Hate and Basketball i

Elliott Prasse-Freeman

war is the historical principle behind the workings of power, in the context of the race problem, as it was racial binarism that led the West to see for the first time that it was possible to analyze political power as war" - Michel Foucault, 1974.

When Jeremy Lin broke out in January, his standing as the first Asian-American to start for an NBA team made his race the inescapable vector of interest. ii Yet at the same time, like a gas filling a vessel, even though race was everywhere, suffusing the pores of Linsanity, it remained ungraspable. A discussion of what Lin signified within the broader milieu of race-in-America never occurred.iii By making it in the NBA Lin was disproving the stereotype that Asian-Americans were only studious, quiet, and oriented toward non-athletic achievement; but more than that, because Lin didnt just play well, but because he played loud, with swagger, against type, iv the Asian communitys adulation over the (at least momentary) emancipation from that type seemed to drown out both the puerile tokenization and the troubling racist blowback from mainstream America. A cause for celebration, not reflection. Second, the blowback that did occur was mediatized as disproportionately emanating from African-Americans: Sports reporter Jason Whitlock tweeted a racist derision about Lins penis size and by extension the supposed sexual diminutiveness of all Asian males; Basketball analyst Stephen A. Smith banged the drum denouncing the medias obsession with Lin as disproportionate and inappropriate, a theme which boxer Floyd Mayweather piled on in a subsequent tweet. This impelled commentaries on what basketball means to black Americans, and perhaps inspired the much-discussed SNL skit which pointed out that slurs about Asians are dismissed as harmless, while those towards blacks are deemed beyond the pale. What is striking in all this is that the system itself has been shrouded by the very reactions from Asianand African-Americans that it generated. In other words, we have been left with two of Americas most potent racial issues eclipsing one another each seeming to keep the other from receiving the precise analysis it deserves because they have together simultaneously obscured the "dark matter" that lurks behind and animates their orbit: the white side. In this murky domain there seems to be an inchoate desire to weaponize Lin against African-American domination of basketball, making him a proxy Great White Hope, and yet better even than this, better because the average white fan couldn't cheer unabashedly for a white equivalent of Lin. If a white player had enjoyed Lins mercurial rise, cheering for him as a white player would be blatantly racist. But the average white fan doesnt face this conundrum with Lin: Lin can be cheered as Lin, as this particular Asian novelty who also contests black hegemony over the worlds most beautiful and compelling sport, v one that once belonged to paler players. Indeed, theres something in Linsanity that isn't simply excitement over an unlikely underdog story, but is rather that of racial animosity and struggle, if not articulated or articulable hatred. This reading has it
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that white liberal Americavi maybe not always, maybe only during uglier moments, maybe behind its own back peels Lin off from the broader Asian-American type to deploy him against the black male body that white males both fear as a threat and desire to have. Moreover, in this act of peeling, AsianAmerican males as a whole remain nerdy and effeminate Jeremy is merely the exception that proves the rule. An objection to the above reading is that impolitic moments of Linsanity were merely exceptional racial outbursts, generating headlines particularly because they are exceptional. Under this logic, America is safely in a post-racial era, evidenced by President Obamas 2008 election. As absurd as the post-racial discussion sounds to many non-white Americans, to those who work with economically marginalized communities, or to those who simply look at the lagging opportunity and outcome statistics for nonwhite groups, it would be equally absurd to dismiss the post-racial discourse as not producing real material effects. After all, articles that insist America is not post-racial continually need to be written. The interesting aspect is that basketball players, who perhaps have some of the most progressive views on race for reasons I will outline below, also see the canard of a post-racial America most clearly. The Lin situation provides an opportunity to outline those contours by looking at race in America from within the sport itself, aiming to show how, where, when, and with what intensities a society with deeply racialized aspects (the USA is multi-ethnic, how else could it be?) tips into a one with destructively and violently racist effects. Credentializing the author or Being the Harvard point guard before it was cool vii While I do not want to prostitute my own experiences so as to generate a narrativized affect that papers over an inadequate analytical argument, my time as a basketball player does help buttress and illuminate the claims above. And this phrase as a basketball player is chosen intentionally I spent an earlier chapter of my life not as someone who played basketball, but as someone whose entire identity was structured and defined by being a basketball player. The level of devotion had a nearly religious feel or perhaps cultish is the right word given my induction at a young age and the existence of a core cohort of gifted young boys with whom I shared the devotion, the set of rites and practices (in the form of games and practices) perpetually repeated, and the many pilgrimages (in the form of trips to across the country and eventually even the globe) that intensified the devotion.viii By the time we were eleven we had played an international tournament 1,000 miles from home; by age twelve most of us played basketball year round and exclusively; by age fifteen entire families moved homes so that many of us could play together in high school. Books or clinical case studies are yet to be written on why our parents indulged this. But, in defense of those parents, race and class and their intersection were inscribed on every aspect of this world. To be raised white and bourgeois in Seattle (an essentially culture-less sphere) and to become a basketball player (with the fervor and intensity that came with it) was to marinate in a foreign culture (of black hip-hop), and to dedicate effort to being accepted in this culture all while knowing one never really could be, and knowing that to try too hard was gauche and offensive, because it had a feeling of false solidarity, of tourism I was cognizant of the material and symbolic lines of flight that I had the privilege of riding away at any moment should I have chosen. Hence while I literally prayed that some genealogical excavation would reveal my actual (even if slight) African heritage, ix thus legitimizing my desired full passage into basketballs bosom, until then I would cultivate my skills and enjoy this liminal identity. Basketball was my special pass-card that allowed me access a different world, one that certainly didnt belong to me.

