After Artest

The NBA and the Assault on Blackness

David J. Leonard

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438442075
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

On November 19, 2004, a fight between NBA players Ron Artest and Ben Wallace escalated into a melee involving several other players and many fans. The "Palace Brawl, " writes David J. Leonard, was a seminal event, one that dramatically altered outside perceptions of the sport. With commentators decrying the hip hop or gangsta culture of players, the blackness of the NBA was both highlighted and disdained. This was a harsh blow to the league's narrative of colorblindness long cultivated by Commissioner David Stern and powerfully embodied in the beloved figure of Michael Jordan. As Leonard demonstrates, the league viewed this moment as a threat needing intervention, quickly adopting policies to govern black players and prevent them from embracing styles and personas associated with blackness. This fascinating book discloses connections between the NBA's discourse and the broader discourse of antiblack racism. Particular policy changes that seemed aimed at black players, such as the NBA dress code and the debate over a minimum age requirement, are explored.

1

AFTER ARTEST

The NBA and the Assault on Blackness

The real question, how does it feel to be a problem.

—W.E.B. DuBois, 1903 (Quoted in Jackson 2006, p. 9)

Ron Artest more than likely will be suspended, but so should Kobe.

(Resnick 2009)

Kobe vs. Artest: Proof Artest Will Kill Your Team

(2009)

NBA Bad Boy Ron Artest of L.A. Lakers Admits He Had A Problem: Drinking During Games!

(Douglas 2009)

Trevor Ariza loses shoe, Ron Artest tosses it into the stands.

(2009)

Artest, who's trying to put his bad-boy image behind him, said he could simply display his ring in his living room or he could wear it. But I think it'll be more important to give back to something I believe in, which is providing kids with someone to talk to because it's so expensive. I pay for parenting counseling, marriage counseling and anger management, and it's very expensive. This will be for children of all demographics, rich or poor—preferably the rich can pay for their own psychologists—but it'll be a great way to help kids who don't know where they're going in their life at this point. (“Ron Artest Plans” 2010)

INTRODUCTION

At first glance, the above headlines point to the fact that Ron Artest's personal history, and especially his association with the Palace Brawl, continues to determine the public narrative assigned to him by the dominant media and broader public discourse. Even those instances of praise and celebratory redemption does so in relationship to his past indiscretions. Despite the banality of his exchange with Kobe and his tossing of another player's shoe off the court (his sportsmanship was questioned by an announcer), and notwithstanding his efforts to admit to a past drinking problem¹ or shed light on the issue of mental health, each in varying degrees have been the read through the lens of the Palace Brawl.

In 2009, Ron Artest admitted to drinking alcohol at halftime while he was a member of the Chicago Bulls. Hoping to teach kids by sharing his past mistakes, Artest's admission, not surprisingly, prompted much media and public debate. Although some people questioned the truthfulness of his admission, others used this moment as an opportunity to speculate about whether Artest was indeed drunk when he entered the stands in 2004. Likewise, his tossing of Trevor Ariza's shoe into the stands, along with his physical and verbal altercations with Kobe Bryant, were given amplified meaning and importance considering his role. In all four instances, Artest's past and his character are used as points of reference.

Often invoking his involvement in the 2004 Palace Brawl, the dominant frame that facilitates his representations is not only constrained by Artest's personal and professional histories, but by the prism of race and blackness. He is consistently imagined as a problem. The nature of these representations point to the ways in which blackness overdetermines not only the meaning of Artest, but of all black NBA players in a post-Brawl context. Post-Artest, blackness is the hegemonic point of reference for both the commentaries and the policy shifts within the NBA, demonstrating that the Palace Brawl changed the racial meaning of the NBA and thus changed the regulatory practices governing the league.

The purpose of After Artest is threefold:

1. To examine the changing racial landscape of the NBA following the November 22, 2004, Palace Brawl, which involved Ron Artest, several Detroit Piston fans, and several other Pacer (and Pistons) players.
2. To think about how race (particularly anti-black racism), ideas of colorblindness, and white racial frames colored the conversations and resulting policy shifts within the NBA.
3. To reflect on the broader significance and meaning of a post–Palace Brawl NBA that at one level mirrors hegemonic notions of/about blackness, and yet at another level functions as a privileged (or exceptional) space for the criminalization (and consumption) of black bodies in the perpetuation and denial of dominant white racial frames.

