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“Too Black”: Race in the “Dark Ages” of the NationalBasketball Association

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPORT AND SOCIETY http://www.SportandSocietyJournal.com First published in 2010 in Champaign, Illinois, USA by Common Ground Publishing LLC www.CommonGroundPublishing.com. © 2010 (individual papers), the author(s) © 2010 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground Authors are responsible for the accuracy of citations, quotations, diagrams, tables and maps. All rights reserved. Apart from fair use for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act (Australia), no part of this work may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact <[email protected]>. ISSN: 2152-7857 Publisher Site: http://www.SportandSocietyJournal.com THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPORT AND SOCIETY is peer-reviewed, supported by rigorous processes of criterion-referenced article ranking and qualitative commentary, ensuring that only intellectual work of the greatest substance and highest significance is published. Typeset in Common Ground Markup Language using CGCreator multichannel typesetting system http://www.commongroundpublishing.com/software/

“Too Black”: Race in the “Dark Ages” of the NationalBasketball AssociationMatthew Schneider-Mayerson, University of Minnesota, MN, USA

Abstract: Contracting and possibly folding in the late 1970s, the global success of the NBA in the1980s and 1990s is often attributed to the charismatic personalities and talents of Magic Johnson,Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan. The NBA’s resurgence was actually the result of successful mana-gerial strategies that expunged the historical racial connotations that made white viewers uncomfortablewith African Americans -- violence, drug abuse, and union activity (greed) - strategies that dovetailedwith Reaganism’s policy of colorblindness. Although the NBA continues to employ a majority of blackplayers, a focus on the ‘dark ages’ of 1976-1979, and the ensuing transformation, illuminates thecontinuing racial politics between black athletes and white fans.

Keywords: Basketball, Race, 1970s, Reagan

TO THE AMERICAN general public and casual fan, the history of the NationalBasketball Association begins in the mid-1980s, when Larry Bird, Magic Johnsonand above all Michael Jordan brought the league to the fore of American sportsthrough their incredible athleticism, regional rivalries, and personal charisma. The

preceding period, the 1970s, has been mostly ignored by laypeople as well as scholars, whohave generally agreed on a simple narrative that professional basketball in America struggledat the time because it was “too black” and too “drug-infested” for a white audience. Thispaper contests this narrative of declension in the 1970s and explores the racialized strategiesof corporate control that have succeeded for the last three decades. The role of basketball inshaping the meaning of race and blackness in the United States is greatly underappreciated,and a recognition and revision of the complicated history of the NBA has implications beyonda mere chronicle of a forgotten era in sports history.I offer three related arguments to challenge the accepted mythology. First, the NBA’s

demise in this period was related not only to the “image crisis” (Cady 1979) created by reportsof drug use, but also to two similarly potent and racialized factors: the prevalence and escal-ating danger of on-court fisticuffs and the very public profile of the (majority black) NBAPlayers’ Union. Second, while the league may have been considered “too black” for theliking of many white Americans, we misunderstand this phrase in terms of the percentageof phenotypically black players.1 Instead, we should see the league’s threatening “blackness”

1 In fact, multiple studies show that most white fans have always displayed prejudice towards black players. Forexample, a study by Eleanor Brown, Richards Spiro and Diane Keenan found that black players with comparablestatistics earn fourteen to sixteen per cent less than their white counterparts. They also find ascribe to fan discrim-ination the finding that “the racial composition of teams is related to the proportion of black residents among thepopulations of franchise cities” (333). I use “phenotype,” the observable characteristic or trait of an organism(person) here because the commonsense way that many imagine race to be objective is through genes, but not allgenotypes produce organisms (people) with identical appearances.

