In a game in Miami against the Heat on Sunday, Feb. 4, LA Clippers star Russell Westbrook found himself in the middle of another verbal altercation with a fan, which ended with the fan being removed from the Kaseya Center.
The fan, a white man, screamed at Westbrook, “I paid for these seats, boy.”
For those who are unfamiliar, boy is a racist dog whistle rooted in slavery by whites who do not view Black men as evolved human adults. This was not the first time Westbrook was called “boy,” by a racist white fan either. In a game against the Jazz in 2018, another unidentified man was removed and banned for life from the Vivint Smart Home Arena for calling Westbrook “boy.” In 2019, Shane Keisel, who later unsuccessfully sued the Utah Jazz organization and Westbrook, also received a lifetime ban for telling the star to “get down on your knees like you used to,” a claim he denies. A basketball game is not a place where many people exercise their best decorum, so it would be unlikely that even that small interaction with Black success would provide an adjacency with Black people solid enough to view them as deserving of basic humanity, especially in cities with even higher white populations than others, like Salt Lake City, not that interacting with Black people is the reason you should feel that way, but I digress.
When speaking out about police brutality, Laura Ingraham of Fox News, (a woman who also called my work anti-racist propaganda), also told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble.” Can you imagine that when someone speaks out about police unlawfully killing citizens, that someone’s response would be to tell them to shut up?! I highly doubt she would feel that way about a white player speaking up about white death. Is the expectation that they do not experience racism in a certain tax bracket, or rather, their salaries should serve as hush money for it? James, as well as other popular sports stars, are often cited as being “ungrateful” when they speak up about social ills which affect the Black community. The same LeBron James whose LA mansion was spray-painted with the N-word on the gate. Is he still not allowed to speak out against racism simply because it was his mansion that was defaced and not a small house? This is also the same LeBron James who faced a slew of racism after his first decision to leave Cleveland. Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, called LeBron’s decision to leave an organization which would’ve happily sold and traded him to another team had he not made them so much money disloyal “narcissistic” and “cowardly.” Exercising his agency clearly made LeBron’s owner pissed. While he never made any specific comments, LeBron and others viewed Gilbert’s statements as having racial undertones.
Even though they employ mostly Black players, that has not stopped many white owners from being even more outwardly racist than Gilbert’s letter. Former L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling was caught on audio going on a racist rant about his players to his racially ambiguous but reported part Black mistress V. Stiviano, “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with Black people,” and, “You can sleep with [Black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want,” but “the little I ask you is … not to bring them to my games.” The same games that his Black players played.
Donald Sterling was later ousted as the owner.
This also prompted Bruce Levenson, once former owner of the Atlanta Blackhawks, to step down as team owner after self-reporting his racist emails where he claimed that the games catered too much to the Black fanbase (IN ATLANTA), who were scaring white fans from attending. NBA owners are not alone in their racist beliefs, Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones, recenrly came under fire after a picture of him surfaced from 1957, amongst a crowd of white students barring Black students entry during the integration of North Little Rock High School. Jones denied he was there to participate in the racist mob but instead justified his attendance as simply curiosity. During the height of Kaepernick’s kneeling controversy, Houston Texan owner Bob McNair was reported to have said, “We can’t have inmates running the prison.” Likening NFL players to prisoners, as if the prison system is not a modern-day extension of slavery, is clearly racist.
Sports owners help drive the optics of many of their teams and their games, whether they balk at the urging of changing racist team names or make hiring practices which are consistent with Black people’s positions of power only being on and off the court or field, many white fans see themselves from the owners’ perspectives much more than the players whose jerseys they wear.
Statement from Texans Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert C. McNair: pic.twitter.com/EXdwKZ4y4x
— Houston Texans PR (@TexansPR) October 27, 2017
Because many white fans spend money on Black players, whether directly from merchandise or game attendance or indirectly from watching the games, they also view themselves as part owner and, therefore, the players as their employees. The more money they spend, the more entitled they can become. Even if the player makes more money than they do, they still view Blackness in subordination to whiteness and that does not dissipate on or off the court or field. The often muttered “ungrateful” characteristic assigned to outspoken athletes implies that the white fan is more responsible for the success than the Black player, as if all the hard work and dedication, which ultimately led to the athlete’s success, was solely the doing of the white fan or the white sports system that supported the player.
Former Boston Celtics player Marcus Smart recalls an encounter he had outside of the TD Garden when he spotted a woman and her child and rolled down his window to warn her about the incoming traffic. Smart told Andscape of her response, “[A]s soon as I said that, she looked at me – as she is wearing a No 4, green with the white outline Celtics jersey – and told me, ‘Fuck you, you fucking [N-word]’,” Smart recalled. The jersey she was wearing at the time was emblazoned with Isaiah Thomas’ name, a Black player. Boston, in particular, is a city known for its racism, inside and outside of the TD Garden, and many other players for different teams have reported it as such.
Black players are not slaves.
They should not have to trade their humanity simply because they live nicer lives than many of the fans who still think of them as their underlings. Classism and racism are definitively linked but that does not mean racism stops at a certain wealth distribution; ask Oprah [Winfrey] how she feels about shopping for purses in France. Black players are not required to shrink their humanity because it infringes upon white entertainment. It is very racist to view speaking out against any type of brutality as being “ungrateful,” but especially when you have not given anything to really be grateful for. Tim Tebow’s pre-game prayers were viewed as refreshing and wholesome to a violent sport that has no problem with Jesus’s presence but a big problem with mentioning some of the things which is believed he would’ve condemned.
Black players are people. They are not slaves. They are not boys. They are adults. It’s crazy how white fans will proudly wear a Black player’s name on their back and can somehow still think that THEY are the superior. *laughs*
Happy Black History Month.
