NY Review of Books, SEPTEMBER 24, 2020 ISSUE
Ball Don’t Lie
by Jay Caspian Kang
The Game Is Not a Game: The Power, Protest, and Politics of American Sports
by Robert Scoop Jackson
Haymarket, 203 pp., $36.95; $16.95 (paper)
Sports metaphors, as a rule, are silly and rarely accurate. Football is
not really like war, regardless of what its legion of ex-players and
commentators will tell you. Baseball does not provide a window into
America—the gentle tension between laconic, quasi-agrarian pacing and
the game’s values of grit and meditative cunning feels nostalgic to the
point of absurdity now. There was a time when every salaried
sportswriter would anthropomorphize every three-year-old filly into Joan
of Arc, but those stories read like kitsch today. They may evoke some
past, but no one under the age of sixty is sure if that past actually
existed.
<https://cdn-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/kang_1-092420.jpg>Hank
Willis Thomas/Jack Shainman Gallery, New YorkHank Willis
Thomas:/Basketball and Chain/, 2003
Basketball has always generated a different set of metaphors than
football and baseball. Part of the distinction comes from the sport
itself, which, like boxing, presents the athlete as both ordinary person
and superhuman. Because it is played without caps or helmets and in a
relatively small space, basketball allows us to see not only the
emotions a player experiences during the game but also the beauty and
extraordinary skill that goes into every minute of action. It’s possible
that you or I might close our eyes and picture ourselves playing second
base for the Mets, but only the most delusional person would ever think
they could play alongside seven-footers with forty-inch vertical leaps.
The closeness of the camera lens also invites the fan to reckon with
who, exactly, the athletes are. The superstars, around whom the sport
has always revolved, each has an interpretation of the game, epitomized
by Michael Jordan’s singular intensity, or LeBron James’s patience and
perfection, or Stephen Curry’s joy. Basketball, as a result, becomes
“like jazz” or “like hip-hop” or “the heartbeat of the city.” The “soul”
of the game, to borrow another coded cliché, is Black, somewhat, though
not entirely, in the way that boxing was Black. Both sports have been
dominated by Black athletes who take on a god-like status and become
among the most famous people in the world. Both carry a vague, seemingly
political weight, wherein every argument about Black people will also be
freighted onto the Black athlete.
Boxing and basketball are both Black sports, but their myths—at least
the ones that endure, whether Norman Mailer’s writing about Muhammad Ali
in Zaire or Steve James, Peter Gilbert, and Frederick Marx’s footage of
William Gates and Arthur Agee in/Hoop Dreams/—are created by white men
who are earnestly, and often clumsily, trying to understand their
subjects. The reports always read a bit anxious—there is no one more
self-conscious than the white boxing or basketball writer who has to
address race. Even the objections to the dominance of Black athletes in
these two sports exist in an anxious state. You can cheer for the Great
White Hope all you want, but you know he’s eventually going to get
knocked out.
These contradictions are examined in Robert Scoop Jackson’s recent
book,/The Game Is Not a Game: The Power, Protest, and Politics of
American Sports./Jackson, who is Black and most recently a writer
atESPN, has spent the last three decades navigating how, exactly, to
present the concerns of Black athletes and fans to readers in a media
industry owned and operated by white people. His examinations of protest
and politics, as a result, read more like literary criticism than
anything else. Through a series of essays and a lengthy interview with
Jemele Hill, the Black/SportsCenter/anchor who was dragged through the
conservative outrage machine for tweeting that Donald Trump is a white
supremacist, Jackson asks not who has the real power—the answer is
obvious: the white owners of the league—but rather who controls the
cultural production of sports.
This examination is personal: Jackson came to prominence in the
mid-Nineties as the lead writer for/SLAM/, a magazine whose covers
showingNBAathletes Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, and Allen Iverson in
defiant poses came at a time when “authenticity” through hip-hop culture
was sold at scale to kids in the suburbs. Just as/The Source/magazine
and the/Rap City/TVshow onBETprovided white kids access toNWA,
NotoriousBIG, and Tupac,/Slam/promised an unvarnished, street-driven
look at basketball. It was selling “realness.”
I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the breeding ground for “the
Carolina way” defined by Dean Smith, the longtime basketball coach of
the University of North Carolina. His teams took on an almost genteel
affect, one that both reflected and molded the politics of the town.