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in terms of the historically articulated cultural associations that many white Americans heldabout African Americans and the threats they posed. Third, I historicize this discussionthrough the dimension of political economy: the NBA’s stagnation in the late seventies andits resurrection in the eighties should be seen in the context of America’s struggling economy,the backlash against the civil rights movement, Reaganism, and “colorblindness” as an un-official national policy.The 1970s have often been referred to as the league’s “dark ages” due to its flagging

popularity, low public profile and almost literal retrospective invisibility; because fewergames were televised, especially nationally, only middle-aged, die-hard fans can actuallyrecall the feats of Pete Maravich and Bill Russell (Fortunato 24-25). I argue that the phrases“dark ages” and the widely repeated “too black” should be seen in relation to each other,since professional basketball has succeeded in America by embracing colorblindness andcarefully managing its players’ images so as to distance the sport from stereotypes of blackmen. More than any other sport, professional men’s basketball has often served as both themost public stage for successful black men in America and simultaneously as “evidence”for biological racial difference. Although the NBA’s domestic popularity has decreased fromits peak in the 1990s, its global reach has never been wider (Carrington, Andrews, Jackson,and Mazur). Football and baseball are currently more popular domestically, but the formerhas almost no profile internationally and the latter’s popularity is limited outside of a handfulof nations (such as Japan, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic). But basketball is truly global:there are, as of this writing, professional men’s basketball leagues in at least 40 countries,and the 2010 NBA All-Star Game was broadcast in over 200 countries. Beyond the gameitself, NBA culture—the products endorsed by its players, their hairstyles, their jerseys andbaggy shorts—have an influence around the world that is beyond measurement (and thescope of this paper). The stakes of the critical interpretation of race in professional basketballare high indeed.

The Absence of Race in the NBA’s MythologyThe NBA has been remarkably efficient in controlling its image and the construction of itshistory since its rise to popularity and visibility in the early 1980s, a factor which partiallyaccounts for its success. Unfortunately, its relative obscurity presents an obstacle to detailedhistorical research before this period, since scholars must rely heavily on short accounts ofgames in newspapers and the autobiographies of former players who have a host of reasonsnot to wade into the waters of controversial topics. In this void, as cultural critic Todd Boydpoints out (1997), “basketball was able to create its cultural mythology without the glare ofmainstream media attention” (119). This is in stark contrast to professional baseball, whichhas held center stage in American sports since the 1870s. Since relatively few people wereconcerned with basketball’s history until the 1980s, the NBA itself has had an unusual op-portunity to craft a uniformmythology that serves to promote their primary interest, economicgrowth.This constructed history is extremely selective. With enough space, I might provide the

short summary here, as any fan could, and as the NBA has in its three official encyclopedias(Hollander; Hollander and Sachare; Hubbard), which focuses almost entirely on the exciting,family-friendly play of its gladiators: gradual increase in skill, athleticism, and popularity;the virtues of teamwork; individual brilliance; and heroic achievements. Sports historians

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have been attentive to the subtle locations in whichmyth-making occurs, such as commercials,billboards, official record-keeping and even word of mouth. All of these are directly relevantto this discussion; however, the most influential site has typically been ignored: televisionbroadcasts of individual games. As sociologist John Hoberman notes, “the live sportscasteris the more important representative of managerial power, because he has the power to frameissues and interpret behavior instantly to enormous audiences” (38). There are approximately1,300 NBA games played each season, which amounts to more than 2,600 broadcasts eachyear (one for each team). Although some local announcers see themselves as journalists orparaphrasers, most are aware of their responsibility to represent the game in the best possiblelight: Hubie Brown, former Coach and broadcaster, admits that his “job is to keep you fromflicking your clicker and changing your dial, to convince you to stay” (Fortunato 122). BrianMcIntyre, NBA Senior Vice President of Basketball Communications, has characterized “agame broadcast, whether it is local or national, as nothing more than a 2 ½ hour infomercialfor the product” (Fortunato 149). Many authors have identified the role of television sportscommentators in naturalizing racial and gender differences through linguistic patterns, whichhighlights the subtle power of announcers. As Toni Bruce put it,

