Avoiding The Honky In The Room
The NBA season has kicked off this week and if you are a white guy, you most likely don’t care all that much. That’s not to say that no white people follow the NBA. It’s just that basketball, particularly the NBA, is the sport for black people. My guess is 90% of black people would list the NBA as their favorite sport, while 90% of whites would have the NBA down on the list or not on the list. One reason for that is the league is dominated by black guys. As this site details, the honkies are thin on the ground in the modern NBA.
According to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the NBA was 74.3 percent black during the 2015-16 season and 81.7 percent were people of color. The study said that the NBA was 18.3 percent white last season, which was 5 percent less than the season before. The league was also a record 22.3 percent international last season.
That 18.3 percent of whites in the NBA from TIDES also includes non-Americans such as Europeans, Canadians and Australians of white descent. Entering the 2015-16 season, the NBA had 42 white American-born players. The NBA had its inaugural season 70 years ago with a league full of white players. As of Sunday, there were 43 white Americans on 30 NBA teams with the season starting Tuesday. Eight teams didn’t have a white American player entering last season, while seven teams don’t have one now.
Unsaid here is the fact that the stars of the league are all black. The last prominent honky was Dirk Nowitzki. Before that, it was Larry Bird. Before that it was John Havlicek in the 70’s. In my lifetime I can count the white stars of the NBA on one hand so it is reasonable to say that the league has been dominated by the brothas since forever. Despite all the preaching and browbeating from our rulers, everyone knows that basketball is the black man’s game. Like a lot of reality, though, it remains unsaid.
The first bit of unintended humor in the piece is when the writer asks the honkies what they learned about black culture as tokens in the black man’s world.
“I like hip-hop, yeah.”
“I like to listen to hip-hop”
“I have definitely picked up on slang, music and food”
“I listen to more rap, hip-hop in the locker room.”
Not a word about peanut butter.
Anyway, the truly hilarious part is when the writer asked the honkies why there are so few white guys in the NBA. J. J. Redick’s answer suggests he had a mild stroke when asked the question:
It does seem there are less and less white Americans. I’d like to know with [Kirk] Hinrich and Steve Blake out this year, how many white guards are there this year in the NBA? Are there even five? If you’re 6-feet-10 inches, can walk, are skilled and can chew gum and all that, defend the rim, you’ll have a job. It doesn’t matter what your skin color is. You’ll have a job.
I don’t know if it’s other sports. Part of it is the game is faster. Players play in space. There is more of an emphasis on shooting. Maybe they are not being taught in suburbia. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer to that is.
The rest of the answers from the other players range from gibberish to some version of “Please God let this end before I say something stupid.” You can’t blame them for it as the surest way for a white guy to end up in a public struggle session is to talk about race. The one guy, who said what everyone knows is true, is some guy named Parsons. He said, “The NBA is a collection of some of the most athletic guys in the world. And white guys just aren’t that athletic.” Yep, there’s the answer.
The NBA altered the rules of their game over the years to make it a running and jumping sport. Whether or not this was intended to make it a black guy sport is hard to say, but given the demographics of the league’s ownership, it is a safe assumption. This is also a league that embraced gangster rap and the hip-hop lifestyle in the 90’s so it is fair to assume they really want to be a black league, except for the ticket base, which remains conspicuously white. Going to an NBA game for these people is an act of contrition.
The lunacy of the modern age is on full display here. Baseball get grief because the makeup of their players matches up pretty well with America. About 13% of baseball players are black. There are loads of Hispanics, both local and foreign, as well as Asian players. Even the management positions have long looked like America, in terms of racial makeup. The NBA is nothing like the demographics of America and it is celebrated as a model of diversity. In modern America, this is diversity, while this is racism.
How long people refuse to notice this is the question of our age.
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