Smith was one of the first coaches to desegregate college basketball in
the South, and he was always given credit for turning his Black athletes
into gentlemen, student-athletes who could blend in with the wealthy
donor class sitting courtside in powder-blue sweater-vests.
For a rebellious, Korean-American teen like myself who was awkwardly
trying to situate himself, without much success, Jackson’s writing, with
its rap and jazz references and its relentless, engaging voice, provided
a vision of Black agency that felt almost illicit. My high school did
have a fair number of Black students, the vast majority of whom were
poor and lived in a de facto segregated part of town. Chapel Hill prided
itself on being more tolerant than the rest of the state, but the
markers of its past were everywhere. We played youth basketball in the
gym of the formerly Black high school; we walked past a now toppled
Confederate monument on our way to Pink Floyd laser-light shows at the
planetarium./Slam/, and Jackson’s vision of basketball, made the endless
local debates about the relative morality ofUNC, the public school with
a civil rights hero as coach, or Duke, the tobacco-baron institution for
spoiled kids from New Jersey who hadn’t gotten into Princeton, seem both
stuffy and parochial. It felt political in a way that I could not
articulate but urgently wanted to understand.
This was always the dialectic of boxing—even the most ardent racists
were trying, in their way, to deal with the fact that, under the
fair-fight Queensberry Rules, a Black man could beat the living hell out
of a white man. The racists were usually rebutted by the
well-intentioned, like the famous/New York Daily News/columnist Jimmy
Cannon, who said of Joe Louis, “He is a credit to his race—the human
race.” Later, David Remnick, in his book about Muhammad Ali, rightfully
took Cannon to task for that phrase and pointed to its clear
condescension as a sign of Cannon’s own sublimated racism. This sort of
pileup of corrections—white writers disentangling the racism of other
white writers and saying that they knew better—was the animating spirit
of mainstream fight-writing. Today, that tangle has been shipped off to
theNBA. The contours have shifted and much of the discussion around
basketball has moved away from the players, thanks to analytics and the
rise of obsessive reporting on every transaction a team makes, but
Jackson is right to argue that any discussion of politics in basketball
must first acknowledge the innate warp in the conversation. We’re still
trying to figure out who really/got/Ali best: George Plimpton, Mailer,
or Cannon?
In June I went to a protest in Oakland that had been organized by a
group of high school students. Thousands of people were expected to show
up, so I parked about a mile away and walked to the site. On my way, I
passed a line of cars that had stopped at a busy intersection. A
barrel-chested, middle-aged white man got out of a MercedesSUVand stood
solemn watch as three teenage girls excitedly climbed out the back
holding “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police” signs. He was
wearing a T-shirt that expressed his own political beliefs:
“Popovich/Kerr 2020.”
The most revealing chapter of Jackson’s book deals with the coaches
Gregg Popovich, of the San Antonio Spurs, and Steve Kerr, of the Golden
State Warriors. Both areNBAchampions who have spoken out extensively on
race, policing, and Donald Trump. OtherNBAcoaches, including David
Fizdale (formerly of the New York Knicks), who is Black, and Stan Van
Gundy (formerly of the Detroit Pistons), who is white, have given
similar, if not even more forceful, protestations, but they do not
receive the same retweeted love. There are no “Fizdale 2020” shirts. The
basketball press does not lionize Van Gundy, who, in addition to his
repeated support of Black Lives Matter, recently argued for a $15
minimum wage.
Jackson also admires Popovich and Kerr. “The outspokenness and
frankness,” he writes. “The realness and openness. The courage and
temerity. All beautiful to witness. All necessary in order to make the
change they seek or to force a change unwanted. But,” Jackson goes on,
“theirs is without risk. For they are protected. They are not threats to
themselves or to others around them.”
They are, in other words, white, and enjoy all the associated safety
that comes with being it. But not all white coaches, Jackson argues, are
the same. Two things set Kerr and Popovich apart: the lack of compromise
in their statements, and, perhaps more interestingly, and unlike Van
Gundy, their résumés on the court. Kerr and Popovich
are able to stand/on/what they stand/for/openly due to their history
of winning and continual ability to win…. Same with any coach who
has amassed the respect that comes with winning in sports in
America. Being white is a bonus. An added uniqueness. Winning
one-ups race, sometimes gender, often class, on occasion politics. A
coach—especially a white one—who sets a standard for winning is in
most cases the most powerful person in their respective sport.
