“#theLakersAreSoWhite:” Celebrations of the White Baller
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
One of the more popular twitter trends of late has been the #theLakersAreSoWhite meme, a response to a Lakers’ roster that has five white American players: Luke Walton, Jason Kapono, Josh McRoberts, Steve Blake, and Troy Murphy. The meme includes a range of posts from the silly – #thelakersaresowhite half the team is skipping the plane back tonight to open a gluten-free bakery in #ripcity – to those based solely around recycling stereotypes of blackness and whiteness:
The meme elicited a column from JA Adande on the changing “color” of the Lakers. The 2011-2012 Lakers have the most number of white American players since the 1977-1978 team. In “Purple and gold take on a new color,” Adande reflects on the Lakers’ recent demographic shift, situating the increased number of white American players on the Lakers within a downward trend throughout the league. Adande wonders if the Lakers, as one of the NBA marquee franchises, have the potential to increase the number of white kids seeking entry into the NBA. “It also would be interesting to see if having so many white players on a high-profile team could have any long-term effects on the dwindling number of white American players in the NBA.” At this level, the piece is quite instructive because it offers a challenge to the biological determinism that both explicitly and implicitly governs much of sports discussions.
In speculating as to how the visibility of a cluster of white American players on the NBA’s principle franchise, Adande makes clear that the racial demographics of the NBA is the result of a myriad of factors from culture (self-fulfilling prophecies) and role models, to resource allocation and inequality in the availability of sports. “The acceptance of this ‘natural athlete thesis’ … is instead an insult when you really break down all the implications,” writes Todd Boyd in Young Black, Rich and Famous. “If this was true, how do we account for the millions of black people, who have never played a sport? Why then are not all black people who pursue sport successful? The biological argument is without any merit, though it is argument that keeps getting recycled. Culture is key to understanding this phenomenon, but few are ready to accept it as such” (Boyd 64-64). I n this regard, Adande’s explanation of the Lakers changing color is a challenge to “the natural athlete thesis” and the memes that have been generated in response to the supposedly new found diversity of the team.
Yet, Adande’s shock and awe reinforces the very spectacle that so often surrounds the entry of whiteness on the basketball court. The mere fact that he writes an article, and that countless others chimed in with twitter comments (the meme) is a testament to the ways in which dominant discourse normalize blackness within the context of the NBA. The spectacle and discourse of the white baller anomaly pivots on the assumed natural connection between blackness and basketball. “Basketball’s prevailing ghettocentric logic keys on essentializing the embodied practices and experiences of Black urban male youth as a means of denoting an ‘authentic Blackness’ designed to appeal primarily to White, middle-class consumers,” writes David Andrews and Michael Silk.
It is highly likely that such commercially driven paeans to basketball’s location within the Black urban American landscape are more attuned to the mainstream (White) consumptive gaze. In light of this, the commercial media, and advertising in particular, have therefore reduced difference to a ‘cultural commodity’ (Sandell, 1995) and valorized ‘a particular, mediated notion of urban blackness,” which connects non-Black, suburban youth to only ‘the most desirable aspects of urban black male experience and physicality—all from a safe and sanitized distance’ (Soar, 2001, pp. 51-53).
In imagining whiteness as Othered within a basketball space, Adande, like much of the media and popular discourse surrounding white ballers, further reinscribes blackness as authentic to the basketball landscape and therefore foreign, unnatural, and inauthentic in virtually every other space.
The effort to celebrate whiteness and its presence within the context of the NBA reflects the overall effort to manage and control the NBA’s blackness. Glyn Hughes (2004) argues that, “The NBA is marketed and managed with a specific, if often tacit, goal of making Black men safe for (White) consumers in the interest of profit” (p. 164). By highlighting and celebrating the presence of whiteness, by noting the many ways that white players help black players, the discourse is in many ways neutralizes white fears of black bodies. For example, Bill Plaschke took a break from being the leader of the Andrew Bynum hater nation to take his turn as the president of “Josh McRambis,” “Josh McFly” and “Josh McHoosier” (names he gives to Josh McRoberts) fan club.
In “Lakers' Josh McRoberts is becoming a household name,” Plaschke argues “McRoberts has done the sort of things that make the Lakers better while leaving the sometimes glamour-weary Lakers fans inspired. The extra pick that frees Kobe Bryant for the jump shot? That's him. That extra pass that leads to a Bynum dunk? Him again.” Recycling the stereotypes long associated with blackness and whiteness, Plaschke depicts one of the Lakers’ newest acquisition as hardworking and team-oriented, as someone who makes their “glamour” (black) players that much better.
In an article discussing the representations of white players in the NBA, Larry Platt (2000) documents how Matt Maloney (former Penn and Houston PG) is often described by commentators and reports as “heady or cerebral,” possessing a tremendous “work ethic” needed to offset his lack of “athletic ability” (71-72). The celebration of the Lakers “white core” emanates from this rhetoric and their underlying assumptions. Todd Boyd, in Am I Black Enough for You, further elucidates the inextricable links between race and the styles of play associated with different players. Whereas whiteness represents a “textbook or formal” style basketball, blackness has come to embody “street or vernacular” styles of hooping defined by flash (narcissism), individual play (selfishness), and uber athleticism. Boyd identifies a hegemonic narrative where “white basketball” players are represented as individuals for whom “adherence to a specific set of rules determines one’s ability to play successfully and ‘correctly.’” White players are seen in relationship to intelligence, mental toughness, and mental agility, whereas the blackballer is imagined through physical attributes – strength, toughness – and aggressiveness. Intelligence, orientation toward team play, and sticktoitness preclude blackness. These ideas are the undercurrent and foundation for the recent pieces by Adande and Plaschke.
In both cases and within much of the media adoration for white basketball player there is a focus on temperament and attitude. That is that white players possess the requisite attitude and demeanor to succeed alongside of their black teammates on the basketball court. Adande seemingly argues that the ability of the “5 white amigos” to succeed on the Lakers reflects their backgrounds: “If you think about it, the Lakers now have a cluster of white players because they have five individuals who were at ease being outsiders.” Noting that Blake grew up in Miami, Walton played with several black players at University of Arizona, and McRoberts was the only white guy on his AAU team, Adande concludes that these experiences as “minorities” provided them with the requisite education to succeed in a league where white players are minorities. In erasing white privilege, in reimagining whites as victims, in denying the normalization of whiteness in basketball and other segregated spaces, Adande reifies the hegemonic views of race and the role of sports as the greater equalizer.
According to Charles Barkley: “The best thing about sports is that it’s colorblind. In the locker room, we’re all the same. Sports bring us together. I meant if you can play, your gonna play, no matter what you are” (quoted in Platt 73). Don’t tell that to Tim Tebow and the Lakers “of a different color;” don’t tell that to Andrew Bynum or any number of black athletes who have “been constructed as a site of pleasure, dominance, fantasy, and surveillance” (King and Springwood 2001, 101). The celebration of white ballers in opposition to black players is yet another example of how “in a post-civil rights America, African Americans have been essentially policed, and literally (re)colonized through Euro-American idioms such as discipline, deviance, and desire.”
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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. Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.
