JOURNAL

T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L

of SPORT

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Volume 1, Number 1

Too Black: Race in the Dark Ages of the National Basketball Association
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

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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 <cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com>. 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 National Basketball Association
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, University of Minnesota, MN, USA
Abstract: Contracting and possibly folding in the late 1970s, the global success of the NBA in the 1980s and 1990s is often attributed to the charismatic personalities and talents of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan. The NBAs resurgence was actually the result of successful managerial strategies that expunged the historical racial connotations that made white viewers uncomfortable with African Americans -- violence, drug abuse, and union activity (greed) - strategies that dovetailed with Reaganisms policy of colorblindness. Although the NBA continues to employ a majority of black players, a focus on the dark ages of 1976-1979, and the ensuing transformation, illuminates the continuing racial politics between black athletes and white fans. Keywords: Basketball, Race, 1970s, Reagan

O THE AMERICAN general public and casual fan, the history of the National Basketball Association begins in the mid-1980s, when Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and above all Michael Jordan brought the league to the fore of American sports through their incredible athleticism, regional rivalries, and personal charisma. The preceding period, the 1970s, has been mostly ignored by laypeople as well as scholars, who have generally agreed on a simple narrative that professional basketball in America struggled at the time because it was too black and too drug-infested for a white audience. This paper contests this narrative of declension in the 1970s and explores the racialized strategies of corporate control that have succeeded for the last three decades. The role of basketball in shaping 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 beyond a mere chronicle of a forgotten era in sports history. I offer three related arguments to challenge the accepted mythology. First, the NBAs demise in this period was related not only to the image crisis (Cady 1979) created by reports of drug use, but also to two similarly potent and racialized factors: the prevalence and escalating danger of on-court fisticuffs and the very public profile of the (majority black) NBA Players Union. Second, while the league may have been considered too black for the liking of many white Americans, we misunderstand this phrase in terms of the percentage of phenotypically black players.1 Instead, we should see the leagues threatening blackness
1

In fact, multiple studies show that most white fans have always displayed prejudice towards black players. For example, a study by Eleanor Brown, Richards Spiro and Diane Keenan found that black players with comparable statistics earn fourteen to sixteen per cent less than their white counterparts. They also find ascribe to fan discrimination the finding that the racial composition of teams is related to the proportion of black residents among the populations 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 all genotypes produce organisms (people) with identical appearances. The International Journal of Sport and Society Volume 1, Number 1, 2010, http://www.SportandSocietyJournal.com, ISSN 2152-7857
Common Ground, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, All Rights Reserved, Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com

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in terms of the historically articulated cultural associations that many white Americans held about African Americans and the threats they posed. Third, I historicize this discussion through the dimension of political economy: the NBAs stagnation in the late seventies and its resurrection in the eighties should be seen in the context of Americas struggling economy, the backlash against the civil rights movement, Reaganism, and colorblindness as an unofficial national policy. The 1970s have often been referred to as the leagues dark ages due to its flagging popularity, low public profile and almost literal retrospective invisibility; because fewer games were televised, especially nationally, only middle-aged, die-hard fans can actually recall 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 and carefully managing its players images so as to distance the sport from stereotypes of black men. More than any other sport, professional mens basketball has often served as both the most public stage for successful black men in America and simultaneously as evidence for biological racial difference. Although the NBAs domestic popularity has decreased from its 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 former has almost no profile internationally and the latters popularity is limited outside of a handful of nations (such as Japan, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic). But basketball is truly global: there are, as of this writing, professional mens basketball leagues in at least 40 countries, and the 2010 NBA All-Star Game was broadcast in over 200 countries. Beyond the game itself, NBA culturethe products endorsed by its players, their hairstyles, their jerseys and baggy shortshave an influence around the world that is beyond measurement (and the scope of this paper). The stakes of the critical interpretation of race in professional basketball are high indeed.