This, for the most part, checks out. Successful coaches almost always
last longer than their players. They are older and carry a nearly
professorial gravitas that bleeds over into everything they publicly
discuss, whether zone defense or police violence. Jackson doesn’t
explicitly say why, but my sense is that the self-consciousness that
informs basketball writing runs both ways: when white people seek out
the opinion they should hold about race in America, they seek out
pedigreed white men who not only have spent a lot of time with Black
people but also have led them to victory.
Popovich’s and Kerr’s dissent operates on two levels. They are the
wizened translators for their Black players, but their authority comes,
as Jackson points out, from the bizarre conviction that winning games
must require some special insight into Blackness itself. Black coaches
don’t get the same credit: Doc Rivers, a Black coach who won a title
with the Boston Celtics and guided the Clippers team through the Donald
Sterling controversy, in which the league’s most trenchant racist was
finally ousted, also talks about social justice, but until he nearly
broke down in tears while discussing the shooting of Jacob Blake in
Kenosha, Wisconsin, his thoughts had mostly been ignored. Similarly, the
actual beliefs of Black players are largely taken for granted, which
means the coach sits not exactly as the medium for his players but for a
vaguely defined “Blackness.”
For its non-Black, liberal fans, basketball exists in a sort of triple
consciousness. They love basketball in part because it allows them
access to Blackness. This, however, comes with guilt and discomfort,
which gets processed into a monolithic and easily accessible politics of
what these days is called “allyship,” which then needs to be codified
and rubberstamped by the esteemed white men who know the players the
best. Popovich and Kerr serve as models for white allies. Underlying all
this is a pressing need to understand Black people.
In/The Book of Basketball/, Bill Simmons, undoubtedly the most
influentialNBAwriter ever and the founder of/The Ringer/, the sports and
pop-culture website and podcast network, wrote that when he was a
Celtics-obsessed six-year-old, he told his teachers his name was Jabaal
Abdul-Simmons because he wanted to be Black. Simmons has been
relentlessly mocked for this by otherNBAwriters and fans, but he laid
out the simplest and possibly most honest reduction of the white fan’s
relationship with basketball: at some visceral, perhaps subconscious
level, that fan obsessively follows theNBAbecause he wants to be
culturally Black. This is nothing new. The white jazz fans who crowded
into the Café Bohemia in New York to hear Mingus or the white
backpackers who hung out in front of Fat Beats in Los Angeles and spoke
with an affected Black accent were after something similar—they wanted
to sidle up to Black culture while only reckoning with Black suffering
through shallow declarations of support for social justice and
enthusiastic support for famous Black people. They, likeNBAfans, defined
themselves not so much by their relationship with Black people as by the
small differences between themselves and their fellow white
culture-tourists.
As happened in boxing, successive generations have brought to fandom a
more respectable and less cringe-inducing language that gets policed
relentlessly. Jackson devotes an entire chapter of his book to the
analytics movement, which after giving rise to/Moneyball-/inspired, Ivy
League–educated executives who ran baseball teams like hedge funds moved
over to basketball. Jackson sees analytics as an insidious development
meant to strip power away from Black athletes and executives. “Too many
empty theories,” Jackson writes,
too many number crunchers, too many pseudo-intellectuals, too many
white dudes stripping away at the culture of the game by using
numbers to dictate how the game is going to be played, and to
discredit the way it was played in the past. It is the customary
American process of controlling someone else’s American Dream.
“We play the game,” he continues,
for a greater purpose than numbers. There’s a passionate connection
we have to basketball that no other race, creed, or culture in
America could understand unless it has walked with us through that
four-hundred-year fire we call our existence in America.
When I worked for Simmons at the now defunct sports and pop-culture
website/Grantland/,we published a lot of basketball analytics writing.
Part of our project was also “celebrating” theNBAthrough an obsessive
coverage of “silly” players like JaVale McGee, Nick Young, and J.R.
