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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 . 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 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 © Common Ground, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, All Rights Reserved, Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com
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