The Absence of Race in the NBAs Mythology

The NBA has been remarkably efficient in controlling its image and the construction of its history since its rise to popularity and visibility in the early 1980s, a factor which partially accounts for its success. Unfortunately, its relative obscurity presents an obstacle to detailed historical research before this period, since scholars must rely heavily on short accounts of games in newspapers and the autobiographies of former players who have a host of reasons not to wade into the waters of controversial topics. In this void, as cultural critic Todd Boyd points out (1997), basketball was able to create its cultural mythology without the glare of mainstream media attention (119). This is in stark contrast to professional baseball, which has held center stage in American sports since the 1870s. Since relatively few people were concerned with basketballs history until the 1980s, the NBA itself has had an unusual opportunity to craft a uniform mythology that serves to promote their primary interest, economic growth. 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 which myth-making occurs, such as commercials, billboards, official record-keeping and even word of mouth. All of these are directly relevant to this discussion; however, the most influential site has typically been ignored: television broadcasts of individual games. As sociologist John Hoberman notes, the live sportscaster is the more important representative of managerial power, because he has the power to frame issues and interpret behavior instantly to enormous audiences (38). There are approximately 1,300 NBA games played each season, which amounts to more than 2,600 broadcasts each year (one for each team). Although some local announcers see themselves as journalists or paraphrasers, most are aware of their responsibility to represent the game in the best possible light: Hubie Brown, former Coach and broadcaster, admits that his job is to keep you from flicking your clicker and changing your dial, to convince you to stay (Fortunato 122). Brian McIntyre, NBA Senior Vice President of Basketball Communications, has characterized a game broadcast, whether it is local or national, as nothing more than a 2 hour infomercial for the product (Fortunato 149). Many authors have identified the role of television sports commentators in naturalizing racial and gender differences through linguistic patterns, which highlights the subtle power of announcers. As Toni Bruce put it, Although live televised sports are commodified spectacles that draw heavily upon entertainment values, they are grounded in new media ideologies of neutrality and objectivity, which add to their perceived credibility. Indeed, broadcasters are cut to the professional quick when racist discourse is identified because it undermines their professional credentials of balance and impartiality. (863) A fair amount of each broadcast comprises dead time during which little on-court action occurs. During these moments announcers generally fill the silences by describing and analyzing the game at hand, but they also highlight their teams history or recall and replay great moments from the sports 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 surprising that announcers would support the NBAs constructed history, especially in relation to a turbulent, embarrassing and mostly forgotten period, the 1970s. An example of the elision of the controversies of the 1970s is demonstrated in the entry on that decade on the NBAs online official NBA EncyclopediaPlayoff Edition on NBA.com, called A Decade of Parity, 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 David Halberstam put it (1999), [The NBA] was seen as far too black, and the majority of its players, it was somehow believed, were on drugs (114). David Stern, named Commissioner 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 studies showing racial bias on the part of white audiences, although the implication that this prejudice was restricted to a bygone era is entirely false (Kanazawa and Funk; Brown, Spiro and Keenan). I want to question what kind of cultural work too black performs. Black in this phrase should not be understood as a players level of melanin but as part of a historically specific racial formation (Omi and Winant) that includes stereotypes of drug abuse, violence and the threat of black physical and political power. In addition, the acknowledgement that white 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 NBA was too black during its dark ages, what was it afterward? Just black enough? And if so, what changed?

The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement

The racial dynamic of the NBA in the 1970s was, in many ways, the result of various responses to the civil rights movement. Black NBA players in the fifties and sixties were selected by NBA team owners with an eye towards the racial (in)tolerance of white fans. The NBA 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 playersas opposed to athletic, creative scorerswere chosen to cross over. Bill Russell, though perhaps the greatest player of the 1960s, fit the mold, renowned more for his rebounding, defense, intensity and stoicism than his scoring. Just as black civil rights organizers learned to frame their actions so as to elicit white support (Stabile 135), black players toed the line so as to maintain both their place in the league and the NBAs financial security (Thomas 135). In the 1970s, there was a qualitative cultural shift in pro basketball that reflected American racial politics, although very few players publicly embraced the heightened political militarism of black activists. After the quota system disappeared as a result of the Boston Celtics successwhich was and is perceived as the result of their willingness to play blacksthe new generation of players embraced emergent black styles, such as the Afro hairstyle. As Hall of Fame player and coach Phil Jackson put it, there was a lot of fuss about players long hair and gold chains (Jackson and Rosen 50). More lasting was the dunk 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 turned two 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 leagues aficionados in the stands. The backlash against civil rights has received a great deal of attention from American historians in recent years, and rightly so. Even outside activist conservative movements, many whites reacted to assertions of black agency and power during the civil rights periodas well as the uprisings of 1968by setting out to undo the liberal legislation of the Great Society, such as school desegregation, fair hiring and housing laws, and affirmative action. McGirr; Lipsitz). Although there is no official data about the racial composition of the leagues fans, evidence from various sources, such as crowd shots from grainy videos of nationally broadcast games and auto/biographies of players suggest that white fans constituted the majority of the NBAs paying fan base (Robertson; Kriegel). Although it is possible that conservative whites and white NBA fans were entirely mutually exclusive groups, it is not likely. Thus, perhaps we should not be surprised that the NBA, with three out of every four players African American and increasingly embracing styles that carried political connotations, should lose fan support just as black political projects (such as affirmative action) were losing their mainstream sympathy.

