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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
© Common Ground, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, All Rights Reserved, Permissions:
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