Although live televised sports are commodified spectacles that draw heavily upon en-tertainment values, they are grounded in newmedia ideologies of neutrality and objectiv-ity, which add to their perceived credibility. Indeed, broadcasters are cut to the profes-sional quick when racist discourse is identified because it undermines their professionalcredentials of balance and impartiality. (863)

A fair amount of each broadcast comprises “dead time” during which little on-court actionoccurs. During these moments announcers generally fill the silences by describing and ana-lyzing the game at hand, but they also highlight their team’s history or recall and replay greatmoments from the sport’s past, all with the powerful illusion of neutrality and objectivity.Provided with information by the NBA and charged with selling a product, it is not surprisingthat announcers would support the NBA’s constructed history, especially in relation to aturbulent, embarrassing and mostly forgotten period, the 1970s. An example of the elisionof the controversies of the 1970s is demonstrated in the entry on that decade on the NBA’sonline official “NBA Encyclopedia—Playoff Edition” on NBA.com, called “A Decade ofParity,” which fails to mention drugs, race, and potential contraction.A great deal has been deliberately left out, and for good reason. The Los Angeles Times

claimed in 1981 that as many as 75 percent of NBA players used cocaine (Cobbs). As DavidHalberstam put it (1999), “[The NBA] was seen as far too black, and the majority of itsplayers, it was somehow believed, were on drugs…” (114). David Stern, named Commis-sioner in 1984, admitted that the NBA was “looked upon as a league that was too black”(Finley and Finley 75) at the time. There are, in fact, dozens of audience reception studiesshowing racial bias on the part of white audiences, although the implication that this prejudicewas restricted to a bygone era is entirely false (Kanazawa and Funk; Brown, Spiro andKeenan). I want to question what kind of cultural work “too black” performs. “Black” inthis phrase should not be understood as a player’s level of melanin but as part of a historicallyspecific racial formation (Omi andWinant) that includes stereotypes of drug abuse, violenceand the threat of black physical and political power. In addition, the acknowledgement thatwhite fans and/or advertisers had racial biases during this period often carries the implicit

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claim that they no longer do. “Too black” drags another question in its wake: If the NBAwas “too black” during its “dark ages,” what was it afterward? Just black enough? And ifso, what changed?

The Impact of the Civil Rights MovementThe racial dynamic of the NBA in the 1970s was, in many ways, the result of various re-sponses to the civil rights movement. Black NBA players in the fifties and sixties were se-lected by NBA team owners with an eye towards the racial (in)tolerance of white fans. TheNBA had an unofficial quota of three or four black players per team for fifteen years (Thomas,136), and while star-caliber players shone in African American leagues, only “role play-ers”—as opposed to athletic, creative scorers—were chosen to cross over. Bill Russell,though perhaps the greatest player of the 1960s, fit the mold, renownedmore for his rebound-ing, defense, intensity and stoicism than his scoring. Just as black civil rights organizerslearned to frame their actions so as to elicit white support (Stabile 135), black players toedthe line so as to maintain both their place in the league and the NBA’s financial security(Thomas 135). In the 1970s, there was a qualitative cultural shift in pro basketball that re-flected American racial politics, although very few players publicly embraced the heightenedpolitical militarism of black activists. After the quota system disappeared as a result of theBoston Celtics’ success—which was and is perceived as the result of their willingness toplay blacks—the new generation of players embraced emergent black styles, such as theAfro hairstyle. As Hall of Fame player and coach Phil Jackson put it, there was “a lot of fussabout players’ long hair and gold chains” (Jackson and Rosen 50). More lasting was thedunk shot. Among Bill Russell and his peers, dunking was considered egotistical and taboo,in stark contrast to the flamboyant dunkers of the ABA and later NBA players, who turnedtwo points into a display of aerial creativity and black masculinity (Houck).As these aesthetic changes occurred on the court, political and cultural currents inevitably

