(ThyBlackMan.com) With the NBA lockout reaching a new low (or a return low) with David Stern’s announcement of the cancellation of the first two weeks, the class of pundits have taken to the airwaves to lament the developments, to asses blame, and offer suggestions of where to go from here. Not surprisingly, much of the commentaries have blamed players for poor tactical decisions, for wasting any potential they may have had over the summer, and for otherwise being too passive. Take Harvey Araton, from The New York Times, who while arguing that the players will need to take risks in order to secure leverage, speculates about a potential missed opportunity:
If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that the modern player might have considered striking first — or at least threatening one before last spring’s playoffs — that is only because the tactic has become virtually anathema, which is a mighty curious weapon for a union to concede.While on the phone, Fleisher looked up the language in the expired collective bargaining agreement on Pages 264-265 that prohibited players from impeding N.B.A. operations. But supposing the players had gone ahead and walked out on the eve of the playoffs after they’d all been paid their regular-season hauls?Fleisher guessed they would have opened themselves and their individual contracts up to a court action. Or maybe the owners — petrified at the thought of their profit season being flushed — might have agreed to a no-lockout pledge for the start of this season. Who knows? But sometimes risk begets reward.
While abstract at a certain level, the argument makes sense. Had the players been more aggressive, had they taken steps earlier, had they capitalized on past leverage, the situation might be different. Yet, we don’t live in an abstract 
world. The realities on the ground precluded such steps (see here for my past discussion). If the efforts to blame players, to demonize them as greedy, selfish, and out-of-touch during a LOCKOUT is any indication how the public might have reacted to a player strike, especially one starting at the playoffs, the strategy suggested here is pure silliness.
world. The realities on the ground precluded such steps (see here for my past discussion). If the efforts to blame players, to demonize them as greedy, selfish, and out-of-touch during a LOCKOUT is any indication how the public might have reacted to a player strike, especially one starting at the playoffs, the strategy suggested here is pure silliness. Moreover, it fails to understand the ways in which race operates in the context of sports and within broader society. The public outcry against LeBron James for exercising his rights of free agency, the condemnation of Deron Williams or Carmelo Anthony for deciding that they wanted to play elsewhere, and the overall vitriol directed at players illustrates both the impossibility of any player leverage and the ways in which race undermines any structural power the players may enjoy. The owners possess the power of the racial narrative that both guides public opinion and fan reaction.
We can make similar links to the larger history of African American labor struggles, where black workers have struggled to secure support from the public at large because of longstanding ideas of the lack of fitness/desirability of African Americans in the labor force. In other words, fans, just as the public in past labor struggles, see the black body as inherently undeserving and thus any demands for fairness, equality, and justice are seen as lacking merit. On all counts, the commentaries fail to see the ways and which blackness and anti-black racism constraints the tools available to the players.
Even those commentaries that ostensibly exonerate the players in highlighting David Stern’s strategy of throwing the players under the proverbial racial bus (his race card) with the hopes that the public will ultimately turn against the players (mostly there already) erases race from the discussion. For example, in “Stern ducks, lets NBA players take hit,” Adrian Wojnarowski highlights the difficulty facing NBA players and how that reality guides the intransigent position from the firm of Stern and owners. “So, there was the biggest star in the sport waddling onto the sidewalk on 63rd Street in Manhattan on Monday night without the kind of big-stage, big-event scene that the commissioner always loves for himself in the good times,” he writes. “He knows the drill now: Step out of the way, and let the angry mobs run past him and the owners. Let them chase his players down the street, around the corner and all the way to the lockout’s end and beyond.” Similarly, Bud Shaw penned the following:
Blaming locked-out players in a work stoppage? Sounds like a plan, just one that defies logic.A player strike didn’t cause a partial cancellation of the schedule. Commissioner Bully made the call, doing the bidding of an ownership whose strategy is to watch players squirm when they start missing checks and wait for the inevitable wave of public resentment to crash down on their heads.After David Stern’s announcement, LeBron James tweeted an apology to fans for the lost games. Steve Nash aimed his regrets at those hurt most by the cancellation, saying “sorry to all the employees in and around NBA arenas losing work.” The owners are betting you’ll read over that and do what fans always do in these situations. Scoff and say, “Sorry? Sure they are. I’d play for a quarter of what those guys make
The reason Stern can step aside and “let them chase his players down the street” (he certainly uses language to convey a lynch mob mentality) are grounded in anti-black racism.
