Campos: Racial consciousness in the NBA

Last week, Slate magazine carried an interesting series of columns written by Paul Shirley, an American pro basketball player currently plying his trade in Spain (he has played parts of three seasons in the NBA).
Shirley’s most interesting observations were about race. He noted that, at present, 6 percent of NBA players are white Americans (75 percent are African-Americans and 19 percent are foreigners), and that “when the average white American male” watches an NBA game, “he would very much like to see another average white American male” on the court.

When he sees such a player, Shirley claims, the average white American fan is going to root for the average white American player, because “we like to see people who look like us succeed.” I have no idea if this is true, but I know it’s not true in my case, at least when it comes to “white” American basketball players.

I root for the players who play for the Detroit Pistons, and for those who went to the University of Michigan. These are tribal allegiances from my youth. But I don’t root for players who look like me, if for no other reason that there are no NBA players who look like me, at least on any scale of likeness I find meaningful.

Shirley sees things differently, in large part no doubt because he is a white American, in a sport in which the white American is becoming an endangered species. For him, the category “white” understandably has a great deal of meaning.

Shirley relates how racial prejudice has dogged his basketball career every step of the way. Because he’s white, many players and coaches have always assumed he wasn’t very good, even though as someone who has reached the NBA, and now makes an excellent living in the world’s second-best professional league, he’s obviously better at basketball than 99.99 percent of the people who made this assumption.

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Campos: Racial consciousness in the NBA
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