Written by a white liberal but still has some interesting observations:
<H1>Campos: Racial consciousness in the NBA</H1>
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<DIV =storyByline>By Paul F. Campos/Syndicated columnist
<DIV =storySource>GHS
<DIV =storyDateline>Wed May 23, 2007, 12:17 AM EDT
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<DIV =datelineCaps>Last week, Slate magazine carried an interesting series of columns written by Paul Shirley, an American pro basketball player currently plying his trade in Spain (he has played parts of three seasons in the NBA).
Shirley's most interesting observations were about race. He noted that, at present, 6 percent of NBA players are white Americans (75 percent are African-Americans and 19 percent are foreigners), and that "when the average white American male" watches an NBA game, "he would very much like to see another average white American male" on the court.
When he sees such a player, Shirley claims, the average white American fan is going to root for the average white American player, because "we like to see people who look like us succeed." I have no idea if this is true, but I know it's not true in my case, at least when it comes to "white" American basketball players.
I root for the players who play for the Detroit Pistons, and for those who went to the University of Michigan. These are tribal allegiances from my youth. But I don't root for players who look like me, if for no other reason that there are no NBA players who look like me, at least on any scale of likeness I find meaningful.
Shirley sees things differently, in large part no doubt because he is a white American, in a sport in which the white American is becoming an endangered species. For him, the category "white" understandably has a great deal of meaning.
Shirley relates how racial prejudice has dogged his basketball career every step of the way. Because he's white, many players and coaches have always assumed he wasn't very good, even though as someone who has reached the NBA, and now makes an excellent living in the world's second-best professional league, he's obviously better at basketball than 99.99 percent of the people who made this assumption.
These are the kinds of experiences that tend to raise racial consciousness. In other words, being a white player in the NBA is more or less like being a black American in the so-called real world. One of the reasons (obviously not the only reason) that there are so few white Americans in the NBA is because, in America, basketball is thought of as something blacks are good at and whites aren't - and over time this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's surely no coincidence that the top 20 or so non-black NBA players, including the winners of the last three Most Valuable Player awards, are all foreigners. They didn't grow up being told several times per day that they couldn't be good at basketball because they weren't black.
Consider, in this context, the implications of the fact that black students do worse on tests when they are told ahead of time that the tests are measuring intelligence.
All this is related to the deep tribalism reflected in the idea that, in Shirley's words, "we like to see people who look like us succeed." This impulse is at the heart of issues such as immigration. For more than a century, nativists have been in a panic about the prospect of America ceasing to be a "white" country.
What these people never notice is that the definition of who counts as "white" in America is always changing. During the nation's first great immigration panic in the 1890s, "white" meant "Protestants of Northern European ethnicity." The notion that "people who look like us" would someday also include the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks and so forth would have seemed bizarre.
Now, in our own time, the relative whiteness of Mexican-Americans and Asian-Americans is shifting rapidly.
With any luck, in another generation or three, the descendants of Barack Obama will be "people who look like us," too.
Paul F. Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Paul.Campos@Colorado.edu.
http://www.dailynewstribune.com/opinion/x1060291454
<H1>Campos: Racial consciousness in the NBA</H1>
<HR>
<DIV =storyByline>By Paul F. Campos/Syndicated columnist
<DIV =storySource>GHS
<DIV =storyDateline>Wed May 23, 2007, 12:17 AM EDT
<HR>
<DIV =storyTools>Story Tools:
<DIV =mainStory>
<DIV =datelineCaps>Last week, Slate magazine carried an interesting series of columns written by Paul Shirley, an American pro basketball player currently plying his trade in Spain (he has played parts of three seasons in the NBA).
Shirley's most interesting observations were about race. He noted that, at present, 6 percent of NBA players are white Americans (75 percent are African-Americans and 19 percent are foreigners), and that "when the average white American male" watches an NBA game, "he would very much like to see another average white American male" on the court.
When he sees such a player, Shirley claims, the average white American fan is going to root for the average white American player, because "we like to see people who look like us succeed." I have no idea if this is true, but I know it's not true in my case, at least when it comes to "white" American basketball players.
I root for the players who play for the Detroit Pistons, and for those who went to the University of Michigan. These are tribal allegiances from my youth. But I don't root for players who look like me, if for no other reason that there are no NBA players who look like me, at least on any scale of likeness I find meaningful.
Shirley sees things differently, in large part no doubt because he is a white American, in a sport in which the white American is becoming an endangered species. For him, the category "white" understandably has a great deal of meaning.
Shirley relates how racial prejudice has dogged his basketball career every step of the way. Because he's white, many players and coaches have always assumed he wasn't very good, even though as someone who has reached the NBA, and now makes an excellent living in the world's second-best professional league, he's obviously better at basketball than 99.99 percent of the people who made this assumption.
These are the kinds of experiences that tend to raise racial consciousness. In other words, being a white player in the NBA is more or less like being a black American in the so-called real world. One of the reasons (obviously not the only reason) that there are so few white Americans in the NBA is because, in America, basketball is thought of as something blacks are good at and whites aren't - and over time this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's surely no coincidence that the top 20 or so non-black NBA players, including the winners of the last three Most Valuable Player awards, are all foreigners. They didn't grow up being told several times per day that they couldn't be good at basketball because they weren't black.
Consider, in this context, the implications of the fact that black students do worse on tests when they are told ahead of time that the tests are measuring intelligence.
All this is related to the deep tribalism reflected in the idea that, in Shirley's words, "we like to see people who look like us succeed." This impulse is at the heart of issues such as immigration. For more than a century, nativists have been in a panic about the prospect of America ceasing to be a "white" country.
What these people never notice is that the definition of who counts as "white" in America is always changing. During the nation's first great immigration panic in the 1890s, "white" meant "Protestants of Northern European ethnicity." The notion that "people who look like us" would someday also include the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks and so forth would have seemed bizarre.
Now, in our own time, the relative whiteness of Mexican-Americans and Asian-Americans is shifting rapidly.
With any luck, in another generation or three, the descendants of Barack Obama will be "people who look like us," too.
Paul F. Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Paul.Campos@Colorado.edu.
http://www.dailynewstribune.com/opinion/x1060291454