affected the league’s aficionados in the stands. The “backlash” against civil rights has receiveda great deal of attention fromAmerican historians in recent years, and rightly so. Even outsideactivist conservative movements, many whites reacted to assertions of black agency andpower during the civil rights period—as well as the uprisings of 1968—by setting out toundo the liberal legislation of the Great Society, such as school desegregation, fair hiringand housing laws, and affirmative action. McGirr; Lipsitz). Although there is no officialdata about the racial composition of the league’s fans, evidence from various sources, suchas crowd shots from grainy videos of nationally broadcast games and auto/biographies ofplayers suggest that white fans constituted the majority of the NBA’s paying fan base(Robertson; Kriegel). Although it is possible that conservative whites and white NBA fanswere entirely mutually exclusive groups, it is not likely. Thus, perhaps we should not besurprised that the NBA, with three out of every four players African American and increas-ingly embracing styles that carried political connotations, should lose fan support just asblack political projects (such as affirmative action) were losing their mainstream sympathy.

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Drugs, Violence and Wealth in the Contemporary American RacialFormationMy use of “race” follows the model of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s concept of the“racial formation,” which is “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created,inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55). A given racial formation establishes themeaning of race in a specific historical moment, waged in discursive fields such as popularculture as well as politics and economics. Racial formations are malleable, and although inthe United States there has historically been a mutually exclusive binary between “black”and “white,” the modifier “too” in front of “black” shows that there are effectively differentstandards for “blackness”—physical, cultural and even political. In this light, the NBA’ssuccess over the last three decades has been correlated to Commissioner David Stern’sability to obscure its players’ cultural and sociohistorical blackness. The league struggledin the late seventies not because too many players had dark skin, but because they were seenas stereotypically “black” as a result of their alleged drug abuse, on-court fisticuffs, andpublic union struggles.The widespread use of drugs by NBA players is cited by league officials and most critics

as the substantive source of the league’s public woes. However, there was little publicknowledge of drug use during the “dark ages”—until August 19, 1980, when the Los AngelesTimes ran a story entitled “NBA and Cocaine: Nothing to Snort At,” claiming that as manyas 75 percent of NBA players were regular users (Cobbs). Newspapers and sportingmagazinesacross the country immediately weighed in, inflating and distorting the accusation—for ex-ample, Sports Briefing raised the figure to “80-90 per cent” (September 1, 1980) and othersadded heroin and marijuana to the list, while the NBA denied accusations of “excessive”drug use (Sports Briefing, August 1, 1980).While the phrases “too black” and “drug-infested”are often seen as unrelated explanations, a number of critics (such as Boyd and Halberstam118) have made the connection. As David L. Andrews argues,

[T]he popular media used the specter of drug abuse within the league as evidence ofthe pathological depravity of the African American men who dominated, and were thusthreatening the very existence of, the NBA, and, again by inference, that of the Amer-ican nation as a whole. (16)

Far from an isolated scandal, this event demands a national-historical lens, for white Amer-icans have constructed blacks as more susceptible to drug abuse for a century, if not longer.This association reached a peak during the highly racialized “war on drugs” in the 1970sand 1980s. Just as the construction of the African American drug fiend led to (among otherthings) grossly unequal prosecution of drug laws (Lipsitz 10-12) it also played a role in theNBA’s “dark ages.” As Lawrence Grossberg has noted, drugs play a unique role as “affectivemagnets” in contemporary American culture: “it is not just that one suddenly sees drugseverywhere, as the new universal culprit. More importantly, as soon as drugs are found,nothing else seems to matter” (284).But narcotics were a scapegoat: far more than drug abuse, which was for the most part

sub rosa until the Los Angeles Times bombshell, on-court violence plagued the NBA’s “darkages.” As the two leagues evolved, the ABA succeeded in part by tweaking its rules to en-courage free movement and athletic play, while NBA games revolved around stationary “big