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Drugs, Violence and Wealth in the Contemporary American Racial Formation

My use of race follows the model of Michael Omi and Howard Winants 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 the meaning of race in a specific historical moment, waged in discursive fields such as popular culture as well as politics and economics. Racial formations are malleable, and although in the 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 different standards for blacknessphysical, cultural and even political. In this light, the NBAs success over the last three decades has been correlated to Commissioner David Sterns ability to obscure its players cultural and sociohistorical blackness. The league struggled in the late seventies not because too many players had dark skin, but because they were seen as stereotypically black as a result of their alleged drug abuse, on-court fisticuffs, and public union struggles. The widespread use of drugs by NBA players is cited by league officials and most critics as the substantive source of the leagues public woes. However, there was little public knowledge of drug use during the dark agesuntil August 19, 1980, when the Los Angeles Times ran a story entitled NBA and Cocaine: Nothing to Snort At, claiming that as many as 75 percent of NBA players were regular users (Cobbs). Newspapers and sporting magazines across the country immediately weighed in, inflating and distorting the accusationfor example, Sports Briefing raised the figure to 80-90 per cent (September 1, 1980) and others added 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 Halberstam 118) have made the connection. As David L. Andrews argues, [T]he popular media used the specter of drug abuse within the league as evidence of the pathological depravity of the African American men who dominated, and were thus threatening the very existence of, the NBA, and, again by inference, that of the American nation as a whole. (16) Far from an isolated scandal, this event demands a national-historical lens, for white Americans 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 1970s and 1980s. Just as the construction of the African American drug fiend led to (among other things) grossly unequal prosecution of drug laws (Lipsitz 10-12) it also played a role in the NBAs dark ages. As Lawrence Grossberg has noted, drugs play a unique role as affective magnets in contemporary American culture: it is not just that one suddenly sees drugs everywhere, 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 NBAs dark ages. As the two leagues evolved, the ABA succeeded in part by tweaking its rules to encourage 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 physical altercations. The 1977-1978 season was perhaps the nadir of the pugilistic NBA, with at least 41 fights. One stood out: on December 9th, 1977, black power forward Kermit Washington, considered one of the strongest players in the league, punched white guard Rudy Tomjanovich in the face with such force that it nearly killed him and curtailed his career. Suspended for two months, Washington was at first less than contrite and placed the reaction of fans in a distinctly racial and political context, saying, Who buys the ticket to the gamewhite people or black people? The answer is white people. So they were going to come down on me, the big black guy who beat up the two white guys (Feinstein 50). At a time when very few NBA games were broadcast nationally, The Punch became a national issue, the subject of a New York Times editorial and fodder for Saturday Night Light. The Punchor rather the widely disseminated video footage of the event, repeatedly broadcast on televisionforever changed (Smith 134) the public image of the NBA. The Punchs immediate and lasting impact was due to its apparent confirmation of historically persistent white stereotypes about violent black masculinity that the mainstream (generally white) media had continually reinforced. While fear of black physicality can be traced at least back to slavery, it is constantly maintained by the medias tendency to present new information through existing frames of reference and the tendency of audiences to rely on those same frames. As Stuart Hall put it, We mainly tell stories like weve told them before, 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 NBAs public image (and popularity) reflect the connotative meanings that white Americans associated with blackness at the time. For example, studies have shown that sports broadcasts tend to emphasize the physical attributes, God-given talent, and negative off-field characteristics and personal interests of blacks, while whites receive almost the opposite treatment (Rada and Wulfmeyer). Coverage in the press was often subtle. For example, the Washington Post on January 17th reported that NBA Commissioner Larry OBrien fined Bostons [white player] Dave Cowens $2,500 and Atlantas [black player] Wayne (Tree) Rollins $1,500 yesterday for fighting during a game at the Boston Garden last Friday. Some sources around the league had expected Cowens to be suspended as well as fined since he threw the first punch. But the NBA report indicated that Cowens action came in response to an elbow by Rollins that went undetected by the officials. Therefore, the NBA said, Cowens punishment was limited to a fine. (D4) After noting that the league was trying to crack down on violence since The Punch, the article listed a number of other incidents during that seasons, all of which involved black players. This subtle bias is representative of most of the medias coverage of the NBA during this period. The third socio-cultural factor leading to the NBAs struggle during its dark ages was the strength and visibility of its union, the NBA Players Association (NBAPA). While labor troubles are often cited as part of basketballs undoing in the 1970s, they have rarely been linked to race. In 1970, NBA and ABA team owners agreed to merge the two leagues, but the unrecognized NBAPA quickly filed a class action suit (named Oscar Robertson v. NBA after 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 judge ruled in favor of the union. Developments in the NBAPA suit received regular publicity from 1970 until 1977, when it was settled out of court, and was often characterized in terms of players thwarting the best interests of owners, leagues and fans. As with most union negotiations, working conditions were as critical as actual wages (George 187), although the media presented greed as the players real motivation (Fortunato 167). The declining power of organized labor in the 1970s may have contributed to an environment unsympathetic to the players union, but it is not the primary context in which to understand the perception of the NBAPA. Seen in the context of the accumulation of wealth by young black men, as opposed to the broader American labor movement, poor treatment of players and a lack of public sympathy to their concerns fit into a historical pattern of white reactions to black financial success. Young black men who had already earned more money than some whites would in their entire lives were organizing collectively to demand even more. From this perspective, the NBA players drug of choicecocainecan be seen as a marker of class. As Boyd (2003) puts it, cocaine was a drug for the beautiful people, the wealthy, 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 them to ignore racial boundaries. Historically, African Americans who amass economic or social capital and/or rise in statusindividually or collectively, as personal fortune or political movementthreaten 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 of color and class via their economic position posed a threat to the social order of white privilege.