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This subject position was ambiguous, but became coded in definitive and binary ways when inserted into the field of social representation. Meaning that while I had my own internal desires and thoughts about how I fit into the messy arena of race and basketball, externally I stood as a representation of the whiteplayer-in-a-black-sport. This did not manifest simply in the racialized characterizations of playing styles (whites are smart,x full of heart, but cant jump; blacks are athletic but undisciplined) which could be seen as only harmlessly bigoted but rather how in the collective imagination teams which were coded as black and whitexi met in a muted version of race war. The team aspect is critical more than ascriptivexii the codings were symbolic: bands of white kids versus bands of black (even if most every team was at least slightly mixed). And hence every game had the residue of race covering it, whether acknowledged or not. While each match didnt spiral out of control, there were occasionally incidents where rage, hatred, and violence became palpable (due to players being injured, referees losing control of the game, parents screaming at one another, etc), to the point where the violence took over, becoming an end in itself. Things were said and done in these moments that were unforgivable,xiii and I can only describe them and the silences that followed as moments of war that couldnt be communicated, that occurred in particular zones and are not legible to those outside of them. This doesn't mean that these things should be excused (which is partially why I discuss them here), but rather seen as different than normal and for that reason both extra-ordinary and realer than real. I held on for a long time to the belief that while America was systemically racist, our team was better than that, basketball was better than that. That something occurred within the bonds of recognition formed on the court that could constitute a small contribution toward navigating America out of its racial trap: creating connections on top of an otherwise deeply abusive and unjust system. In this view, our white players were playing not to dominate another race, but to perform fidelity to both basketball itself and hence black America as well, to grasp basketball as the communion wafer that would transubstantiate animosity (or unfamiliarity at the very least) into identification. To win here was to belong. But in the outbursts which repeated themselves across the years I realized that something else was going on as well. To win especially in the eyes of many around us was also to destroy, to humiliate, and to dominate. The racism was not some cancer only inside those who exploded with words of hatred, but somehow flowed within the assemblage that we constructed with the black teams during those particularly charged moments: it was part of all of us. Hence the codified representations white players are smart, we were a real team who knew how to play the game the way it should be played took on an insidious inflection, a way of fighting this battle passively rather than explicitly. We were made into weapons directed at black people. History of black male body as threat Why is this violence necessary? Evolutionary biology inflected arguments obtusely reduce race war to the ease with which homo sapiens as a species constructs and demonizes the Other. But this misunderstands two aspects of difference: first, there is no thing as objective difference that would predict that one group would Other-ize another; one white group is different from every other sub-group of white people, can be identified as different with the correct differentiating lens (the Irish went from being racially slandered by the likes of Benjamin Franklin to now being seen simply like other white people). Second, what matters is how difference is made salient: how it is coded as threat rather than just as another expression of the human. It is here where theory read with the history of sports and race in America is helpful.