Smith, who became lovable antiheroes. Every lascivious Instagram post,
every tweet that read as “street,” every boneheaded play in a game was
converted into smirking content. Everyone in the editorial office, save
me, was white. I don’t think we acted out of malice, but the intent, at
least subconsciously, was to create two points of access for ourselves,
and, by extension, our audience of mostly white, mostly educated sports
enthusiasts. First, we wanted to be the best analytics site on the
Internet. Second, we wanted to “humanize” the league through a meme
parade. We were desperately trying to wring our work through the hope,
however misguided, that we could justify our own place in a Black sport.
What Jackson understands is that the entire structure of professional
basketball—whether ownership, marketing from the shoe companies, or
self-conscious coverage of an overwhelmingly white sports media—is just
a variation on that same ungainly attempt.
In the winter of 2015 I took a break from journalism and moved to
Portland, Oregon, to work at the Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency. The
reason was simple: I needed the money. But I also had reached a bit of
an impasse in a career spent writing about sports and race. The problem
was that I didn’t really know if the two subjects converged, at least in
any meaningful way. At the time, political sports writing felt like a
mostly nostalgic exercise with fixed yet somehow abstract reference
points—Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens—whose modern-day
equivalents, through no fault of their own, never quite lived up to the
comparison. LeBron James, for example, might wear an “I Can’t Breathe”
T-shirt before a game, but that only seemed to inspire
meta-conversations about athletes’ responsibilities, rather than pushing
forward an idea itself. I was tired of the stretching, so I decided that
I might as well go work for the company that had made all my favorite
Nike ads. The line between sports journalism and sports marketing didn’t
seem wide enough to deny myself the comforts of an actual salary.
My work was mostly pleasant. I liked my coworkers. Nobody seemed much
bothered by trivial dichotomies between story and commodity or brand and
truth. This was just a fun job where you made cool stuff with every perk
you could possibly imagine, from lunch meetings catered by one of
Portland’s culturally appropriated restaurants to long shoots in Los
Angeles under the direction of Michel Gondry. I watched Kobe Bryant’s
last game, in April 2016, at a bar with my colleagues because my closest
friend at the agency had been the art director of the farewell
commercial in which a cast of fans and players serenaded Bryant with a
satirical version of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” We
were all excited for him when it aired. Scrolling through social media
that night, I saw that everyone else had loved it, too. This, it seemed,
was a better way to be a sports fan.
After six months of pleasantness, my wife got pregnant. We weren’t sure
if we wanted to raise our kid in Portland, so I went back to New York
City to take up journalism again. On my third day at my new job at/Vice
News/onHBO, Philando Castile was killed in Minneapolis. A Black
copywriter at Wieden+Kennedy sent out an agency-wide e-mail about how
the death of yet another Black man at the hands of the police had
affected him. (I was still on the agency’s e-mail list.) This prompted a
reply-all deluge of sincere, at times uncomfortable conversations about
race. After dozens of emails, Wieden+Kennedy’s website went black but
for a short, succinct message: #BLACKLIVESMATTER.
A few days later, the agency announced their newest client: social
justice. Some very serious Super Bowl ads followed, and then in 2018, a
full two years after Colin Kaepernick knelt for the national anthem and
was subsequently blackballed by theNFL, my pleasant and earnest
ex-colleagues put out Kaepernick’s famous Nike ad. The spot, which did
not once mention the police—and which featured the nebulous slogan,
“Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything”—was
widely celebrated, not so much for its message but for its existence in
the sports economy. If Nike and its billions of dollars and its
influence could stand with Kaepernick, that meant something was changing.
This was two years ago. I found myself thinking about those advertising
colleagues this summer, when news started coming out about theNBA’s
plans to “address systemic racism” inside its elaborate, Covid-fighting
bubble at Disney World, which it set up after suspending regular season
play in March. These plans included a set of messages agreed on by
players and owners that could be worn on the back of jerseys that ranged
from “I Am a Man,” the slogan used by Memphis sanitation workers during
their 1968 strike, to anodyne words like “Equality” and the even more
bendable “Freedom.” The league, in addition, would be placing decals
saying “Black Lives Matter” on the courts at Disney World. Before the
players arrived, Kyrie Irving, one of the league’s most popular
athletes, tried to convince his fellow players to not play and focus,
instead, on the protests. Irving did not give much detail about what
that might mean, but on a conference call with over eighty players, he
reportedly said, “I don’t support going into Orlando. I’m not with the
systematic racism and the bullshit. Something smells a little fishy.” He
added, “I’m willing to give up everything I have” for social justice.
