Editor’s Note:This is a response to Kevin’s piece on racism in basketball writing from last week (linked below).
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If you haven’t yet read The Diss’ co-editor Kevin Draper’s piece “Your Favorite Basketball Writer is Probably a Little Racist”, I suggest you do so right this very moment. I had missed a lot of what the post discussed (namely, Bill Simmons’ unfortunate linkage of crowd nervousness in Memphis to a collective trauma associated with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968) because I was on vacation. Despite this, I found the discussion compelling and the assertions sound. In the post, Kevin used recent work produced by Bill Simmons, Bill Dwyre, TJ Simers, Andrew Sharp and Ben Golliver to point out the way (white) writers employed outmoded, stereotypical narratives to support erroneous, far-fetched arguments about the NBA and its predominantly black player base. From mischaracterizations of Memphis as a place where you need “a bullet proof vest” to see a Grizzlies game (Simers), to more innocuous narratives where player success is tied to the wisdom of a predominantly white front office (Sharp), Kevin took each of these writers to task, and shows how their work was at best tainted by white privilege, and at worst guilty of outright racism. In the end, Kevin asserted that this recent spate of work was really indicative of a larger structural problem with sports journalism: that “the basketball writing community is made up of an incredibly homogeneous group of writers, ” and more specifically, that “community is made up of white males writing about black males, reading other white males write about black males, and discussing the exploits of black males with white males.” In the end, Kevin asserted, the writers that we enjoy end up coming of “a little bit racist”.
On the whole, I found Kevin’s analysis to be spot on. As he correctly pointed out, there are a number of racialized narratives that seem to pervade analysis in a number of disciplines, including sports writing and analysis. The image of the southern city as largely black, segregated and violent — an oft repeated trope in journalistic and entertainment endeavors, and seen clearly in Simmons, Simers and Golliver’s work — has long been a part of the American cultural imagination, and has been replicated in different mediums many times over. Additionally, the idea that a wealthy family (more likely to be white) has a greater chance to enable a child to succeed than an impoverished one (more likely to be black) has informed social policy and development theory, and also served as a useful metaphor for the Grantland piece Andrew Sharp wrote, and Kevin took to task in his post. And indeed, as Kevin points out, the discipline (so to speak) of basketball writing is dominated by white males, both in terms of its writers and the majority of its readership. This is not a point I disagreed with, and I’m happy Kevin articulated that point.
However, I do feel that Kevin’s argument could be generously described as in the right direction, and cynically described as a only getting at part of the much larger issue: the problematic nature of objective analysis in general. For though Kevin is correct that whiteness is pervasive in the basketball stuff-o-sphere (my own term for the wide umbrella of print and online media created by both paid and unpaid basketball analysts), he is certainly generalizing. I know this by looking in the mirror: I am black. I also know this because, for three years, I struggled with the deeply compromising nature of objective, evidence-based analysis in History, and the ways we can produce better analyses that can educate a broad audience, without relying out outdated, simplistic narratives. It was that angst that produced The Diss, and the lens in which I viewed Kevin’s sort-of “bull in a china shop” approach towards parsing out racism in writing of basketball.
For a time, I was the one of two black students enrolled in the History department at the University of Washington (though the other one transferred after my first year, leaving me all by my lonesome). I lasted three years in a PhD program, where my intention was to study Egyptian history and write a dissertation about Egypt’s “African identity”. Now, as I have hinted a number of times on this blog, I struggled mightily during my abortive stint as an academic in Seattle. I had many grievances, and included among them were the analyses that I was reading in my seminars, referencing in my research projects, and teaching to my students; the very books and articles I spent hours pouring over and integrating into other works. In these books, with fantastic titles like Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, or Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Cast, 1856-1888, various (predominantly white) American historians cast “Africans” (we needed to remember which specific group he or she was talking about) through the dense, self-indulgent language of academia, turning real people who existed, living and breathing at some point in history into lifeless terms. The words “patrons”, “clients”, “warlords”, “gatekeepers”, and “big men” appeared like “rooks”, “bishops” and “pawns” in an instruction manual for chess. In the process, these individuals became pawns for academics with, on the whole, good, honest intentions to push a research agenda; real people reduced to ideas that were supported by primary and secondary documents.
Throughout my graduate school experience, I struggled with the way historians described their African subjects, in particular, their assessments of the particular thoughts, desires, and motivations of individuals who were either long departed, or had no real written record of their live histories. African history is notable for its distinct lack of written sources, and African historians often out of necessity rely on alternate primary sources (such as interviews) to structure frameworks for research projects. As such, most book-length efforts in African history (at least ones which focused on the early post-colonial period in the 1950s and 1960s) were a combination of interviews with Africans, fortified by European archival sources and American/European secondary work. Sometimes the work was good. But sometimes, I didn’t enjoy it, and found it problematic in terms of it’s depiction of race.