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Foucault argues that as popular sovereignty subverted monarchy, citizens faith and obeisance was transmitted from the single transcendent figure of the King onto themselves (their own race) as an object. Where Foucault focuses on the further diffusion of race war into the biopolitical modality wherein society prunes itself from within (society defended from itself), the original vestiges of explicit externalized race threat (society defended from the outside) remains. In this transference, the Other does not become dehumanized; as Josef Conrad reminds us, the white colonizers fear was really that the Other was human beneath all of the horrifying ascriptive difference.xiv Dehumanization is an easy excuse, but Conrad reminds us that the hatreds energy is actually generated by the humanity within the alterity. This is what race war seeks to dominate, to take difference and make it same. Due to the particular dynamics of slaverys deep wound, black Americans were neither dominated nor rehabilitated. Instead a robust oppositional culture developed in sometimes subtle sometimes open resistance to hegemonic white America. But the desire on the part of white America to dominate seems to continue, getting played through in sports as liberal society has delegitimized race war being fought in the open. Dave Zirin, the leading popular analyst of the sociology of American sports, spends a great deal of his seminal if analytically-thin Peoples History of Sports in the US, outlining how Americas racial politics have been played out in sports play. But one cannot help noting that where Zirin highlights sports as an emancipatory domain in which walls are broken down, he ignores the simultaneous dynamics in the domains of representation which reify and ossify race: throughout history the reader cannot ignore the repetition of the same double-move in which black athletes are kept out of the sphere of legitimate sport because they are deemed not athletic enough to compete with the white master race, until they are ultimately incorporated into the legitimate domain but coded in the precise opposite way: at the point of incorporation they become too athletic for whites, and in so doing become reduced to that athleticism. Whites are painted as smarter, their resources devoted to strategy and intelligence both inside of the sports world and outside as well. Blacks remain trapped on the field that they had to fight so hard to access in the first place. Cant spell hoodie without hoodlum Quarantined in mediatized sport, the black male body remains on display for white America. This body, historically a threat to white masculinity (hence the history of hysteria regarding the black penis), remains a potent force in the cultural imagination. To make sense of the persistence of this perception of black-man-as-threat it is essential to read Trayvon Martins murder and the Miami Heats powerful response to it together. Martins death, according to Geraldo Rivera and others on the right, can be attributed as much to Martins choice to wear a hooded sweatshirt as to his murderers choice to pursue and shoot him. As outraged portions of the pubic have noted, his is akin to blaming the rape victim for wearing provocative clothing. Within the shes asking for it logic the males libido is a loaded weapon, and the woman is a constant threat to roil the loins; hence she is responsible for keeping the weapon holstered. Carrying the analogy forward to the hoodie murder-victim, here the black male body remains an embodied threat to white male masculinity, such that a child as innocuous as Martin is required to capitulate to the terrified white world, to symbolically show his hands 1 so the white man does not react reflexively and with annihilating force against the threat. All of this in a country that wraps itself in the mantle of equal rights and claims to celebrate difference. And yet theres still more, taking this from the obscene to the vertiginous: While black males are compelled to demonstrate their domestication to white America, at the same time the threat they embody is cultivated by some of the only modes of symbolic sustenance available to a great many black Americans hip hop and sports. The oppositional culture developed and sold through commercial hiphop and the athletic prowess channeled into professional sports both rely fundamentally upon conjuring
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threat.xv And so while the explicit threat of the black male body has been diffused into consumer domains into the sports arena and the music studio, where it can be processed in explicitly nonthreatening ways, becoming sterilized and consumable we also cannot ignore how it retains effects and affects that exceed capture, that lead to real violence bestowed upon those black men who commit the crime of being what the USA demands them to be. Thus, I read Lebron and Wades powerful symbolic statement as a way of saying "Our oppositional culture that you marketize and your children devour is also what you use as an excuse to murder us?" The David Stern-imposed dress code, the racial aspects to last summers owner lock-out, Lins weaponization all have been building up, such that the attack on the hoodie becomes a metonym for an attack on the hip-hop-listening basketball-playing black man, which is in turn an attack on the black American man himself.xvi Basketball touted as the way out of urban centers for so many black men facing brutal structural inequalities that leave them few other options becomes a double-edged sword: tied up in a form of cultural expression that is so threatening that it can become a way out of life itself. The task must become to figure out how it could be otherwise. Through Sports a Different Politics The basketball player version of me is so located in my past that he often feels wholly disconnected to my present that was me? And yet, hes also always there, bubbling to the surface without my consent: Watching a televised basketball game my muscles still go taut with anticipation and butterflies often invade my belly when the buzzer goes off to signal the resumption of play. With a whoosh I am back there again.xvii Emerging from that moment has the bittersweet feeling of coming down. But whats worse in the crushing return of the real is that not only am I not a basketball player any longer, but Ive lost that pass-card into that zone of black America. This serves as a way of illustrating how sports will not save us without a different politics how the beautiful and singular truth-events that can exist between races on the court cannot last, mostly because they get thrown into the domain of representation and turned into other things entirely, turned into the low-grade race war. How to prevent this transformation? Those moments of potential need to be politicized before they are captured by the reactionary aspects of our society. These moments of connecting across difference where difference is not obliterated but rather used as a point of departure from which we can imagine a better, less parochial, more interesting, less indecent world need to be made explicit as such, turned into coalitions and movements formed between people who share something on the court and hence have an opportunity to enter into the political issues that they respectively face off of it. Right now so much opportunity in sports falls to waste: athletes often dont use the platform they have not only because that they believe it would be a distraction to teammates but also because they dont believe they have standing to make such a stand. Athletes arent supposed to do these sorts of things. But athletes have done so, over and over again! Why do we athletes as a group have so little sense of those visionary political athletes who came before us those such as Mohammed Ali, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Martina Navratalova, David Meggyesy, Billie Jean King, Roberto Clemente who Zirin outlines as using their excellence in athletics as a platform to highlight societys injustices? Perhaps if their histories had been tied up in how athletes learn sport (rather than growing up Jordans Republicans buy shoes, tooxviii), political actions could be placed in context seen not as aberrations, but rather as responsibilities. This doesnt mean that athletes need become austere militants. Playfulness is an essential aspect to sports, and a dour politics that would insist on humorless athletes would serve no one. But the fact that
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sports can oscillate on a dime between playfulness and the war described above indicates that there is certainly room for multiple motivations and that a certain effervescent politics certainly could be inserted as well. Moreover, participating in a political protest and playing in a big game generate many of the same affects: the same feelings of radical commitment, solidarity across difference, teamwork, sacrifice emerge in both; the same drive to win on the court can be brought to the political struggles of our time off of it; and sports loves an underdog story so its not farfetched to think that athletes would side with the marginalized and the abused in political movements if provided the encouragement. Given the ugliness in sports, and the way its participants at the highest levels are often manipulated and exploited by capitalist commercialization,xix its time for athletes to wrest their vocation and passion back from those interests and inscribe it with the political meaning that goes beyond the game.