His declaration was debated on all the usual sports talk shows. The
attendant chatter on social media focused on whether or not Irving—who
was injured at the time and couldn’t play in the bubble anyway, and who
has occasionally floated flat-earth theories—was serious. Far less time
was spent discussing the (valuable) line he seemed to be drawing between
supposedly real protest and the display put on by the league and its
corporate sponsors. Weeks later, Irving donated $1.5 million to help
offset the salary losses ofWNBAplayers who had decided to opt out of
their own bubble. (That included Maya Moore, one of the greatest women’s
basketball players of all time, who sat out last season to help free a
wrongfully incarcerated man from prison.) The question Irving seemed to
be posing was not unlike the one I had cast aside when I decided to go
work in advertising: Can theNBApartner with Nike and its marketing and
advertising machine to create a meaningful message of dissent? And if
so, whom is the message supposed to reach?
For Irving, the answer was no. At the time, he was seen as an
outlier—not just in the league, but also among protest leaders,
including Alicia Garza, one of the three Black women who started the
Black Lives Matter movement. Garza recently told the sports website/The
Athletic/that seeing those words used by professional sports leagues
across the world “blows me away. It’s incredibly amazing.”
Jackson, for his part, is not a critic who wants to tear everything down
at the first whiff of impurity. He, like Garza, believes that dissent in
sports, even if it’s organized by the biggest corporations in the
country, can have a profound transformative effect. In his introduction,
Jackson writes, “THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT POWER,” and while he concedes that
white ownership ultimately calls the shots on the business side, he
still sees great potential in both the actions of individual athletes
and the physical and spiritual spectacle of the games themselves:
I’ve noticed how most of the people making decisions that affect
sports at the highest money-generating level are those furthest
removed from the cultural center of the games….
I’ve also learned that not having power or ownership in sports
doesn’t make you powerless…. Sports in America gives—and has
given—minorities, women, the disenfranchised and disrespected
leverage that is rarely afforded by any other chosen American
profession. Through sports we have found a sense of freedom that is
nonexistent or not accepted in other walks of life.
For Jackson, the game is the game, but there’s still the game itself,
which is not a game.
These are real distinctions, not just semantics, but as I read through
Jackson’s book, I couldn’t always tell where power started or ended. He
describes, for example, how a team’s ownership can work with media to
offload its own messaging onto an athlete, but he also touts the social
importance of Nike ad campaigns, calls Kaepernick a “militant in Nike
clothing,” and even suggests that Popovich and Kerr should have a Nike
shirt that reads, “I’m Not Woke, I’m Wide Awake.” The final chapter,
titled “I (Still) Can’t Breathe,” argues that individual athletes should
not have to be the face of social justice in sports, but that teams,
their owners, and the leagues themselves should take the lead. He seems
fully aware that these institutions are almost entirely owned and
managed by white people who exploit Black labor, but his suggestions
mostly call for a shift in messaging, not exactly in practice. The
discussion of basketball and race, in other words, should be turned into
a monologue, but the triple consciousness—wherein the white fan
confronts the Blackness of basketball but accesses it through its white
power structure and uses that comfort to create a conditional, and
ultimately facile, “understanding” of Black people—can remain mostly
undisturbed.
/The Game Is Not a Game/was published before the protests in response to
George Floyd’s death and the creation of theNBAbubble, but in his final
chapter, Jackson predicts a revolution in sports that will spread to the
greater public:
Given the state this country is in, the divided mindset of the
people, the players’ struggles and maneuvers for power, the refusal
to relinquish position or provide leverage by those in power, the
current outcome may not be an outcome at all—with sports
transforming into something much more than a game, athletes
subscribing to be much more than just athletes, and fans believing
more and more that we have earned the right to be more than just fans.
For the first two months inside the bubble, theNBAfollowed Jackson’s
prescription. Every team and the leadership of the league placed the
vague notion of systemic racism at the center of their
self-presentation. On the first night theNBAseason resumed, I watched
players, coaches, and referees link arms and kneel for the national
anthem. When the song ended, the players took the court with the
collectively bargained slogans on the backs of their jerseys. Following
Popovich and Kerr’s lead, theNBAcentered its show around thoughtfulness,
with dutiful incantations of its responsibility to use its platform for
good and ninety-second videos of players, all of whom were wearing
masks, talking to the camera about what systemic racism and police
brutality mean to them. Nothing was unexpected or particularly moving. I
imagine nobody’s mind was changed about anything, which I imagine wasn’t
the point anyway.
