by the rules? AI was certainly faced with difficult circumstances, and had to make tough decisions about what path to follow. And yet over the long haul, it became as opaque a guise as Jordan's Sphinx-like mask. They may have been polar opposites, but their inflexibility and predictability ultimately made them two sides of the same coin.
Should we bemoan the fact that, in the age of Twitter, authenticity is no longer about any iteration of “the struggle,” or truce between the two sides, but the possibility that individual athletes be both accessible and undeniably themselves? The stakes may have been lowered, and yet better a feed like Rudy Gay’s inform our sense of athlete “realness” than AI’s on-message scowl. Relaxation on its own is empty, taking a stand indefinitely is its own kind of blandness.
Incidentally, anyone who’s seen Iverson in the locker room, or otherwise with his guard down, knows that dude would be a monster on Twitter.
Next week, I will return to FreeDarko, and hopefully The Baseline will load reliably. In the meantime, you should check out this 2003 Roger Beebe video, which I just saw at an INCITE! screening on the subject of sports and aesthetics.
It's rarely stated explicitly, but FD has a long and lasting connection to hip-hop. For all our jazz pretensions and obvious Pitchfork ties, many of us were shaped and formed by rap music, and spent many long hours trying to make sense of our place as fans and, in some cases, participants. All I know is that, no matter what they take from me, they can't take away the first time I heard Rakim, or Straight Outta Compton, or The Infamous. I've more or less repressed all the time I spent flirting with the tape trade underground, but certain albums, however obvious, are as much a part of my musical consciousness as, say, The Band (which came way later, by the way). I will even now unapologetically assert that Wu-Tang changed my life, without leaning too hard on Cuban Linx, but only if I only get credit for knowing most every Guru lyric by heart.
Why am I bothering to tell you all this? Well, mostly as a show of support for Dr. LIC's Straight Bangin' guest post on "why I hate rap now". It was supposed to be a "top 10 albums of the century" joint, but when the Doctor was blocked, and only go going when he realized what the problem was. I didn't even try and bother. Maybe I was always a tourist, maybe that "N.W.A. and Public Enemy were like punk rock" line had more truth to it than I thought. All I know is that, after having intently followed hip-hop since I first bought Raising Hell and yes, Licensed to Ill (gateway pass) in third grade, I'm just not interested these days. Did I give up hope? Grow out of it? Prove that I never had any place in it to begin with? I don't lose much sleep over ferreting out the answer.
But like I said, I think the good Doctor's post does a lot to explain why I've drifted further and further away, and right now own probably like three recordings from the 21st. My list would probably have included The Cold Vein, Supreme Clientale, Philadelphia Freeway, The Black Album, and Got It 4 Cheap 2. And yeah, I know there's definitely a problem/disconnect there, which is why I'll plead alienation instead of (for once) reaching for overwrought justification.
UPDATE: To reiterate, if you're in New York, and want to see me and most every other sports blogger of note on panels, attend Blogs With Balls.
Don't ask me how a post about Rep. Steve Cohen's age limit remarks, and Cohen himself, ended up on The Baseline. Oh, I forgot: Because that's where everything corporate and boring goes to die.
Anyway, this got myself and Joey talking about the rule, with me explaining to him the exemption/cap-and-trade system devised on last week's podcast. For those of you who didn't make it that far, Dan, Ken, special guest Kevin Pelton, and myself discussed the possibility of teams getting a voucher for, say, one preps-to-pro pick per decade. Break glass in case of LeBron James, in other words. They could be traded, too, so in theory one team could horde them in hopes of the next LeBron coming down.
This lead one of us to a very basic, but meaningful, breakthrough: Education is valuable. But you know who it has the most value for? People who don't have the opportunity to make millions right out of high school as professional athletes. What if, whenever a player wanted to go pro out of the 12th grade, they would designate a promising non-athlete to be tutored up and attend a four-year college—all at the expense of the team that drafted them? We're talking about peanuts for an NBA franchise, especially if the number of players making the jump were reduced through the aforementioned system.