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men” wrestling for position underneath the basket, a style which tends to lead to physicalaltercations. The 1977-1978 season was perhaps the nadir of the pugilistic NBA, with atleast 41 fights. One stood out: on December 9th, 1977, black power forward Kermit Wash-ington, considered one of the strongest players in the league, punched white guard RudyTomjanovich in the face with such force that it nearly killed him and curtailed his career.Suspended for twomonths,Washington was at first less than contrite and placed the reactionof fans in a distinctly racial and political context, saying, “Who buys the ticket to thegame—white people or black people? The answer is white people. So they were going tocome down on me, the big black guy who beat up the two white guys” (Feinstein 50). At atime when very few NBA games were broadcast nationally, “The Punch” became a nationalissue, the subject of a New York Times editorial and fodder for Saturday Night Light. “ThePunch”—or rather the widely disseminated video footage of the event, repeatedly broadcaston television—”forever changed” (Smith 134) the public image of the NBA.The Punch’s immediate and lasting impact was due to its apparent confirmation of histor-

ically persistent white stereotypes about violent black masculinity that the mainstream(generally white) media had continually reinforced. While fear of black physicality can betraced at least back to slavery, it is constantly maintained by the media’s tendency to presentnew information through existing frames of reference and the tendency of audiences to relyon those same frames. As Stuart Hall put it, “We mainly tell stories like we’ve told thembefore, or we borrow from the whole inventory of telling stories, and of narratives” (1984).The potent effects of the reports of drug abuse and violence on the NBA’s public image (andpopularity) reflect the connotativemeanings that white Americans associatedwith “blackness”at the time. For example, studies have shown that sports broadcasts tend to emphasize thephysical attributes, “God-given” talent, and negative off-field characteristics and personalinterests of blacks, while whites receive almost the opposite treatment (Rada andWulfmeyer). Coverage in the press was often subtle. For example, the Washington Post onJanuary 17th reported that

NBACommissioner Larry O’Brien fined Boston’s [white player] Dave Cowens $2,500and Atlanta’s [black player] Wayne (Tree) Rollins $1,500 yesterday for fighting duringa game at the Boston Garden last Friday. Some sources around the league had expectedCowens to be suspended as well as fined since he threw the first punch. But the NBAreport indicated that Cowens’ action came in response to an elbow by Rollins that wentundetected by the officials. Therefore, the NBA said, Cowens’ punishment was limitedto a fine. (D4)

After noting that the league was “trying to crack down on violence” since The Punch, thearticle listed a number of “other incidents” during that seasons, all of which involved blackplayers. This subtle bias is representative of most of the media’s coverage of the NBA duringthis period.The third socio-cultural factor leading to the NBA’s struggle during its “dark ages” was

the strength and visibility of its union, the NBA Players Association (NBAPA).While “labortroubles” are often cited as part of basketball’s undoing in the 1970s, they have rarely beenlinked to race. In 1970, NBA and ABA team owners agreed to merge the two leagues, butthe unrecognized NBAPA quickly filed a class action suit (named Oscar Robertson v. NBAafter African American player Oscar Robertson, then NBAPA President) claiming that a

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merger would form a monopoly and restrict player mobility (George 186). In 1973, a judgeruled in favor of the union. Developments in the NBAPA suit received regular publicityfrom 1970 until 1977, when it was settled out of court, and was often characterized in termsof players thwarting the best interests of owners, leagues and fans. As with most union ne-gotiations, working conditions were as critical as actual wages (George 187), although themedia presented greed as the players’ real motivation (Fortunato 167).The declining power of organized labor in the 1970s may have contributed to an environ-

ment unsympathetic to the player’s union, but it is not the primary context in which to un-derstand the perception of the NBAPA. Seen in the context of the accumulation of wealthby young black men, as opposed to the broader American labor movement, poor treatmentof players and a lack of public sympathy to their concerns fit into a historical pattern of whitereactions to black financial success. Young black men who had already earned more moneythan some whites would in their entire lives were organizing collectively to demand evenmore. From this perspective, the NBA players’ drug of choice—cocaine—can be seen as amarker of class. As Boyd (2003) puts it, “cocaine was a drug for the beautiful people, thewealthy, the stars, the glamorous ones for whom money and access were no object” (23).By using cocaine, NBA players implicitly signaled that their wealth and power allowed themto ignore racial boundaries. Historically, African Americans who amass economic or socialcapital and/or rise in status—individually or collectively, as personal fortune or politicalmovement—threaten the status quo that has privileged white Americans. During a the 1970s,a decade of relative scarcity, young black men who crossed the interrelated boundaries ofcolor and class via their economic position posed a threat to the social order of white privilege.

