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THE INTERNATIONAL
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SPORT
& SOCIETY
Volume 1, Number 1
“Too Black”: Race in the “Dark Ages” of the National
Basketball Association
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
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“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 NBA’s 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 Reaganism’s 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
TO 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 NBA’s
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 league’s 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
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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPORT AND SOCIETY
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 NBA’s stagnation in the late seventies and
its 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 unofficial
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 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 men’s 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 NBA’s 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 latter’s 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 men’s 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 culture—the products endorsed by its players, their hairstyles, their jerseys and
baggy shorts—have 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 NBA’s 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 basketball’s 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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MATTHEW SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON
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 ½ 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 team’s history or recall and replay great
moments 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 surprising
that announcers would support the NBA’s 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 NBA’s
online official “NBA Encyclopedia—Playoff 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 player’s 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 players”—as
opposed to athletic, creative scorers—were 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 NBA’s 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’ success—which was and is perceived as the result of their willingness to
play blacks—the 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 league’s 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 period—as well as the uprisings of 1968—by 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 league’s 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 NBA’s 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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MATTHEW SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON
Drugs, Violence and Wealth in the Contemporary American Racial
Formation
My 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 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 “blackness”—physical, cultural and even political. In this light, the NBA’s
success over the last three decades has been correlated to Commissioner David Stern’s
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 league’s public woes. However, there was little public
knowledge of drug use during the “dark ages”—until 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 accusation—for 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
NBA’s “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 NBA’s “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 9 th , 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
game—white 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
Punch”—or rather the widely disseminated video footage of the event, repeatedly broadcast
on 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 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 media’s 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 we’ve 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 NBA’s 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 17 th reported that
NBA Commissioner Larry O’Brien fined Boston’s [white player] Dave Cowens $2,500
and Atlanta’s [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 media’s coverage of the NBA during
this 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 “labor
troubles” are often cited as part of basketball’s 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 player’s 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 choice—cocaine—can 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 status—individually or collectively, as personal fortune or political
movement—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 of
color and class via their economic position posed a threat to the social order of white privilege.
Black Style and White Prejudice
MATTHEW SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON
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 NBA’s 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 Reagan’s heightened militarism against
narcotics—reports 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 league’s dire financial situation to heart and lowered their
demands, agreeing in 1983 to a salary cap—at 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 NBA’s 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
230

“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 NBA’s 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 NBA’s 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 office’s active role
in controlling the racial connotations of its African American players. David Stern’s 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 Pierce’s fine for what
NBA officials mistakenly alleged was a gang symbol on April 26, 2008) should be seen in
the 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 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
MATTHEW SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON
“A Decade of Parity,” NBA Encyclopedia Playoff Edition, http://www.nba.com/encyclopedia/decade_of_parity.html,
accessed on April 24 th , 2008.
Andrews, David L. (2001), The Fact(s) of Michael Jordan’s 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.
2 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 closely—regularly watching local and national games and reading articles in local
and national press—since at least the 1990s.
231

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About the Author
MATTHEW SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON
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 America’s 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.
233

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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