It's not just that the "student-athlete" model is hypocritical, dated, and hopelessly flawed. It's that, if you want to talk about teens who could make the most difference in society if exposed to higher ed, basketball players are way at the bottom of the list. That's not to say that all athletes are stupid, or some don't have an appetite for learning. Just that, if you're going to pull that "education can change a life" cant with a one-and-done, you're insulting every potential doctor, lawyer, educator, whatever who isn't currently in a position to attend college.
The only losers here? Someone like Kevin Durant, who wants to both play ball and pursue a degree (over the summer). The question is, would he have the same educational option available to him if he tried to go to college as a preps-to-pro player? That would depend on a lot of things, and might be an actually realistic reason for the one-and-done to exist. Derrick Rose, though? Surely he's got some friend screwed over by city schools, and who might even be useful to him down the road if he gets a business degree.
Hell, if that happened, it might even help the NBA, too.
P.S.We are looking for research assistants for the new book, preferably in Seattle, Chicago, Boston, or New Haven. We will get you college credit and free shit. Holler at the gmail (freedarko at gmail dot com) if interested.
Unlike some of the other entrants in this year’s LA competition, Mazda hasn’t forgotten to pen its concept with childlike awe; the Kaan features a sweeping, aerodynamic shape constructed with plenty of carbon. The centre-less wheels look strangely like beer bottle openers from the side - though not many bottle openers have light beams running across their centres.
Also unique among all the entrants is the idea that Kaans don’t compete alone, but rather in a peloton - a close knit pack of cars in formation like cyclists in a race. According to Mazda, the closer the pack sticks together, the more aerodynamic and thus faster it becomes. A lightning bolt inspired all that, allegedly. Early Retirement or Podium Finish: Finishes just outside the top three when one of the peloton gets too close and clips another during the final lap, causing a multiple comedy tankslapper among the entire pack.
The MAZDA KAAN is an electric race car designed to compete in the E1 races, the pinnacle of international motorsports in terms of technology and popularity. In 2025, California freeways have been resurfaced with a sub-level electro-conductive polymer that powers the electric cars of the modern world. MAZDA’s patented electronic tire system uses this technology to power the KAAN to reach 250 mph with no harmful emissions!
The vehicles are piloted by individual drivers but teams are made up of thirty cars, all on the track together. Using strategies similar to those in cycling peletons, the tighter the group sticks together, the more aerodynamic and powerful it becomes.
Inspiration for the KAAN comes from electric fields and textures seen in nature, particularly those in a lightning bolt. The car is uniquely designed around its powerful electric wheels while the cockpit acts as a capsule to safely house the driver, allowing for tighter peloton formations and a team victory.
With some words on the Hawks, their city, and their parallel progress, here's Avery Lemacorn. He's been here before, and also writes the music and lit blog DeckFight.
“The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”—Freud
Uncanny yes that the Hawks were facing another Game 7 for the second year in a row in the first round of the playoffs. Uncanny yes that they had never won a game seven and that a group of pretty much the same players were in the same predicament. Uncanny yes that Atlanta’s game 7 blunders have haunted them.
For these Hawks, this was a long road back, but one done with quiet fortitude with little fanfare from the masses or the mass media. This is a team dizzied by its own potential, a team that says Joe Johnson should be in the conversation about the top of the league, a team that says Josh Smith should not be so mercurial, a team that says Al Horford is too small to be a starting center. A team doubted because of its conference, a team overshadowed by another Atlantan in another city, even.
The fact is that Atlanta is a haunted city. Not by ghosts, not by voodoo, not by old gangsters, founding fathers, or star-struck starlets. It is haunted by the dismantling of its own success. Sherman burned Atlanta down as a symbol against the excesses of Southern pride. The former penal colony turned Confederate powerhouse turned powder. And approximately 100 years later when the city thought they had all this figured out, that they and the world had an uneasy comfort with “their” view on things, a man with famous initials moved to town to launch a national movement bringing unrecognized sins to light. Struck down again.
Not to say that those changes in the city were not for the better, but granted, there were wounded egos. Hence, the flight out. Yes, that pale-colored flight.
