Media Circus:

White America has always had mixed feelings about black style. In-your-face black artists like Miles Davis have been both loved and feared; outspoken athletes like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have been regarded with wariness. For years, a kind of truce was maintained in pro sports: Blacks might be a little more exuberant, a little more demonstrative, but they kept their blackness under check. Blackness was just a pleasant spice in the stew. Recently, however, it has become the whole enchilada in some sports -- and the clash between white and black cultural styles has become so extreme that it is impossible to ignore.

The clash has become apparent in football, where the in-your-face style of black players scared the NFL enough that it cracked down on on-field celebrations and taunting. The NFL didn't want its black gladiators to get out of control.

It's in basketball, however, that the oppositional street-black style is most obvious. A special basketball issue of the Source, a hip-hop and black music magazine, proclaims on its cover, "Hip-hop hits the NBA! Is the league ready?" The editors write, "Right now, the NBA is experiencing an influx of hip-hop heads ... seemingly every single player coming in is down (with hip-hop) ... Instead of giving some blow job to the NBA, we take on the matter of whether or not the league feels comfortable with so many young African-American males dominating its presence on and off the court. Allen Iverson or Michael Jordan -- who is defining the NBA now? Because at some point, the league has to realize that everyone can't be like Mike."

Still more telling is a feature story titled "Generation Gap," about the gulf between the old NBA guard and these new trash-talking hip-hoppers (Sprewell is mentioned as one of them). Darrell Dawsey writes, "Criticisms of young players aren't necessarily unfair. But when they are used to veil narrow-minded contempt for urban Black culture -- when Iverson has to be a 'knucklehead' not because of his game but because of the way he rolls -- then the critiques become a sorry reflection of the source."

This week, by coincidence, Sports Illustrated's cover story is "What Ever Happened to the WHITE Athlete?" -- an investigation not just of why blacks dominate football and basketball (short answer: They're better), but of why so few whites are going out for those sports in high school and college. (Short answer: See above.)

The combination of the vanishing white athlete, the overwhelming preponderance of white owners, coaches and fans and the rise of black players who are coming out of "urban Black culture" is volatile. The Sprewell incident, as University of California-Berkeley professor Harry Edwards noted, may be a wake-up call -- worse episodes could follow if the underlying problems aren't addressed, Edwards warned.

The heart of the matter is simple: When is "contempt for urban Black culture" justified, and when is it racist? When does street-black cultural style cross over the line of unacceptability? There's a lot of white hypocrisy on this issue. Winning, for American sports fans, is a higher value than decorous behavior: When Deion Sanders was a 49er, I miraculously forgave those same jive-ass prancings that drive me up the wall now that he plays for Dallas. Whites will tolerate the confrontational, boastful, aggressive posturings of black stars as long as those stars help their team win.

To criticize some aspects of inner-city black style is to invite charges of racism -- but so be it. Just as black street culture has wonderful and inspiring aspects -- its exuberance, its creativity, its deadpan, soaring linguistic virtuosity -- it also has problems. What fan, black, white or yellow, doesn't feel that the ideal of sportsmanship represented by players like Magic Johnson is besmirched by the antics of players who seem to be driven not just to defeat their opponents, but to humiliate them? Who doesn't respect a team player like Barry Sanders more than one who views the game as a stage for his gigantic ego, like Ricky Watters?

It isn't that whites can't be bad sports or colossal egotists. The great Larry Bird was one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the league; the list of white whiners and malcontents is endless. But, as former NBA forward Chet Walker has written, for players who grow up poor and black, selfishness is almost a survival skill: "In the ghetto, you often must take what you can before someone takes it away."

In the best of all possible sports worlds, black emotional fireworks would enliven white dullness (who wants to watch a bunch of repressed honkies who never celebrate?) and white restraint would temper black individualism. We don't just need an ethnic melting pot, we need a stylistic melting pot. White dudes throwing down trash, black dudes wearing the poker faces of assassins -- now that would be a league. Let's hope it comes before we can't even talk to each other anymore.

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