Black Style and White PrejudiceAs the rival leagues competed, the ABA and NBA developed distinct styles that developedracial associations. The ABA operated without a television contract and on the edge of apecuniary cliff for most of its existence (1967-1976), which forced the league to experimentin order to draw more fans. Rule changes, most notably the introduction of the three-pointshot, were supplemented by the active recruitment of athletic players to create a guard-orientedstyle of play that emphasized movement, athleticism and showmanship. Players, coachesand owners were attentive to their fans’ desires: they developed a red-white-and-blue ball,inaugurated the SlamDunk Contest, and promoted individual players as celebrities (Andrews14) in order to increase attendance. Fans, players and critics often refer to the ABA as a“black” league (Boyd 2003; George 181; Andrews 14). The ABA did indeed have a slightlyhigher percentage of black players than the NBA, but more importantly it was “dominatedby a Black aesthetic” (George 181), which is usually described as some combination of“improvisational,” “creative,” “athletic” and “intimidating” (George xvii). In the mid-1970sABA attendance was actually increasing at a greater rate than the NBA, even without theexposure of national television (Kirchberg 146). Indeed, after the merger, many players andjournalists questioned whether the NBA’s dwindling attendance had something to do withits slow-down, drag-out style of play. As Boyd noted about the relationship between whitefans and black players, “they love your performance, but they hate you” (2003, 39). As wehave seen, the league may indeed have been too culturally and politically “black” for whitesat the time. The NBA thus faced a dilemma: how to harness the “black aesthetic” that whitesfound appealing while rendering “blackness” invisible?

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The answer would come from David Stern, who joined the NBA as its General Counselin 1978 and had a solution when he became Commissioner in 1984. As Stern put it, he “putout the fires” (Fortunato 99) one-by-one. First, drugs: a month after the first public cocaineallegation, the NBA created a Drug Education Prevention Committee; although it would bethree years until a drug testing agreement was struck with the NBAPA, the media regularlyreported on league meetings about the issue (Mitten). The league appeared to be fighting itsown “war on drugs” that paralleled President Ronald Reagan’s heightened militarism againstnarcotics—reports of drug use and player suspensions increased significantly throughoutthe 1980s. Second, violence: the frequency of violent incidents barely decreased for over adecade, but increasingly severe fines and penalties for full-blown fights restricted its severity.In both cases the league positioned itself with the fans and against the players. Third, union-ism: the players’ union took the league’s dire financial situation to heart and lowered theirdemands, agreeing in 1983 to a salary cap—at the time, the anti-union environment createdby the Reagan administration (Collins) may also have led to decreased sympathy from andsupport by the general public.

Cleaning Up the PastTo paraphrase Marx, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan played and changedbasketball, but they did not do it under conditions of their own making. The NBA’s renais-sance can be equally credited to David Stern, who benefitted from an upturn in the economyand the racial politics of Reaganism. By the 1980s, the term “colorblindness,” which wasembraced by conservatives and the Reagan administration, emerged as “the neoconservativeracial doctrine” (Omi and Winant, p. viii), a Trojan horse codeword that promised to solvethe “problem” of race by pretending not to see it. As Nicholas Laham put it (1998),

In supporting colorblind law, Reagan could represent his efforts to reform affirmativeaction, not as an attempt to reinstate racial and gender discrimination against minoritiesand white women, but as a sincere and genuine effort to achieve a fair and just societyin which all individuals are guaranteed equality under the law. (11)