In fulfilling these three goals, After Artest offers a rather simple argument: Highlighting the league's blackness, the Palace Brawl mandated the transformation of NBA policy regarding the governance of black bodies. Negating the two-decade long project of David Stern, the Palace Brawl belied the popular narrative, dominated by the figure of Michael Jordan, in which race within the NBA was seen as insignificant. The Palace Brawl was the culmination of the recoloring of the NBA. It represented a moment when the blackness of the league was irrefutable and thus needed to be managed, controlled, and, if necessary, destroyed. After Artest argues that the Palace Brawl served as that “aha moment” in which blackness displaced the racially transcendent signifier of Michael Jordan. This blackness, and its representative threat, were undeniable and, as such, necessitated intervention, termed as an assault within this book's title. Not surprisingly, anti-black racist/white racial frames have anchored the debates and policies that have followed Artest; frames based on racial transcendence or colorblindness remain in the background. In this sense, Artest mandated a reversal wherein race/blackness had to be noticed (and controlled/destroyed), leading to public articulations of the white racial frame instead of denials of racial significance. Finally, After Artest argues that the debates and struggles over racial meaning within the NBA are not isolated; instead they coexist alongside and are in dialogue with those narratives, ideologies and discursive articulations about the criminal justice system, education, and countless other institutions.

GUIDING FRAMEWORKS

Before further identifying and reflecting on the book's argument and point of entry, it will be useful to highlight three of the guiding frameworks that serve as foundation for my discussion here: (1) new racism; (2) white racial framing; and (3) anti-black racism.

New Racism²

In recent years, it has become increasingly popular to describe America's current racial moment as an era of “colorblind racism,” “new racism,” or even “racism 2.0” (Wise 2009; Duster 2003; Doane, 2003; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, 2003). The implication here is that although it's often difficult to define and locate in the absence of Klan rallies and Jim Crow signs, race and racism remain defining features of American life. According to Patricia Hill Collins, new racism “reflects a situation of permanence and change” (2004, p. 33). Many of the outcomes and much of the societal inequality of today mirror the circumstances of 1896, 1919, and 1968, yet the cultural practices, institutional organization, political/policy formation, and geographic orientation have all changed. Peter Teo, in an essay analyzing racial discourse within Australian newspapers, identifies new racism as a “form of racism that is much more subtle, covert, and hence insidious” (2000, p. 8). Notwithstanding the vast amount of statistical data illustrating the persistence of racial inequality, new racism is defined by processes wherein “whites explain the apparent contradiction between professed color blindness, and the United States' color-coded inequality” (Bonilla-Silva 2003, p. 2). Embracing a variety of lenses and rhetorical strategies, whites are able to rework America's contemporary racial reality to legitimize notions of colorblindness, freedom, equality, democracy, and America.

In this vein, Bonilla-Silva argues that colorblind racism functions as a mechanism for keeping blacks and other minorities “at the bottom of the well” (2003, pp. 2–3). Colorblind racism is subtle, institutional, and composed of “apparently nonracial” practices, yet it enables inequality, segregation, and white privilege to remain intact. For example, whereas Jim Crow segregation was enforced through overtly racist signs, restrictive covenants, and violence, today's practices include landlords not showing units or advertising vacant properties, denying vacancy, and quoting higher prices to minority applicants. The tactics of each era are different, but the results remain the same. Bonilla-Silva describes the shift within racism as follows:

Yet this new ideology has become a formidable political tool for the maintenance of the racial order. Much as Jim Crow racism served as the glue for defending a brutal and overt system of racial oppression in the pre–Civil Rights era, color-blind racism serves today as the ideological armor for a covert and institutionalized system in the post–Civil Rights era. And the beauty of this new ideology is that it aids the maintenance of white privilege without fanfare, without naming who it subjects and those who it rewards. (2003, p. 3)

As evident here, the prominence of colorblindness and the use of implicitly racial language appear to reflect the newest form of an old system by which white privilege has long been maintained through the ideological/institutional justifications of white supremacy. Similarly, Collins identifies new racism as “the juxtaposition of old and new, in some cases a continuation of long-standing practices of racial rule and, in other cases the development of something original” (Collins 2004, pp. 54–55). Henry Giroux also argues that new racism is not defined by the declining significance of race, but rather its fluidity, its contradictions, its metamorphoses, and by the ubiquity of the denials voiced regarding the importance of race after the civil rights movement. “The importance of race and the enduring fact of racism are relegated to the dustbin of history at a time in American life when the discourses of race and the spectacle of racial representation saturate the dominant media and public life” writes Giroux. “The politics of the color line and representations of race have become far more subtle and complicated than they were in the Jim Crow era (2003, p. 192). More broadly, Giroux defines the specific dimensions of new racism in the following way:

Unlike the old racism, which defined racial difference in terms of fixed biological categories organized hierarchically, the new racism operates in various guises proclaiming among other things race neutrality, asserting culture as a market of racial difference, or making race as a private matter. Unlike the crude racism with its biological referents and pseudoscientific legitimizations, buttressing its appeal to white racial superiority, the new racism cynically recodes itself within the vocabulary of the civil rights movement. (2003, p. 192)

Amy Elizabeth Ansell similarly focus on the ways in which cultural differences mark and rationalize the existence of inequality:

