Black Gods of the Asphalt

Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball

Onaje Woodbine

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541121
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket.

On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.

Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.

PART 1

MEMORY

1

“LAST ONES LEFT” IN THE GAME

From Black Resistance to Urban Exile

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

We are born like this, into this, into these carefully mad wars…into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings…born into this walking and living through this, dying because of this, muted because of this, castrated, debauched, disinherited because of this, fooled by this, used by this, pissed on by this, made violent, made inhuman by this, the heart is blackened, the fingers reach for the throat, the gun, the knife…the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god…we are born into sorrowful deadliness….

—Charles Bukowski, “Dinosauria, We”

Shorty’s slim, dangly black body twisted and twirled on Roxbury’s asphalt courts. He seemed guided by an otherworldly force. As neighborhood kids, we studied and worshipped his every move. I witnessed Shorty dribble the ball along the right baseline leaning so far over his left shoulder that his torso became parallel with the ground. Without falling, he managed to tiptoe around one defender, and then suddenly, he launched off the pavement like a rocket, holding the ball with two-hands, arms and legs fully extended in midair.

As Shorty hung there, we observers stood in awe. Then almost as gracefully as he glided toward the sky, he retracted his body downward to avoid a defender who had leapt to block his shot. While this defender remained at the rim, Shorty descended to just inches above the court, his face nearly touching the ground. From this underworld he effortlessly flicked the ball off of his wrist. The rotating sphere came to life, spinning upward toward the glass above the hoop, kissing the backboard and falling into a swishing net. An “Ahhh!” swept throughout the crowd; we were mesmerized. It was as if Shorty was destined to be great with the basketball.

Fifteen years later I had not forgotten those days when Shorty seemed like a god on the court. Since then myths abounded of his fall to the perils of drugs and prison. But I wanted to speak to the man himself. Then one day as I stood on the sidelines of Roxbury’s Malcolm X Park, Shorty hopped onto the asphalt in front of me.

The Suave Life Tournament was the fifth street-ball competition of the summer in Boston’s black neighborhoods. The games were organized to honor the memory of several black youths murdered in the streets of Mattapan on September 28, 2010. On the morning of the killings, local residents discovered naked, bullet-riddled, black bodies on the sidewalks. Among the dead were a mother, her two-year old child, and two black men. A fifth young black man still lay on the sidewalk gasping for air. The Boston Globe described the horrible scene: “The bodies of two male victims were found naked, sprawled on a side street…in one of the cities roughest sections. The woman, 21-years old…had been shot in the head, and her child, she held fatally wounded. A third male also lay naked in the area…clinging to life after attempting to flee.” A ten-year-old boy who heard the shootings from his bedroom window spoke about the panic he was feeling: “It puts fear in people’s hearts.”¹

A general sense of terror pervades Boston’s black neighborhoods—Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester—the places where I conducted this ethnography of street basketball. According to the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts’s in-depth study, the “State of Black Boston” (2011), there is a history of underlying racial inequity in Boston that is a root cause of the subhuman living conditions faced by many of the city’s black residents.² The report suggests that while there has been progress, Boston’s history of racial injury persists in nearly every major category of civic life and physical well-being.³

More than a fifth of Boston’s black residents twenty-five-years-old and under lack a high school diploma, and only 11.9 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree. A quarter of all Boston’s black residents are impoverished, double the rate of whites in the city. Black unemployment is the highest of any racial group—while employed blacks make $30,000 less than whites on average. Nearly half (45.2 percent) of black youth depend on food stamps, and households run by single-parent mothers represent over half (55.4 percent) of Boston’s black family types. Black residents are twice as likely to die of heart disease and more than three times as likely to die of diabetes. Black families suffer from the highest infant-mortality rates in Boston. Whereas the median asking price for a home in black Mattapan is $154,967, it is $456,837 citywide. Blacks who earn identical incomes as whites are denied housing loans twice as often. Two of Boston’s black neighborhoods—Roxbury and Mattapan—carry the burden of maintaining the greatest amount of high-cost home loans in the city.⁴

Poverty, racial discrimination, poor education, and disease are compounded by disparities in crime and the criminal justice system. Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan bear the highest crime rates. At least half of all reported violent crimes in Boston occur in these three areas, including 63 percent of homicides, 52 percent of robberies and 51 percent of aggravated assaults. Many of Boston’s black men and women who do not suffer literal death in the streets are disenfranchised and rendered socially invisible through incarceration. In 2010 blacks were only 6.6 percent of the Massachusetts population but accounted for nearly 35 percent of the state’s inmates. Having to endure a continuous threat of violence, bodily harm, and imprisonment has led to an unquantifiable measure of affective injury and grief in this community. The 2010 national census ranked Boston as the eleventh most black-white segregated city in the country.⁵

There was a picture of one Mattapan murder victim adorning the fence surrounding the asphalt basketball court during the Suave Life Tournament. After spending some time staring at his face, I proceeded to the fence opening, which defined the court from the streets. Once I stepped inside, I found myself partially underground, as this particular court is sunk below street level, in the manner of a netherworld.⁶ There, in the flesh, was Shorty. I noticed him immediately because he still moved his body with the style and grace of a street baller, legs and arms swinging rhythmically back and forth as if an invisible basketball dribbled between his legs.

He laid down his gym bag on the asphalt and walked toward me. Our eyes met—but I noticed something strange. Shorty’s eyes seemed empty. I called his name: “Shorty!” “What’s up,” he responded softly, looking past me as if I were not there. “Shorty, it’s me, Onaje.” “I know,” he said, staring in the distance. “Oh,” I said, feeling as if I was speaking to a ghost of a man. “Wow, it’s been so long. Listen, man, I am writing a book on street basketball and would love to interview a legend. Do you think you’d be interested?” “Yep,” he responded. “Okay, what is your phone number so I can give you a call?” Later that evening, I sent Shorty a text message. His response was cautiously revealing: “Okay, I have a lot to tell. But only for you.” What he had to tell was almost too terrible for words.