A condensed version of this essay was published by The New Inquiry on 24 April 2012, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hate-and-basketball/
Headlines of the Did Race Play a Role in Linsanity? variety were so fatuous as to drift into Onion territory

ii

iii While sports sociologist Dave Zirin argues that a conversation about the Asian American male has been started, I have been shocked by how little meaningful analysis there has been. To wit, is every Asian-American now compelled to be Jeremy in both achievement and affect to attain liberation? Here it is worth noting that Asian-American parents have expressed concern that basketball is displacing a focus on education; will Asian children effectively be forced to choose? What was amazing about the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow (2003) is that they made Academic Decathlon cool in other words, they rehabilitated a space degraded by racist mainstream America, and did so on its own terms; I will build on Roger Ebert in pointing out that Asian American suburban ennui being featured as a topic worth exploring in itself may not transcend Lins effects, but at least feels closer to where most Asian Americans actually live. iv Jay Caspian Kang notes both Lins defiance of type and the Asian communitys cognizance of this (although in the next breath Kang concludes with some lines about Americas transcendent greatness so cringe-worthy in their blindness, inaccuracy, and chauvinism that they soil the entire article). v I am slightly biased in this judgment, as I will expound on below. vi In the increasingly unreconstructed GOP, racism need only be vaguely shrouded, if at all, it seems as Newt Gingrichs debate performances in South Carolina attest to.
vii

