Saturday Edition
America’s Most Wanted? The Locked Out NBA Baller
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
While the NBA players remained locked out by the owners, they continue to be subjected to what Alice Walker describes as “a prison of image, whereby stereotypes function not as errors, but rather forms of social control.” The media reports resulting from two separate altercations invoking Matt Barnes and Michael Beasley, and efforts to connect them to the NBA lockout, the culture of the NBA, and blackness demonstrates the power and threats inherent in these imprisoning images.
Trying to wax sociological, Chris Haynes, in “Overseas Not Problem, Pickup Games Are NBAers will continue to get into trouble if they keep playing streetball, ”uses Beasley and Barnes to point to the bigger dangers of the NBA lockout: the NBA player. “The NBA just like any other professional league, is also comprised of young, immature, volatile, emotional players who need structure in their lives 365 days out of the year. Unable to workout and have contact with their individual teams, players may be left searching for a good pickup game to stay in shape.” In other words, the NBA lockout will lead these immature and volatile to be free on the streets (playing street ball), just waiting to attack the nearest fan or competitor.
Celebrating the “grounded players such as Steve Nash, Derek Fisher, Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki” (the good ones) Haynes is concerned about the behavior of the OTHER (the bad ones) NBA star during the lockout. He goes on to argue that the danger stems not only from the lack of structure experienced during the lockout, but the backgrounds of the players themselves:
Several players come from poverty-stricken backgrounds and still have some form of street mentality embedded in them. In the heat of the moment, competing against amateurs who are disrespecting and derogating athletes in their face, is a bad recipe for something potentially to pop off. Beasley and Barnes are lucky, it could have escalated to firearms.
The efforts to link “poverty” to criminality is problematic at many levels. At one level, it demonstrates the power of stereotypes and racial narratives relative to black bodies given the backgrounds of both Barnes and Beasley. Barnes, who was born in Santa Clara, California, and grew up in Sacramento, is the son of Ann and Henry Barnes. His mother, who died of cancer is 2007, was an elementary school teacher that worked with mentally challenged kids. His biography (like so many in the NBA – over half of NBA players grew up in Suburban neighborhoods) doesn't mesh with the stereotypical discussion of inner-city ballers that Haynes works through in this piece. Likewise, Beasley, who was home-schooled and raised by his mother, Fatima Smith, exists on a different plane.
At another level, the media discourse evident here reflects a larger history of white racial framing and white supremacy. Playing on a myriad of racial narratives and tropes, Haynes uses the Beasley and Barnes incident, as well as the assumptions about streetball, the rhetoric here reflects a larger history of race in America.
For Elizabeth Alexander, the nature of racism within the United States is defined by practices wherein black bodies are systematically displayed “for public consumption,” both in the form of “public rapes, beatings, and lynchings” and “the gladiatorial arenas of basketball and boxing” (1994, p 92). Jonathan Markovitz similarly locates the criminalization of the black body within the narratives of the sports media: “The bodies of African American athletes from a variety of sports have been at the center of a number of mass media spectacles in recent years, most notably involving Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson, but NBA players have been particularly likely to occupy center stage in American racial discourse.”
Amid the NBA lockout, the narrative space available for NBA players is increasingly limited to the projects of demonization and criminalization that are central to white supremacy. The coverage afforded to these instances, the efforts to spotlight their missed-steps as evidence of a larger problem facing the NBA, the narrative prison that links them to larger frames regarding black criminality, and the rhetorical devices offered demonstrates the process of criminalization central to the history of black America.
Enter exhibit B. Challenging the narrative that the players have gained the upper-hand, Ken Berger, in “Sadly, it's players behaving badly,” reduces NBA players to criminals incapable of controlling themselves.
And oh, we now bring you the widely anticipated and sadly inevitable news of Michael Beasley shoving a fan in the face and Matt Barnes punching an opponent during pro-am games on either coast.
We don't even want to get into the escapades of three former NBA players in the news this week -- Darius Miles, who was arrested for trying to bring a loaded gun through airport security, Rafer Alston, who was sued over his alleged role in a strip club fight, and Samaki Walker, who allegedly tried to dine on eight grams of marijuana during a traffic stop in Arizona, during which police also confiscated prescription drugs and liquid steroids.
Guns, strip clubs and weed – the trifecta of ammunition for those quick to stereotype NBA players as outlaws, lawbreakers and menaces to society. Great job, guys.
It’s a lockout, so NBA players must be behaving badly. And they are.
While acknowledging the existence of a stereotype , while still blaming players for reinforcing such stereotype, rather than those instances of reporting that have the same effect, Berger paints a broad brush here. Like Haynes, he connects these instances to the lockout, thereby constructing the NBA’s primarily black players as essentially criminals who in the absence of structure and surveillance will invariably resort to pathological behavior – “It’s a lockout, so NBA players must be behaving badly.” At the same time, he links together Barnes, who got into an altercation during a game (a practice that is celebrated as evidence of manhood when done in a bar or on a hockey rink) and Beasley who got into a verbal spat (and ultimately pushed a guy) with a fan with three FORMER NBA players. The rhetorical slight of hand that gives readers an impression about the culture of the NBA (and plays on and into racial stereotypes) and the criminal activity taking place during the NBA lockout.
In a brilliant piece about the Palace Brawl and Ron Artest, Grant Farred identifies the resistance inherent to a restive black body – publicly consumed black bodies at rest are inherently a challenge to the restrictive scripts that demand activity (entertainment; performance) that are central to American racial history.
In several moments, therefore, the problematic of how black athletic bodies occupy public space is privileged in order to read how these bodies move in that space and the limitations and possibilities that attach to that mobility. Of equal interest is how Artest's momentary im-mobility-the demand of perpetual black athletic motion-triggers the release of an enigmatic voice. By being still and speechless on the scorer's table, Artest becomes, momentarily, an enigma. The tough, skillful, uncompromising, and often mouthy defender (the defender who is always talking "smack"), Artest was transformed, in that moment, into the voice of rest. At rest, but not restful, at rest and still restive, provocative in his restfulness, Artest became the black body that was temporarily prone, not moving, the body that for a momentous second or two refuses the perpetual motion that is inveterately expected of the NBA athlete.
Farred’s discussion of the Palace Brawl in that NBA players in the context of the lockout are instructive as players are imagined as being at rest (this is why efforts to play in summer league games, overseas, and anywhere is an important space of resistance). No longer useful commodities for public consumption, they are “rest” and therefore not useful. The utility of blackness within public space is erased within the white imagination leaving those at rest subjected to discourses of fear and demonization.
According to Abby Ferber “Black men have been defined as a threat throughout American history while being accepted in roles that serve and entertain White people, where they can ostensibly be controlled and made to appear nonthreatening.” Facing a historically long lockout, both the instruments of control and value (commodification and entertainment) are in flux explaining the fears and criminalization that have penetrated the public discourse. By this logic, if there is a lockout black men are a restive as commodities and therefore potentially active as criminals. America’s New Menace: The locked-out baller.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.
