Friday, Aug 29, 2008
THE LATRELL SPREWELL CASE MAY SIGNAL THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICA'S LAST RACIAL UTOPIA -- SPORTS.
Dec 10, 1997 | If President Clinton is really as interested as he says he is in jump-starting his moribund "national dialogue on race," he might try using the sports pages as a conversation starter. For many of the burning racial issues of the day -- affirmative action, the conflicting claims of class and race and above all white anxieties over an aggressive black street cultural style -- are summed up in the parallel universe of athletics. And, in stark contrast to the timorousness that shrouds the discussion of Big Racial Issues, when it comes to sports, everybody's willing to speak their mind.
The Latrell Sprewell case is the latest and most ominous development -- an early warning that the sports world's carefully constructed racial utopia is a fagade that may soon turn very ugly. By now, everybody knows that Golden State Warriors all-star guard Latrell Sprewell, who is black, attacked his white coach, P.J. Carlesimo, that his team fired him and the NBA suspended him for a year, and that San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown played the race card. "His boss may have needed choking," declared Brown, who called on Jesse Jackson and Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris to investigate the incident. (Harris agreed with Brown that an investigation was needed, saying "Race is an issue.")
Brown's comments set off a firestorm. Outraged callers and letter-writers asked how a mayor who fires his employees on a whim could suggest that termination was too harsh a punishment for a man who had physically assaulted his boss? In what line of work, other than the fantasy world of pro sports, would anyone be able to ever return to work after such behavior? Realizing he had blown it, Brown tried to engage in some lame damage control, but the whiff of Al Sharpton-style racial demagoguery clung to his Armani suits like the odor of rotting fish.
It's almost incredible that leaders like Willie Brown continue to cry "racism" on the most bogus of pretexts. Following such great moments in race-card playing as the O.J. Simpson and Tawana Brawley cases, one would think that black leaders would have recognized that picking the wrong fights leads to a dismissive "boy who cried wolf" reaction from whites, one that can undercut support for real injustices. Indeed, the pious racial posturing of master bottom-dealer Johnnie Cochran (who appeared with Sprewell at a press conference Tuesday in which the player publicly apologized) probably turned more whites, including liberals, against racial preferences than the combined arguments of Dinesh D' Souza, Charles Murray and Shelby Steele.
For Brown, the fact that the league, the ownership, the coach and the fans are white and the player was black automatically meant that racism was involved -- the Man came down on an uppity brother. But what many white fans believe, whether they say it or not, is that black players who strangle their coaches aren't uppity brothers (how can you be "uppity" when you're making $7.7 million a year? Where do you go up to?) -- they're the jock equivalent of gangsta rappers: thugs who attack when they don't get their own way.
Latrell Sprewell is obviously a complicated man (there's a sweetness to him and some previous coaches say they liked him, but he also once threatened a teammate with a two-by-four) whose problems may or may not be related to an inner-city ethos. The fact is, however, that America's overwhelmingly white sports fans are just now beginning to confront a black cultural style that is antithetical to their deepest beliefs about respect for authority, teamwork and sportsmanship. The way this confrontation will be resolved -- in advertising images, in league rulings, in player-coach relations, in the hearts and minds of players and fans alike -- will help shape America's race relations well into the next century.
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