Black Style and White Prejudice

As the rival leagues competed, the ABA and NBA developed distinct styles that developed racial associations. The ABA operated without a television contract and on the edge of a pecuniary cliff for most of its existence (1967-1976), which forced the league to experiment in order to draw more fans. Rule changes, most notably the introduction of the three-point shot, were supplemented by the active recruitment of athletic players to create a guard-oriented style of play that emphasized movement, athleticism and showmanship. Players, coaches and owners were attentive to their fans desires: they developed a red-white-and-blue ball, inaugurated the Slam Dunk Contest, and promoted individual players as celebrities (Andrews 14) 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 slightly higher percentage of black players than the NBA, but more importantly it was dominated by a Black aesthetic (George 181), which is usually described as some combination of improvisational, creative, athletic and intimidating (George xvii). In the mid-1970s ABA attendance was actually increasing at a greater rate than the NBA, even without the exposure of national television (Kirchberg 146). Indeed, after the merger, many players and journalists questioned whether the NBAs dwindling attendance had something to do with its slow-down, drag-out style of play. As Boyd noted about the relationship between white fans and black players, they love your performance, but they hate you (2003, 39). As we have seen, the league may indeed have been too culturally and politically black for whites at the time. The NBA thus faced a dilemma: how to harness the black aesthetic that whites found appealing while rendering blackness invisible?

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The answer would come from David Stern, who joined the NBA as its General Counsel in 1978 and had a solution when he became Commissioner in 1984. As Stern put it, he put out the fires (Fortunato 99) one-by-one. First, drugs: a month after the first public cocaine allegation, the NBA created a Drug Education Prevention Committee; although it would be three years until a drug testing agreement was struck with the NBAPA, the media regularly reported on league meetings about the issue (Mitten). The league appeared to be fighting its own war on drugs that paralleled President Ronald Reagans heightened militarism against narcoticsreports of drug use and player suspensions increased significantly throughout the 1980s. Second, violence: the frequency of violent incidents barely decreased for over a decade, 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, unionism: the players union took the leagues dire financial situation to heart and lowered their demands, agreeing in 1983 to a salary capat the time, the anti-union environment created by the Reagan administration (Collins) may also have led to decreased sympathy from and support by the general public.

