The author discusses the racial politics of Allen Iverson and his image as a thug.
In other words, the idea that Iverson is a thug is a fictive reality conjured up in the racialized imagination of a society that remains fearful of young black men in spite of electing a black man president. To the extent that Iverson’s image resonates with a set of racialized metaphors we live by, he never had the agency to truly be understood.
Is it okay to recycle material from Twitter? I feel okay stealing other people’s lines, if I positively can’t remember who owns it. There’s a great Coltrane line about tradition as “a big reservoir that we all dip out of.” That’s been reduced to today’s “hive-mind,” and while it makes my skin crawl, it provides all sorts of convenient excuses for an Internet that has gotten almost impossible to track in terms of ownership and originality. Still, I get uneasy at the thought of really using the thing as a notebook, in part because I worry that these days, my web presence amounts largely to Twitter outbursts during NBA playoff games.
However, I’ll break through the pain here, and reiterate this one true thing about Dirk Nowitzki: The Big German, as he’s affectionately known is Dallas, is not Larry Bird.
“In the hands of Selig, irony becomes arsenic.”
Unfortunately for International Association of Athletics Federations officials, they are faced with a question that no one has ever been able to answer: what is the ultimate difference between a man and a woman?
What runner Caster Semenya’s story reveals about gender, race, science and the politics of athletics.
Ask sports fans from across the country to describe Boston, and you’ll hear this: “City of Champions.” Ask athletes themselves the same question, and you’ll hear it described in very different terms: as a city of racists. If it’s not a fair label anymore, as so many of us insist, then why won’t it go away?
The onetime coach at Southwestern Louisiana was vilified for violating NCAA rules, but the author, who grew up in Cajun country, remembers him for doing something courageous: helping to integrate college basketball in the Deep South.
On race, religion, and the honor code at BYU.
Several black BYU athletes, including one who is still in school, say that little mention was made of the honor code during their recruitment. BYU was like any other college, they were led to believe. One former athlete recalls going to a party at a football players’ house during a recruiting visit — an “orgy,” in his words — and coming away thinking that “everything was kept on the hush.” Only later, after the athletes had arrived on campus, did they realize the implications of the compact they had signed: that they had entered an environment where official morality is unevenly applied, where snitches and spies abound, and where, above all, an interplay of race and religion affects every decision and allows the school, at least publicly, to take a righteous stand that only advances the missionary aims of the church that owns it. In short, BYU creates the conditions for certain athletes to fail and, when they do, expresses only dismay.
