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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPORT AND SOCIETY 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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