I’ll point to this excerpt (quoted at length) from the introductory chapter of the aforementioned Speaking With Vampires (Berkeley: UC Press, 2000), written by the historian Luise White, as an example of writing that I found problematic. I wouldn’t call it “racist”, but it presented race, for me, in a troubling way. In the following passage, Luise White lays out the argument for the originality (and necessity) of her book, which focused on the role ”vampire” and “bloodsucking” rumors played for Africans living in colonial Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. Throughout the book, White emphasized the important role these rumors played in East Africans’ conceptualizations the power of the British colonial state, specifically in terms of understanding European technology and navigating the dense machinery of the colonial government. White was concerned with both accurately representing the agency of African subjects, while at the same time, supporting her own original assertions about the manifestations of colonial power in colonial East Africa:
This book argues something very different. I think there are many obvious reasons why Africans might have thought that colonial powers took precious substances from African bodies, and I doubted if Africans needed to see or hear of a specific medical procedure to imagine that white people would hang them upside down and drain their blood. I think bloodsucking by public employees is a fairly obvious metaphor for state-sponsored extractions, just as vampires are an unusually convincing modern metaphor for physic ills and personal evil…my concern is not with why the idea of bloodsucking Europeans came into being, but why it took the hold it did, and why Africans used it to depict a wide variety of situations and structures and sometimes acted upon such beliefs. (Page 18)
When I read passages like these, and attempted to discuss them in class, I was always distracted by the strange (yet strangely seductive) linkages between European ideas of bloodsucking vampires to East Africans living in colonial East Africa, shrouded in deeply obtuse academic language. Over time, this distraction evolved into a deep ambivalence around studying history, and by extension, constructing lengthy research projects (like a dissertation). Indeed, the desire to tie seemingly unique assertions around clunky generalizations, and as a result, making linkages that can be problematic, and in some cases offensive. Certainly it is not White’s intention to create a flawed image of what late colonial East Africa looked like. But through her analysis, we are implored to believe that, based upon 130 interviews conducted in a three year period (Page 16), a sizable portion of East African society thought about the state in Western terms, where “vampires”, “game rangers” and “firemen” took people at night, hung them upside down, and suck their bloods. It is an analysis that seems both regressive and revolutionary. White won acclaim (among those who know her, which is a very small segment of the population) for her innovative use of primary sources, but in my opinion, her analysis portrayed Africans as intimidated by colonial technologies who were only able to comprehend their complexity through rumor, myth and magic. Though it was hardly White’s intention to do so, I felt her work perpetuated the notion that black Africans were primitive, and struggled to accept seemingly unknowable aspects of European colonial society. This is simply not true, and it is a problem.
By the end of my third year of school, and having read literally hundreds of books and articles that re-cast African men, women and children, as whatever symbol fit a particular (white, generally male) historian’s research agenda, I was no longer capable of engaging in seminar. As a graduate student, my job was to offer nuanced critiques of other scholarly works, and eventually, produce my own work for others’ review. However, by that point, I was wholly incapable of producing thoughts that, essentially, suspended the reality that the very nature of our work was problematic, and in some extreme cases, perpetuating outmoded notions about race, class, gender through our work. At that time, most of my points boiled down to the obvious shortcomings of research — inability to properly translate the full meanings of primary texts, the constrictions of academic research in terms of funding and faculty support, the dense, obtuse nature of academic writing, and so on — and with those thoughts firmly ingrained in my mind, I was essentially useless in seminar. As I grew more dour (I stopped speaking in African history classes and became obstinate in my writing) my work suffered, and my relationship with my African history adviser deteriorated. By the end of it all, I was grumpy and morose, yet feeling strangely good about myself. In my mind, I wasn’t part of the problem. In my mind, I wasn’t perpetuating work that I felt did a disservice towards broad understanding.
It was in this moment of isolation — I fancied myself as Neo with a fiery Holden Caulfield streak, seeing the Matrix for the first time and only having the wherewithal to think “fuck this, what’s the point, anyways?” — that I was the most aware of my race, and how alone I was in this industry of analysis. Not only was my department mostly white-washed (over 90%), but my field, as well. In the United States, the historical study of black Africans is conducted mostly by white people; mostly liberal, conscientious individuals, but still White, still American, and largely unfamiliar and unversed in the particular experiences, ideas and beliefs of the people they write about for a living. And though my skin was black, I was no more well-positioned to declare “expertise” than anyone else. It seemed like the most problematic aspect of the entire thing, and the fact that everyone didn’t stop and realize it at every moment – “wait, we can’t really know what these dead Africans are thinking and feeling; how can we even postulate without sounding stupid?” – not only made me sad, it made me angry. And so, at that point, it was easy to rage quit; to let all these silly white people talk about “Africans” exclusively in terms of “development” “aid”, “war”, “genocide”, “globalization”, “informal economies” and “structural adjustment”. I was depressed, and the way history was being presented — dark, depressing, eternally cast through the jumbled lens of post-colonialism — was depressing. I didn’t need to get involved with those terms anymore. So I stopped. No more analysis that I found to be deeply problematic, due to its false pretenses of “objectivity” and heavy reliance on generalizations. So I stopped. I quit. Two days later, I got a different job in the field I’m currently working in. Three days later, I started writing about basketball. And that’s all I’ve been doing since.