The legerdemain of colorblindness only “worked,” of course, because most white Americansdenied that the existence of racial categories affected them, even as they consistently benefitedfrom racial discrimination (Lipsitz). In their re-articulation of colorblindness, conservativesin the 1980s found a national electorate more than willing to believe racism and racial dis-crimination, if not “race” itself, could and would simply disappear, if it had not already Thepopularity of colorblindness as an ideology provided the NBAwith a solution to its dilemma.Stern was able to “clean up” the NBA by promoting a colorblind philosophy through heavilydisciplining players whose actions evoked negative associations of “blackness” to whites(such as Michael Ray Richardson, who failed repeated drug tests and was eventually bannedfrom the league); and showcasing the more marketable black players (such as Jordan). Thecontrol of African American players by white managers was euphemized by the color-neutral language of management (Hughes). On the other hand, by promoting the image ofclean-cut African Americans and circulating information about team “community service,”the NBA “rebranded itself as both an institution of racial uplift and an entrepreneur of racialflair” (Hughes 74), while banishing not only the negative traits that whites associated with

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“blackness” but any mention of “race” itself, which is notably absent during broadcasts,communications from the league, andmost press.2 In addition to reflecting the racial formationof the 1980s, the NBA reified it in the public imagination.If my account of race in the construction and reality of the NBA’s struggles in the “dark

ages” and the transformation that occurred in the 1980s seems to place an undue explanatoryemphasis on structural factors at the expense of the players themselves (and their agency),it is only because the NBA’s deliberate management and incorporation of “blackness” par-allels the tenacity of the contemporary racial formation in the United States. The NBA inthe twenty-first century closely resembles the NBA of the late 1970s in a number of ways,such as style of play, its relative domestic unpopularity, and the league office’s active rolein controlling the racial connotations of its African American players. David Stern’s concernover players’ clothing (the NBA imposed a player dress code in 2005), fighting (such as thebrawl between Indiana and Detroit in 2004), and even gangs (Paul Pierce’s fine for whatNBA officials mistakenly alleged was a gang symbol on April 26, 2008) should be seen inthe context of the NBA’s need to “put out the fires” of stereotypical socio-cultural “blackness”in order to de-racialize and revitalize the league in the mid-1980s. A historical perspectiveon conceptions of race and forms of racism is critical. While this paper is intended primarilyas a historical revision of a misunderstood epoch, it also attempts to situate the twenty-firstcentury racial formation through one of the primary public representations of blacks inAmerican culture. By juxtaposing the “dark ages” of the late 1970s with the contemporarytangle of race and basketball, we can see how techniques of control and manipulation reflecta dominant conception of race that has been remarkably stable, in many ways, for four dec-ades. Basketball, a “black game” in a white nation, has served as a barometer of race inAmerica for half a century. Now more than ever, with a black president who organizes reg-ular pickup games and invited his favorite team (the Chicago Bulls) to the White Housethree times in his first two years in office, the future of the tightly interwoven relationshipbetween race and basketball deserves close and continued examination.

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About the AuthorMatthew Schneider-MayersonMy interests are fairly diverse. I have articles under consideration on alternate history novels(a genre of popular fiction) and the connection between peak oil movement (a secular apo-calyptic movement of the newmillennium) and the American ideology of unlimited economicgrowth. My dissertation focuses on this subject and a growing awareness of the limits ofnatural resources and America’s global power. However, this is something of an outlier: myprimary interest is in postwar American popular culture and political power, from film tomusic to popular fiction. In addition, I am an avid lifelong basketball fan, and find myselfreturning to sports, which I view within the context of race, class, and culture.

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EDITORS

Keith Gilbert, University of East London, UK. Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Mojca Doupona, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Mark Hargreaves, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, USA. Jack Jedwab, Association for Canadian Studies, Montreal, Canada. Sid Katz, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Richard Lichen, Beijing Sports University, Beijing, China. Abdul Hafidz bin Haji Omar, University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia. Otto J. Schantz, University of Koblenz, Landau, Germany. Karin Volkwein-Caplan, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, West Chester, USA. Rhodri Williams, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

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