It is a form of racism that utilizes themes related to culture and nation as a replacement for the now discredited biological referents of the old racism. It is concerned less with notions of racial superiority in the narrow sense than with the alleged “threat” people of color pose—either because of their mere presence or because of their demand for “special privileges”—to economic, socio-political, and cultural vitality of the dominant (White) society. It is, in short, a new form of racism that operates with the category of “race.” It is a new form of exclusionary politics that operates indirectly and in stealth via the rhetorical inclusion of people of color and the sanitized nature of its racist appeal. (1997, pp. 20–21)

Bonilla-Silva identifies four central frames of colorblind racism—abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism—which together define the new racist discourse. The two latter frames are particularly useful in understanding contemporary sporting culture and the approach offered in After Artest, given that the NBA functions as an important site for the denial of contemporary racism and the demonization and exclusion of racialized bodies through cultural argumentation and discourse. “Cultural racism is a frame that relies on culturally-based arguments,” Bonilla-Silva explains (Bonilla-Silva 2003, p. 28). According to Carrington and McDonald, “cultural racism posits that although different ethnic groups or ‘races’ may not exist in a hierarchical biological relationship, they are nevertheless culturally distinct, each group having their own incompatible lifestyles, customs and ways of seeing the world” (2001, p. 1). Similarly, Spencer concludes, “cultural racism is thus predicated on an understanding of culture as a whole way of life and has implications for racism in sport” (2004, p. 121).

Instead of basing exclusion and inequality on purely biological explanations, dominant racial discourses locate social problems in the cultural deficiencies of the African American community. Rather than circulating evidence of the biological inferiority of black men and women, a common practice in the United States was evident in the exclusion of bodies of color from American sports teams through the first half of the twentieth century. Contemporary (new racist) racial discourse (including the narratives circulating about blackness and the NBA) focuses on cultural and class differences as the predominant narrative to explain persistent inequality. By repeating those narratives that celebrate racial progress and the availability of the American Dream to many African Americans, amid a focus on the black underclass, new racism demonizes and blames those who continue to live in their own nightmares because of personal failures and deficiencies all while denying the importance of race. “The clock has been turned back on racial progress in American, though scarcely anyone seems to notice,” argues Michelle Alexander in New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Era of Colorblindness. “All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, who have defied the odds and risen to power, fame, and fortune” (2010, p. 175). Narratives of success and those exceptional exceptions are used as evidence of a post-racial America.

A second frame, which both dominates contemporary racial discourses and infects our understanding of the representations and media discourse surrounding the NBA, minimizes the continued importance of racism. This minimization of the racism frame “suggests that discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities' life chances” (Bonilla-Silva 2003, p. 29). Teo describes this defining element in a similar fashion, detailing the ways in which the dominant racial discourse generates “discursive strategies that blame the victims for their circumstances on their own social, economic, and even cultural disadvantage” (2000, p. 8). Dismissing hate crimes, police brutality, racial profiling, continued inequality and individual prejudice, new racist discourse frequently accuses people of color of using race as a “crutch,” being overly sensitive when it comes to racism, or deploying the “race card” (Bonilla-Silva 2003, p. 29), while they simultaneously deny the existence of racism, instead blaming the cultural deficiencies of people of color for any instance of inequality.

The realities of new racism are clearly part and parcel of an NBA discourse, even after Artest, so there are certain limitations to thinking about the NBA through this lens given both the centrality of the racial discourse and the continued deployment of historical white racial frames.

White Racial Frame

According to Joe Feagin, “the socially inherited racial frame is a comprehensive orienting structure, a ‘tool kit’ that whites and others have long used to understand, interpret, and act in social settings” (Feagin 2009, p. 13). This tool kit contains stereotypes, which Picca and Feagin describe as “filters, straining out information inconsistent with the dominant racial frame” (2007, p. 10) and “ ‘big picture’ narratives that connect frame elements into historically oriented stories with morals that are especially important to white Americans” (Feagin 2009, p. 13). My efforts here seek to illustrate how, within a post-Artest NBA discourse, these stereotypes and “big picture narratives” literally play out on players' bodies, elucidating how the dominant racial frame guides both the consumption and demonization of black athletes which, in turn, “structures [white] events and performances” (Feagin 2009, p. 12) outside the arena of sports. Joe Feagin describes the white racial frame as a “master frame,” “that has routinely defined a way of being, a broad perspective on life” (2009, p. 11; 2009, p. 13; Feagin 2008). Frames encompass a “conceptual and interpretative scheme that shapes and channels assessments of everyday e...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1. After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness
• 2. ‘I Went to a Basketball Game and a Vibe Awards Broke Out’ or ‘Negroes Gone Wild’: The Palace Melee and the Racialized Culture War What Else?
• 3. A Crisis Inside and Outside America's Arena: Age Restrictions and the Real Color of Money
• 4. ‘No Bling Allowed‘: The NBA's Dress Code and the Politics of New Racism
• 5. The Palace Brawl and the Colorblind Fantasy
• Notes
• Works Cited: Popular Discourse
• Works Cited: Scholarly Discourse
• List Of Titles in the Suny Series On Sport, Culture, and Social Relations