Shorty shared his story with me as we sat on the front steps of his apartment building in Roxbury. He was born and raised in Roxbury’s Avenue projects—pissy hallways, roach infestations, filthy clothes, murderers, crack addicts desperate for a fix, and devastating poverty. His biological parents were dope addicts. His grandmother, an informal network of peers and mentors associated with local basketball, and gang members constituted his primary role models: “I never really had a relationship like with my mom. I always use to see my mom when she did come by. And my pops he was dead but he wasn’t dead. Like he was in the house, but when we did something wrong that’s the only time he said something.” He continued to describe the social and familial violence that shaped his external and internal worlds as a child.

I ain’t never really sat down and had a deep conversation with my pops or my mom. My mom’s basically doing drugs, moms and pops, you know what I’m saying? Just basically on drugs and throughout my whole life growing up.

You know growing up in the Avenue. It was kind of hard. You see like every day drug dealers people selling whatever out there. You know, it’s crazy. You got robbers, stick up kids, and at a young age I kind of like swayed away from that, tried to sway away from that. But I think as I got older it came into play, but basketball was a way out to not be in the streets.

Bourdieu uses the term “habitus” to refer to the tendency in human beings to unconsciously internalize their external environments. Born into a field of social forces, people habituate to the norms of the field, even if they are harmful to one’s self. Over time these cultural narratives shape the thoughts and feelings of groups and individuals, such that their bodies become the historical “repositories” of a culture.⁷ Employing sports metaphors, Bourdieu draws an analogy between this social process of internalization and an athlete’s development of a “feel for the game.” When an athlete possesses a feel for the game, the rules become second nature.⁸ In contexts of social violence, this second nature is so insidious precisely because marginal individuals and groups are unaware of it as such.

Shorty certainly embodied the dominant narratives of the streets. However, “basketball was a way out not to be in the streets.” The basketball court signified an alternative space of resistance to the violence of the neighborhood. Shorty substituted his “dead” biological father and mother with the loving family members he found on the court, and they schooled him in the art of the game:

I just learned from watching everybody, you know, my man Kane, my brother, my cousin, all them dudes. Dana, all them dudes that played basketball that was real tough from around my way. I learned from a couple of dudes from other projects, you know, Lewis projects, you know. Bane, I used to watch him and then my brother go at it. I used to steal moves and all that. It was only right. It’s only right, that’s how you get nicer. You just add your little twist to it. That’s what I used to just do. It was other people’s moves, I just put a little, add a little something extra.

In reality, Shorty added more than “a little something extra” to his game. By the time he was fifteen years old, he was an emerging basketball legend in Roxbury. His style on the court was uncanny and unscripted.⁹ Think of the way a speedskater lunges from side to side across the ice. Picture one arm swinging high in the air as the same leg dashes forward. Put the ball in his right hand and let it cross over smoothly from right to left as it sweeps the ground low before coming up high on the other side. Now imagine Shorty’s feet skating between muscular defenders as his body glides across the concrete rubble. His dribble, like the rhythm of his life, was full of incredible highs and breathtaking lows.

Shorty’s father enlisted him in the drug game as a child, forcing him to buy crack for his family. He hated school because of the unwashed clothes he was often forced to wear to class. Plus what would school teach him about surviving the projects? He was hungry and broke. The shame of buying crack for his parents rotted away his self-esteem. He began using drugs to bury the pain and developed a visceral sense of “nobodiness”: “I didn’t really have the support. I was in high school like I didn’t have no clothes that whole time, from like high school on. I started selling drugs. You know what I mean? I started drinking, smoking weed, just not caring. I think high school was like the turning point of my life.”

Shorty’s high school administrators treated him like a commodity, forging his grades so that they could ship him off to play ball for a predominately white and wealthy high school. The journalist William Rhoden suggests that impoverished black males are often viewed as the “raw materials” of white schools and businesses seeking to benefit from their poverty and “natural” athletic talent. Informal local and national recruiting systems, which he refers to as “conveyor belts,” then funnel black bodies from the streets to the halls of the white elite.¹⁰

Shorty experienced more shame and isolation at his new school, eventually returning to Boston aimless and depressed. As a high school dropout, he gradually turned into one of the most active drug dealers and thieves in Avenue projects. At eighteen years old he was incarcerated:

But after that situation, I came back to Boston. I ended up catching a case. I ended up catching an armed robbery case, and I probably was like I want to say eighteen at the time. I caught the case and I thought I was going to get off, but I ended up doing two years from that case and when I got out I was kind of lost. Like what am I going to do, you know? I mean, there was a couple of other people like trying to help me out like, “yo, get you into community college, ROTC,” but once I got out, it was like, I stuck with it for a little while and I just went back to what I normally do, which was sell drugs, carry guns, because the environment that I lived in. I was kind of dumb. It wasn’t like I needed to be out here selling drugs or whatever, but it was a time where I didn’t have certain things that I wanted. I wasn’t trying to get no job. I didn’t even know how to do it. I was so young.

Shorty recognized the role of his environment (poverty and institutional racism) in contributing to his incarceration and unemployment, but he also subconsciously blamed himself for going to prison for several years between 1999 and 2012. By the time we met, he had been released from jail, but his feelings of personal humiliation remained...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Memory
• Part II: Hope
• Part III: Healing
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index