Class matters and surely the current economic crisis matters, but when the strategy of ownership is to lock their workers out and when those workers offer a concession of at least 160 million (reduction of player’s take of the BRI from 57% to 53%), it is hard to argue that class disintentification drives fans and the public at large from players to owners. Race and the power of a white racial frame that imprisons black male bodies to a narrative of criminality, danger, pathology and greed, that constructs blackness as undeserving, unintelligent, unprofessional, and not part of the mainstream, highlights the basis of this strategy.
The lockout isn’t simply about increased profits and changing the structure of the NBA so that the Cavs, Kings, and Bobcats have as much of a chance of winning an NBA championship as the Heat and the Lakers (this portion of the argument remains suspect to me since clearly a NBA finals between the Bobcats-Kings finals does little to improve revenues). It as much about breaking the union, disciplining and managing the league’s black bodies in an effort to secure victory in the NBA’s assault on blackness. It is both an effort to capitalize on anti-black racism through playing on fan/media contempt all while enhancing their profit margins (constrained by anti-black racism) and power to transform the criminalized black body into a more profitable entity.
In 2006, Kobe Bryant had not yet returned to his prominence within the NBA. In wake of accusations of sexual violence and his often-publicized feud with Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe remained a suspect superstar incapable of converting talents to profits for the league and its corporate sponsors. That year, he did secure his place in history when he scored 81 points in a January game. Notwithstanding the historic nature of this performance, his dropping 81 on the Raptors led numerous commentators to question Kobe’s commitment to his team/the game, using the moment to lament his inability to become the next MJ. On the web, in newspapers, on sports talk radio, and on the various television sports debate shows, fans and sport commentators debated whether scoring 81 points was indeed a great accomplishment or a sign of a character flaw in Bryant, and thus a sign of the precarious future for the NBA.
Interestingly, similar conversations took place earlier in the season, when Bryant dropped 61 on the Dallas Mavericks in three quarters. With his team up by 40, Bryant did not play the fourth quarter, prompting fans and sports reporters to deem Bryant as selfish for he did not return to the game in search of Wilt Chamberlin’s 100 points in a game record. Greatness on the court was one thing, but his purported selfishness, his me-first attitude, and overall disrespect for his teammates, opponents, the fans, and the game itself, embodied the problems facing the NBA.
Scoring 81 points served as a signifier for his place as both a dollar sign and a thug within the dominant white imagination; he was marketable, yet limited as a commodity because he was unable to transcend the meaning of blackness. In this instance, he, like so many NBA ballers, functioned as the ultimate marker of the decay facing the NBA, functioning as both a source of celebration and a spectacle where the discursive logic and ideological rhetoric played out on, through and within his body. In other words, Bryant’s greatness did not propel the league forward because his greatness fed anti-black stereotypes and narratives.
The NBA’s strategy of marketing players over teams, of commodifying stars over rivalries proved ineffective because of the wider meaning conveyed by blackness within the white imagination. The lockout represents a reversal of this strategy by both undermining the star power of the NBA’s elite players all while trying to create team parity. Since the next Michael Jordan, as a post-racial fiction, appears no where in the NBA’s future, the league is set on restructuring itself to further conceal its blackness even while it plays upon anti-black sentiments to cultivate support for ITS cancellation of games. It ain’t about their salary, it’s about the race of the NBA reality that guides the NBA lockout and its reception.
Written By David J. Leonard
Official website; http://newblackman.blogspot.com/
