Blackballed

A white sports fan wrestles with basketball's racial taboos.

By Sallie Tisdale

Dec 7, 1999 | In David Shields' new book, "Black Planet," the narrative is deceptively simple: a diary of the Seattle Supersonics 1994-95 season. It is the diary of a middle-aged, white baby boomer, a desk-bound man with fading athletic skills and little power in a dangerous world. "Sometimes what being a fan seems to be most about is self-defeat," he writes, wondering at his own willing surrender to the professional game. "What an agony of enthralldom we are in." This world of the sidelined fan is a rich one, but it is only the skeleton upon which Shields hangs his real story, the dark fable he wants to tell.

Dark fable, I write, and there I am, in a world of hidden and exposed fears: "In the NBA black men rule (sort of), so we admire them (sort of); everywhere else in America we're afraid of them." "Black Planet" is not exactly about basketball -- though if you don't like basketball, you may find the book tough going; the details of the game fill every page. The book's theme is something else -- "white people's reverence for, resentment toward, and colonization of black people's bodies."

Such terrors are vividly portrayed in American professional sports, but to discuss them is largely taboo. It is especially taboo to discuss them the way Shields does here -- in unguarded, private prose, in the world of thought.

Shields doesn't just break rules about what one should or should not say out loud. There are conventions about nonfiction, its territory of fairness and honesty and how writers discover the truth. Shields does not pretend to journalistic objectivity; his focus on race is a focus on David Shields and his own myriad selves. But he pretends to other truths that are not as easy to define.

I am breaking conventions, too -- taboos about readers and book critics and our pretense of objectivity. They fall apart here, as reader and writer and reviewer collide.

The book follows the Sonics' progress, and Shields' diary fills with incidents, a painful racial awareness noted in each small glance between strangers, in chitchat, in how people stand. Shields is hypervigilant; nothing escapes his tainted glance. He sees unspoken racism when the team's Sasquatch mascot shines the shoes of the black referee, in a woman's glance at a black man jogging by, in his own habitual effort to say thank you to black bus drivers but not white ones. During one game's halftime, a Harlem Globetrotter plays with a kid from the crowd: "The kid the Globetrotter dragged out of the stands had to be black: the hoopla of black hoops transcendence needs, first, to erase memory."

This piling up of incident and distrust creates a picture of what happens when we begin to see everything in terms of race. In a world where everything is innately racial, all relationships become artificial -- they are literally constructed from appearances, from surfaces, from image. In that world, nothing can be trusted because surfaces lie. Even skin can lie. No reaction, no feeling, no conversation can be free of the taint. Each moment, one is painfully conscious of those around him or her, and therefore, painfully self-conscious.

We are polarized creatures, aching with separation. In "Black Planet," Shields sees polarity everywhere -- not only the poles of race, but endless permutations of Us and Them, I and You, Me and Everyone Else. Race is only a visible manifestation of an existential otherness that keeps us apart.

"Black Planet" is a book about men as much as race. There are almost no women here, and when women appear, they seem destined to emasculate by virtue of their freedom from the fears men share and never discuss. Here is a tangle of erotic appetites: the hunger of white men for black men's skills; the secret belief that black men are sexually superior to white men. It is a world of terrible insecurities. Shields thinks that white men -- especially those who, like the narrator, fear the rocky shores of political correctness -- love the antics of black athletes because they seem to be bad boys. White men see in the arrogance of black athletic stars their own missing self-confidence, their own lost, youthful freedom. This freedom is so ironic, represents a world so inside-out to many white men, that it is hard to contemplate.

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