My thanks to Ryan Sheely for this joke. viii In seventh and eighth grades, the reason for baggy jeans was so you could wear your basketball gear underneath. You never knew, after all, when a game was going to break out. ix I wince as I admit that I even hoped that my surname Freeman would be found to indicate my familys status as freed slaves. x The trope that white players are smarter than blacks is not just insidious, its simply wrong. Even the word smart doesnt match to what gets done on the basketball court. Taking smart as a point of departure, two of our most brilliant players at Harvard, a 1600 SAT southerner and a pre-med Canadian Nigerian often had trouble moving to the right spots on the court. The former also forgot the plays with abandon, and hence was doubly disastrous for our coaching staff, as he would ask

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clarifying questions do we run those screens concurrently or sequentially? that always caught them off guard. As for whites being unselfish this is just as silly. I hold the Ivy League record for career assists a statistic that ranks as stuff white people like and I insist (in a non-humblebrag way) that assists can be incredibly selfish acts. I lived for the ooh of the crowd that came with a particularly risky and successful pass. Often the same scoring play could have been created by making a simpler pass to an intermediary teammate who would then in turn find the scorer. The fact that I chose the former is also the reason I most likely hold the Ivy League record for career turnovers (for the uninitiated: that is not a good record to hold) xi (city and street ball versus suburban, and team ball were typically the codified signifiers) xii (we had black players on our team after all, and all difference is socially constructed to be given salience) xiii I vividly remember an adult, in a moment of blind rage, telling us to go beat those niggers even seeing the word written does a certain violence to me now, let alone to those who are the object of the epithet. xiv No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar Heart of Darkness. xv Recall that rapper Eazy E excoriated erstwhile NWA pal Dr Dre for wearing lipstick before smoking chronic at picnics. In other words, before performing the role of gangster Dre was not quite as hard as all that a story mostly confirmed by biographical information on Dre, who is nonetheless credited with co-founding gangsta rap, a form of entertainment that sold depictions of life in the black urban centers to mostly vicarious white suburban consumers. xvi While this binary does not define the black experience, there is a sense that black American males are too often forced to make an impossible choice: submit to the demeaning and cynical discipline of the white bourgeois domain, effectively repudiating the black oppositional; or remain in the pride-maintaining oppositional, which is simultaneously not only mostly a socioeconomic dead-end but requires becoming a symbol of threat that in itself can justify reactionary murder on the part of white America. Akeel Bilgrami's insight in his essay "What is a Muslim?" is not that he's always a Muslim, but that when that identity gets slandered and threatened by a dominating culture, he is forced into a binary choice; to betray this fundamental commitment is to betray a part of himself. I think this travels to the African-American context: rather than the binary of either being a "sell-out" or an oppositional hoodie-wearer, its rather the subtle and yet continual barrage of assaults on the oppositional racial identity that creates a residue of anger and frustration especially/even if one does not choose the oppositional. [Akeel Bilgrami, "What is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity," Cultural Inquiry 18, Summer 1992.] xvii I think this is a generalizable phenomenon; indeed, observe a group of former basketball players watching a game on TV and you will notice the depth with which they take it in: they enter their former positions on the court, become a part of the rhythm of the games flow, the familiarity of the movements spurs gasps of anticipation, smiles of recognition, momentary reveries of becoming that escape signification they are again in the game. xviii Zirin writes of Jordan Much is also expected of those with power. And no athlete has ever had more and done less than Michael Jeffrey Jordan. xix Kang in a case study of UNCs Harrison Barnes highlights how self-branding appears to be backfiring, becoming a preoccupation.

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