It is time to talk about racism. This time, it is not just Kendrick Perkins, the overweight former Celtics center, but also Stephen A. Smith, the sharp-tongued Black commentator with the high forehead, who regularly gets into arguments with stars past and present.
This week, Smith said that the leading team in the NBA would not win a championship because it is “a team built around white players”, meaning Reavs, Dončić, and Kessler. The Los Angeles Lakers, as it happens. An incredible team.
Perkins, in his time, made sure Nikola Jokić was robbed of two MVP awards: he deserved five and received three. But consider the following statistic: five of the six most dominant players in the league right now are white. Only six players belong to the 22/6/6 club—six rebounds (a defensive contribution), six assists (an offensive contribution), and 22 points (an offensive contribution), and five of them are white. Overall, white players make up only about 20 percent of the league.
The reason I am talking to you about sports is that, outside academia, this is a world that truly interests people and connects all social classes. It is vernacular: a mirror of entertainment, curiosity, anthropology, values, aesthetics, and consumerism. In short, a thoroughly American experience that takes it all in.
It is also a space where integration once became possible, and where, as in academia, we now see what happens when integration, or the revolution, rises up to kill not its children, but perhaps its heirs.
Here is the fascinating point: we have a precedent for what happens precisely in a field where African Americans receive every possible opportunity, are nurtured endlessly, and even enjoy dominance. Yet here, under what appear to be equal rules, when people who look different from them rise to the top, and over the past five years, Dončić and Jokić have indeed been the best players in the world, something violent, racist, and aggressive suddenly emerges. Something that would end any other commentator’s career on another network.
But that is the point: someone who enters the world keeping a ledger of grievances can never put it down.
Now consider the likely reaction. Should we expect any outcry? Imagine a white commentator saying something like this about an African national team at the World Cup, or about a team of Black schoolchildren or college students.
Historically, basketball is a multiracial sport. If we were to select the 30 greatest players of all time, at least a third would be white and the rest Black. Since at least the 1980s, the sport has largely operated in harmony. Now we are seeing a new kind of rhetoric.
Perhaps Stephen A. Smith is doing us all a favor. He is opening up questions about race and performance. If that is the case, perhaps those questions should be extended to other areas: intelligence, propensity for violence, the ability to maintain a stable family life, educational attainment, discipline, creative thinking, invention, and more.
Why confine this language to basketball?
