NBA All-Star Weekend 2010 and "Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season"
The All-Star starting lineup is:
F – Carmelo Anthony, Denver
F – Tim Duncan, San Antonio
C – Amar’e Stoudemire, Phoenix
G – Kobe Bryant, L.A. Lakers
G – Steve Nash, Phoenix
Head Coach: George Karl, Head Coach of the Denver Nuggets
(This is Karl's fourth time as Head Coach of the Western Conference All-Star Team. He led in 1994, 1996, and 1998.)
F – Kevin Garnett, Boston
F – LeBron James, Cleveland
C – Dwight Howard, Orlando
G – Allen Iverson, Philadelphia
G – Dwyane Wade, Miami
Head Coach: Stan Van Gundy, Head Coach of the Orlando Magic
(This is Van Gundy's second time as Head Coach of the Eastern Conference All-Star Team. His first go-around was in 2005.)
In 2000, I published a review of Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season by award-winning author, David Shields. It was celebrated as “One of the Ten Best Books of Nonfiction of 1999” by Esquire, Newsday, LA Weekly, and Amazon.com; and in 2000, it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
Black Planet follows the Seattle SuperSonics' 1994-95 season—incidentally, George Karl was head coach of the 'Sonics at the time— and is structured around Shields's diary entries. During his season-long observation Shields becomes less interested in the "minutiae of [the game's] strategy" and more fixated on the theory that the NBA offers a "photo negative of American race relations." Black Planet is a "risky and brilliant book. . . . It is an emotional journey into Jock Culture's heart of darkness. Shields is willing to write himself naked about the hungers and envies that move across the grandstand like the wave" (Robert Lipsyte, The New York Times).
Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season by David Shields
Hardcover, 223 pages
Published by: Crown Publishers
Price: $23.00
Publication Date: 1999
During the 1994-95 National Basketball Association (NBA) season, journalist/professor David Shields attended nearly all of the Seattle SuperSonics’ home games and watched most away games on television. three years later he collected his “hundreds of pages of often illegible notes” and “transformed” his scribblings into this book— “a daily diary which runs the length of one team’s long-forgotten season and which is now focused to the point of obsession, on how white people (including especially myself) think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies.”
Black Planet is a blunt, potentially explosive book. It trades in self-conscious, clichéd talk about racism for deeply personal, bold statements about race relations in Seattle, Washington, as well as in the NBA.
In this book/diary Shields, an avid basketball follower, reveals intimate details about his marriage and sex life; his relationship with daughter, Natalie; and his bothersome stutter. He’s also unafraid to admit his awe-stricken regard for Gary Payton, the Sonics’ “language-besotted,” energized point guard.
One of the many underlying tensions of Black Planet is the city of Seattle and its over-the-top adherence to civic responsibility and courtesy. Shields tests Seattleites and their penchant for good behavior just about every day as he does the unthinkable: he jaywalks. Shields shoves this in the faces of his fellow Seattle citizens and waits for the fallout. In Shields’ mind, this act of rebellion complements Payton’s legendary, on-the-court trash-talking. It’s the closest Shields will get to riling up tempers and instigating confrontation. “Gary Payton,” Shields writes, “….allows me to fantasize about being bad.”
In most of his declarations about blacks and whites and their ever-strained, skeptical relations, Shields is dead-on. He writes intelligently beyond easy generalizations. He doesn’t need to conjure up or identify the absurdity of some people’s behavior in certain situations: any racial undertone that takes place speaks for itself and needs no embellishment.
Shields asserts with unabashed clarity that relationships between blacks and whites are less about relating to one another on a personal level to share common aspirations, notions, joys, and anxieties. They’re more about doing a fine dance around one another, avoiding directness and falling into assumptions:
During halftime, a guy plays familiar tunes by bouncing colored plastic balls on an enormous keyboard placed on the floor at center court. In the audience, most white people are applauding mightily; black people sit there, stunned, that this is apparently what white find lyrical.
[Radio commentator and former NBA player] Marques [Johnson] says, “Now that’s rhythm right there.”
Kevin [Calabro, Seattle radio sports commentator] says, “Mozart was doing that at age four.”
Marques: “Stevie Wonder at age three.”
Kevin: “So Mozart was an underachiever, huh?”
Is race racing through Calabro’s mind every time he talks to Johnson, or am I just imagining it? Is race on my brain, and am I screwed up? Or is it on everyone else’s brain, and am I just taking notes? No one ever acknowledges the true subject of our discussions; it can never get expressed directly, it simply can’t be, won’t be, isn’t allowed to be talked about openly, and so it comes out in a thousand indirect inflections.
By season’s end the Sonics are eliminated in the first round of the playoffs against the Los Angeles Lakers by 3 to 1. Shields registers fans’ collective, vicarious disappointment in the out-of-reach players/worthy deities who have been elevated to hero status all season long: “We resent that we need them so badly, that we live through them so completely; we’re embarrassed that we’ve created a religion with such fallible gods.”
And it’s in this type of analysis that Shields demonstrates his great ability to observe. Using the inane conversations between sports talk-radio hosts and the show’s sometimes irate, sometimes flattering callers as well as postings to the Sonics’ electronic bulletin board, Shields exposes and interprets the culture of fans’ hero-worship. At times, what Shields discloses bristles; at others, it amuses.
Black Planet deserves the attention of anyone interested in examining an original viewpoint on race as it relates to the NBA and society at large. While you may not agree with all of Shields conclusions, you will at least acknowledge his effort to identify the workings of racism and to divulge his own tendencies.
Portions of this book review appeared originally in MotherTown in 2000.
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