In a way that no court could ever order, Atlanta began to change. In 1965, the Falcons came. In 1966, the Braves moved to Atlanta. Then the Hawks. In '73, the first black mayor of the city was elected then Hank Aaron had his historic run. But not many were there to see the Hawks get ever so close. Slowly, sports began to make the majority comfortable in the skin of the city again. The Braves won first in 1991, then big in 1995 drawing those on the outside back into the city core. The Falcons made their own run with the Dirty Bird to the Super Bowl in 1998. Atlanta elected its first African-American female mayor in 2001, the same year that the great uniter for the most beloved sport in all of Georgia would come: Michael Vick. Vick would electrify crowds of any color, of any persuasion. Staid ol’ UGA never played ball this way, not since Herschel, the Walker on air. But now this was happening in Atlanta, the ATL, to all and for all.
But Vick only brought them so far before his own uncanny downfall. Now it's time for the Hawks. City streets and landscapes are changing. New downtown condos, new “refabbed” neighborhoods are guaranteed to make white people comfortable. Here comes IKEA. From 2007-2008, for the first time in forty years the city proper took in more residents than it lost. No matter what happened to Vick, the momentum has swung. The city has changed.
Atlanta was ready for this, ready to win a Game 7. Ready to show how everything has changed. With their past, Atlanta was simultaneously ahead and behind the nation in racial politics. The success of the Hawks is directly related to this moment in time, a Southern city being comfortable on a large scale with its president of color, its own nuances of color, its music, its game. A place where the Cartoon Network and crunk can reside side by side.
Think all of this is too much? The players don’t think so. From Mark Bradley at the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
“It feels good,” said Josh Smith, the Atlantan who scored 21 points and took nine rebounds in Game 7. “It feels like the monkey’s off Atlanta’s back, not just this team’s.” Said Al Horford, who worked 32 1/2 minutes on a sprained right ankle: “It’s big. People are really starting to look at Atlanta and consider us a basketball city.
Despite all of the missteps in years past by the Hawks' management, Joe Johnson and the Hawks are still playing while the Suns, the Jazz, the Hornets and the Blazers are at home.. Their moment is easily calculable--going past this point will be truly unexpected. They made it to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro only to discover that Mt. Everest exists. But no one expects them to climb Everest, only to show that they can climb at all.
But there can be dreams of what may have been. Maybe it's the constant "lack" of the point guard that has plagued this team. Pete Maravich and Dominique then Steve Smith and Jason Terry and Joe Johnson—all more reliable wing scorers than anything else. Though I appreciate the Hornets, I firmly believe that Chris Paul was supposed to be in Atlanta, with Josh Smith the perfect receiver for anything and everything Chris Paul could launch. Instead, everything we are seeing is something played out in an alternate universe, and the rest of us are the Oceanic 6 trying to figure out just how this time travel thing works to somehow correct it. And as New Orleans threatens to dismantle, isn’t there a way to spin the wheel in the proper direction to make these annoying flashes of frustration stop?
Mike Bibby and David West are the same. Both are serviceable like Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate": not what you would openly wish for, but exactly what you need. But who are we kidding? Paul "needs" a Josh Smith, like the Hawks "need" a Chris Paul for fulfillment. Though both are satisfied, neither are exactly ecstatic. This will always be the Achilles Heel for both.
In a lot of ways, the Hawks are a parody and lesser version of the Cavs. The point guards complete, but there is still an over-reliance on the wings for stability. LeBron by himself is essentially the ultimate culmination of Josh Smith/Joe Johnson. Cunning with his ballhandling and creative with his shot, LeBron is Joe Johnson while also being explosive, dynamic, competitive, expressive in style and action like Josh Smith. This series then is the battle of the two-headed monster of the Hawks against the monstrous leviathan of the Cavs with Bibby and Mo feeding and reeling the beasts.
Is the transformation of the city of Atlanta or the Hawks to champions fully complete? No, not yet. Not by any means. But maybe they have escaped that which has always been old and long familiar.
