With the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha, Wisconsin cop, Covid-19 and BLM are now shining their light on professional sports. The Milwaukee Bucks cancelled a playoff game with an elegant plea that the state they play in and for “take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.”
Other NBA teams and the league followed. Coach Doc Rivers of the LA Clippers was elegant: “We’re the ones getting killed. We’re the ones getting shot. We’re the ones that were denied to live in certain communities. We’ve been hung. We’ve been shot. And all you do is keep hearing about fear.” He—a successful, rich, Black athlete and coach whose father was a cop—ridicules White fear while acknowledging the legitimacy of continuing Black fears.
Rivers nailed it. The scene today is one of White fear: the fear of statistics—that in ten or twenty years Whites in the country will be outnumbered by Black and Brown people; the fear, stoked by some in politics and media, that Black thugs will loot stores and harm the police that have been harming them.
And the fear that African Americans are in fact superior athletes, and now, having conquered professional sports and established themselves strongly in music and entertainment, White fear that their children have been infected with adoration for Black prowess.
I’ve watched professional sports go from all-white to majority black in one lifetime—Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball; Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan and Stephan Curry dominating basketball; and Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters wedging Black into elite tennis.
But what must most gall the middle-aged White men and a growing chorus of younger White males is the students in small rural schools like ours in Wallowa County—or, I imagine, rural Wisconsin—where basketball players high five and chest bump, wear long shorts and blast rap music during warm-ups.
Despite Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee on the football field, Whites couldn’t stay away, drawn like moths to a flame they fear. And White Milwaukee, now less than half the population in a racially divided city, worship and fear the Black players on their Milwaukee Bucks.
At least, as Covid-19 makes clear, Whites are still way ahead in wealth and health.
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