During those first days of theNBAbubble, the only disharmony came from
two players—one white, one Black—who stood while everyone else knelt.
(Popovich, who served in the military, also stood for the anthem, as did
Becky Hammon, the first woman to work as a full-time assistant coach in
theNBA. When asked about it, Popovich said, “I’d prefer to keep that to
myself.”) These acts of defiance prompted an interrogation both from the
reporters inside the bubble and then throughout social media about why
they would do such a thing, openly at odds with not only public morality
but the stated values of theNBA. This shouldn’t have been
surprising—protest requires conflict, and the most progressive league
will offer the fewest opportunities for an actual challenge to power.
When almost everyone kneels and the media asks the standers about it,
kneeling becomes the league-approved norm.
Professional leagues around the world have also followed Jackson’s
prediction and placed their institutions, whether franchises or their
front offices, behind Black Lives Matter. But outside ofNASCAR, which
banned the Confederate flag from its raceways, pro sports have not yet
“transform[ed] into something much more than a game.” The athletes were
still athletes and the fans were still fans.
After two nights of demonstrations in Kenosha, severalNBAplayers
expressed frustration over being stuck in the bubble. Their thoughts
were most succinctly summed up by Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics,
who tweeted, “I want to go protest,” implying that what he was already
doing—giving statements to the press and kneeling for the anthem—did not
qualify. The next day, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take the court for
Game 5 of their series against the Orlando Magic. That same
night,WNBAplayers staged a walkout; the Milwaukee Brewers declined to
play their scheduledMLBgame against the Cincinnati Reds; the tennis star
Naomi Osaka said she was dropping out of her semifinal match in the
Southern Open; and Kenny Smith, a former point guard and longtime
commentator onTNT’s/Inside the NBA/, walked off the set. For the
players, coaches, and media who withheld their labor, true resistance
lay outside the game.
The day after the strike, theNBAannounced it would resume the playoffs.
Shams Charania of/The Athletic/reported that the players wanted to “find
new and improved ways to make social justice statements,” but that
“games would be returning over the weekend”—which does not make theNBA’s
initial bubble demonstration meaningless. If the league’s experiment
showed just how effectively a well-run corporate machine can keep the
balls bouncing during a time of viral infection and uprising, the player
strike showed what can happen when all that comes crashing to a halt, if
only for a couple of days.
When yet another Black person is killed by the police, no person of good
conscience will stay home because they believe that watching a
basketball game has fulfilled their duty to humanity. Nor will the
spectacle of players kneeling at half court inspire anyone to walk into
clouds of tear gas. Kaepernick’s initial act of protest, four years ago
this week, was replicated in stirring, meme-like fashion on high school
lacrosse fields, college basketball courts, and throughout theNFL; it
has become a signifier of assent. Nike just provided everyNBAplayer and
coach with a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt written in the familiar “Just
Do It” font. And the league has made it clear that they, too, consider
social justice a treasured client. After the strike, these messaging
efforts will only be redoubled. All of this could help lessen the
distance between the white fan and the league he loves—but I don’t see
how diminished self-consciousness or increased social awareness will
lead to Jackson’s revolution.
Soon the season will resume, and the league will again test hundreds of
its players, coaches, and staff for Covid-19 in a bubble located in
Disney World. Those players will receive their results within twelve
hours in a state where doctors, nurses, and elder care aides report
twelve-to-fifteen-day waits on their diagnoses. Between games, the
players will head back to their rooms, which are cleaned by a workforce
made essential by theNBA’s need to play games. They will eat food cooked
by another, similar group of workers, none of whom are within the bubble
or have access to the same testing capacity. The vast majority of those
workers will be Black or Latino. This is also a form of “systemic
racism,” but it’s one that the usually smooth, frictionless politics
shared between theNBA, its players, and its fans will never acknowledge
because it goes beyond the abstract desire for white people to
understand Black people, and speaks, instead, to the ritual exploitation
that benefits—and damns—us all.
/—August 27, 2020/
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