Which brings me to today; to The Diss and basketball and my blackness and racism and whatnot. Since dropping out of the University of Washington in 2011, I have swapped my role as a black graduate student in a field dominated by white folks with the role of a black basketball blogger in a field dominated by white folks. Frankly, this is nothing new. Indeed, it’s has been the role I’ve played throughout my life, from marching band in 1996 to ultimate frisbee in 2007. Much of it is a product of my upbringing (my mother is black and my father is white, and we grew up in Northern California in a diverse community without any other black folks), as well as the choices I made for myself (like going to a predominantly white undergrad at a private school in Minnesota, where my closest friends were almost all uniformly white). Is it ideal? No, not really. I struggle with it, on a daily basis. Much like school, it is a reality I am always aware of, and at times, it is truly a struggle to not orient myself, and my relationship with both my blogging colleagues, and writers whose work I read and analyze, purely in terms of my race. There are some days where I dissect the very ways white writers describe black bodies, alternating between beasts of burden in a stable, or brawny, hyper-sexualized men, and just shake my head. When I’m sitting on Twitter. There are some days it is really hard to play along with others, especially those who are unaware of the racial narratives they perpetuate.
But having now written thousands of words in a previous life as an African-American historian trying to construct balanced analyses about various topics of African history, as well as thousands of words in a current life as an African-American blogger trying to construct balanced analysis about various topics of the National Basketball Association, I have discovered anything that turns a living thing into a subject that you can analytically pick up, look at, make broad assessments about, then put down and walk away, is problematic. In order to incorporate as many perspectives as necessary, and create as full of a picture as possible, it’s necessary for the analyst to render human subjects lifeless, so they can write freely about them. The goal, of course, is to offer assertions that can be backed up by actual evidence, and supported by both primary and secondary sources. But ultimately, if a writer has done their job correctly, they’ve created a narrative that is both respectful and revealing; offering truthful, compelling evidence about a particular subject, while at the same time, keeping the reader fully engaged and interactive with the subject, as well as the analysis generated around the subject. In the end, this is what I try to do with my writing. And though I’ll never know for sure (Simmons has never responded to me on Twitter), I think this is what Simmons, Golliver and Sharp were trying to do in their respective pieces, despite their reliance upon flimsy historical connections (such as Simmons’ MLK flap), blurred lines between race and class (Sharp’s metaphor for the difference between the Wizards and the Spurs) and outmoded racial narratives in connection of urban environments (Golliver’s explorations into Damian Lillard’s Oakland roots, and Simer’s bone-headed characterizations of Memphis). As Kevin pointed out, they didn’t succeed in their quest. Their final products seem unfinished, or worse, racist. And due to the shortcomings in their research frameworks, they likely are. But their individual methodologies are clear, as are the intentions of their pieces.
So this is where Kevin’s analysis doesn’t quite go far enough for me. Labeling others (and their work) as racist, is the easy way out (especially if you’re white, and calling other white people racist). What is hard is the big picture; that is, actually identifying ways to produce better analysis that can entertain and educate a broad section of readers, and inspire them to produce work of their own. Additionally, it is difficult to fully weed out narratives that promote outdated, and in some cases, hateful lines of thinking. Public shaming doesn’t fundamentally alter the very structures that need to be brought down to consistently work that is appealing to all, and not just a homogenized group.
But with that said: Kevin correctly identifies the predominance of white males as both producers and consumers in the basketball blogosphere as being deeply problematic. He also aptly points out that certain writers unintentionally create narratives that come off as racist to perceptive readers. This is a product of a history of white male supremacy in, well most everything, and it persists in most competitive fields (including basketball blogging, believe it or not). However, this is the case in most fields of analysis, where increased participation from women and folks of color has allowed for a, shall we say, “de-white-and-male-i-fication” of a variety of disciplines. The going is slow — white men do have a lot of power, you know — but it’s going. I am no devout optimist, but even I feel that an uneven power structure is slowly but surely being toppled, and with that comes more sensitive, nuanced analysis is being produced in a variety of fields. My hope is this is coming in basketball writing as well.
So, now what? Now that we have ascertained that the very methodology that we use to create analysis is deeply problematic, and produces work that does not align with our political, social or cultural views, what do we do to change it? I unfortunately have no good answers, for basketball writing, historical analysis, or anything. Like I did as a black clarinet player, or a black ultimate frisbee player, I already feel like I’m doing my part. As much as I can, I try to help those who want to start writing about basketball get going, regardless of their race or religion. It seems like a cop-out, but I’m doing my thing, and trying not to be racist in the process.
So I think the best thing, really, is to do what Kevin did last week: point out the fucked up shit when it happens, and take those who mess up to task. And then all of us — readers, writers, fans of basketball and smart writing alike — can continue to do what we can do to make sure that things stay nuanced, passionate, and fair around this great basketball stuff-o-sphere in the sky. It’s not an easy job to change both demographics and discussion. But certainly we are on our way.