Cleaning Up the Past

To paraphrase Marx, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan played and changed basketball, but they did not do it under conditions of their own making. The NBAs renaissance can be equally credited to David Stern, who benefitted from an upturn in the economy and the racial politics of Reaganism. By the 1980s, the term colorblindness, which was embraced by conservatives and the Reagan administration, emerged as the neoconservative racial doctrine (Omi and Winant, p. viii), a Trojan horse codeword that promised to solve the 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 affirmative action, not as an attempt to reinstate racial and gender discrimination against minorities and white women, but as a sincere and genuine effort to achieve a fair and just society in which all individuals are guaranteed equality under the law. (11) The legerdemain of colorblindness only worked, of course, because most white Americans denied that the existence of racial categories affected them, even as they consistently benefited from racial discrimination (Lipsitz). In their re-articulation of colorblindness, conservatives in the 1980s found a national electorate more than willing to believe racism and racial discrimination, if not race itself, could and would simply disappear, if it had not already The popularity of colorblindness as an ideology provided the NBA with a solution to its dilemma. Stern was able to clean up the NBA by promoting a colorblind philosophy through heavily disciplining players whose actions evoked negative associations of blackness to whites (such as Michael Ray Richardson, who failed repeated drug tests and was eventually banned from the league); and showcasing the more marketable black players (such as Jordan). The control of African American players by white managers was euphemized by the colorneutral language of management (Hughes). On the other hand, by promoting the image of clean-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 racial flair (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, and most press.2 In addition to reflecting the racial formation of the 1980s, the NBA reified it in the public imagination. If my account of race in the construction and reality of the NBAs struggles in the dark ages and the transformation that occurred in the 1980s seems to place an undue explanatory emphasis on structural factors at the expense of the players themselves (and their agency), it is only because the NBAs deliberate management and incorporation of blackness parallels the tenacity of the contemporary racial formation in the United States. The NBA in the 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 offices active role in controlling the racial connotations of its African American players. David Sterns concern over players clothing (the NBA imposed a player dress code in 2005), fighting (such as the brawl between Indiana and Detroit in 2004), and even gangs (Paul Pierces fine for what NBA officials mistakenly alleged was a gang symbol on April 26, 2008) should be seen in the context of the NBAs 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 perspective on conceptions of race and forms of racism is critical. While this paper is intended primarily as a historical revision of a misunderstood epoch, it also attempts to situate the twenty-first century racial formation through one of the primary public representations of blacks in American culture. By juxtaposing the dark ages of the late 1970s with the contemporary tangle of race and basketball, we can see how techniques of control and manipulation reflect a dominant conception of race that has been remarkably stable, in many ways, for four decades. Basketball, a black game in a white nation, has served as a barometer of race in America for half a century. Now more than ever, with a black president who organizes regular pickup games and invited his favorite team (the Chicago Bulls) to the White House three times in his first two years in office, the future of the tightly interwoven relationship between race and basketball deserves close and continued examination.

References
A Decade of Parity, NBA Encyclopedia Playoff Edition, http://www.nba.com/encyclopedia/decade_of_parity.html, accessed on April 24th, 2008. Andrews, David L. (2001), The Fact(s) of Michael Jordans Blackness: Excavating a Floating Racial Signifier, in Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America, edited by David L. Andrews. Boyd, Todd (1997), Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the Hood and Beyond, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Boyd, Todd (2008), Young, Black, Rich & Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Brown, Eleanor, Richard Spiro and Diane Keenan (1991), Wage and Nonwage Discrimination in Professional Basketball: Do Fans Affect it?, Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 50, No.3, July 1991, p. 333-345.

It is, of course, nearly impossible to definitively identify an absence of racial discourse when the data set is so large. To do so would require an analysis of every television and radio broadcast, league press release, and mainstream article. As evidence of the striking absence of race in NBA discourse, I rely on five informal interviews with fans who have followed the league closelyregularly watching local and national games and reading articles in local and national presssince at least the 1990s.

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Robertson, Oscar (2003), The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game, New York: St. Martins Press. Samuels, Allison (1998), Race, Respect, and the NBA, Newsweek, 12/21/1998, Vol. 132, Issue 25, p. 55. Smith, Earl (2007), Race, Sport and the American Dream. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic press. Stabile, Carol A. (2006), White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in the US, New York and London: Routledge.

About the Author

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson My 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 apocalyptic movement of the new millennium) and the American ideology of unlimited economic growth. My dissertation focuses on this subject and a growing awareness of the limits of natural resources and Americas global power. However, this is something of an outlier: my primary interest is in postwar American popular culture and political power, from film to music to popular fiction. In addition, I am an avid lifelong basketball fan, and find myself returning 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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