Racial resignation: The Atlanta Hawks, the premises of racism, and the church

It happened, perhaps, at an opportune time, when attentions were distracted by many sports stories, not least the Ray Rice case in the NFL.  It didn't go completely unnoticed, but between Rice and other tales of domestic abuse, and then the report of Adrian Peterson's different form of domestic abuse, the story came and went rather quickly, much to the relief of the NBA, no doubt.  That it was worth maybe a week of attention, maybe less, speaks to how strangely the incident was handled; the first that many people heard about it, at least outside of Atlanta, was the report that Bruce Levenson, principal owner of the NBA Atlanta Hawks, was falling on his sword over racially charged comments in an email to other club principals.  Other details trickled out, eventually implicating GM Danny Ferry with making a racially charged statement that may or may not have been quoted from a scouting report from a scout who may or may not have been affiliated with an NBA team other than the Hawks (it finally seems as if he really was reading the words of another, which should set off a whole other set of alarms in the NBA).  By the time any more news threatened to come out, other more twisted news came along in the sports world, and the NBA was spared Donald Sterling Redux.

If I paid enough attention to the NBA to have a team, the Hawks would probably be it.  Which is to say, the last time I paid attention to the NBA, the Hawks were my team.  They had some epic battles with the Larry Bird Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs, believe it or not, that nobody remembers because all anybody remembers is the epic battles the Celtics had with the Los Angeles Lakers back then.  But then the team got old, and Dominique Wilkins left or was sent packing, and the team slid, not all the way into despair, but into a persistent and seemingly intractable mediocrity that allowed it to make the playoffs or hover on the fringes but never really become a threat to do damage.  Last season was somewhat typical, as they snuck into the last spot in the Eastern Conference playoffs and lasted long enough to put a slight scare into the Indiana Pacers before receding.  It got just interesting enough that I actually slipped into a bar in the Atlanta airport to watch part of one of those playoff games while waiting for a flight.

And there the Hawks sat, largely a peripheral concern in their own city but nevertheless not in real danger of perishing.  A hockey team came and went.  The Falcons actually got to a Super Bowl, then went off a cliff, and have been resurgent of late, enough to be the probable lead dog among Atlanta's pro teams (yes, over the Braves; more on that in a bit).  The Braves owned the 90s, until people got bored with consistent playoff appearances that did not end in World Series wins (hard to believe that a city could get spoiled by one WS win, but it sure looks like that happened in retrospect).  There was a bit of a downturn in the 2000s, but the team has returned to the playoffs of late, though this year may not be included.  Fan interest in the Braves has been maddeningly just short of what a team of such success might hope.  Meantime the city will add a new major league-level franchise in the next few years, as Arthur Blank somehow wrangled an MLS team to play in the new pleasure-palace he managed to finagle from the city for the Falcons, which I suppose guarantees the facility will be used over the summer.

So the Hawks sit, occasionally getting a bit of notice for an unexpected playoff push only to fall away in predictable disappointment.  Big-name players don't come there.  They don't make transcendent draft picks.  They're just...there, until earlier this month, when they got the kind of attention they could really do without.

Now about that Levenson email.  I'm presuming you have clicked above and read it.

It was racially charged, sure.  Racially insensitive, you bet.  Utterly stupid to be writing, of course.

I'm not entirely convinced that it was racist.

I think it was far worse than being racist.

What Levenson does in his email doesn't constitute racial hatred, I think.  It constitutes racial resignation.

To attempt to explain: Levenson cites his wildly off-the-cuff and probably inaccurate calculation about how many black vs. white fans in the stands, in the bars at the arena, on the KissCam (an innovation that needs squelching badly, IMHO).  From that point he immediately begins to ramble about potential remedies to these problems, all driven by the assumption that for the Hawks to be more successful in drawing white Atlantans to Hawks games.

How many fallacies can you pull out of that sentence?

At risk to my future (being a white guy born in Georgia, I should be running from this issue full speed, but as a would-be spiritual leader I am forbidden from doing so), I want to try to pick out the worst things going on in Levenson's mind, evidently, as he rambled out that email.

The short version: I don't think Levenson is a racist, or at least he's no more racist than the average white guy.  He's not a candidate for a white hood and torch.  He was probably never a David Duke kind of guy.

What he is, though, is a white person who accepted the premises of racism as incontrovertible fact.

He accepted that southern whites would not attend events at an arena populated by mostly blacks.  To be sure, there is a subset of southern whites for whom this is true.  Levenson presumed this to be true for 100% of southern whites.  This is not the case.  I don't know the percentage, but it's not 100%.

He accepted the implication that southern whites are a monolithic entity, all thinking and acting the same way.  Not all southern whites dislike hip-hop.  Music sales (such as they are) don't lie.  There are whites out there who do not govern themselves according to the premises of racism.  If that had not been the case in southern history, where would the Clarence Jordans and Millard Fullers of the world have come from?  Hell, where would Jimmy Carter have come from?  Levenson apparently saw no such possibility in the white population he was attempting to court; maybe he needed a history lesson.

He accepted the premise that race is only a black/white issue.  Apparently in Levenson's view there are no Hispanic or Latino or Asian-American or Native American or anything else persons living in the Atlanta area that might be persuaded to attend NBA games, just blacks and whites.  Racism would be very happy for you to see the world that way.  Dichotomy is much easier to manage and control than a truly multifaceted view of a world or a city.

He accepted a perceived "it's us or it's them" demand, and sided with the "us".  Even though he calls the perceived attitudes of his hypothetical whites about Philips Arena and the vicinity "racist garbage," he nonetheless chooses to cast his lot with the "us" whom he perceives as believing that "racist garbage."  He can see no other possibility than to change the promotional mechanics of reaching out to fans to favor those particular whites.  You would think he would realize that, by his own reasoning (flawed as it is), a country concert after a game would chase away black fans to the same degree that a hip-hop concert presumably chases away white fans, yet he sounds like he's on the verge of bringing in (fill in current hot country act here, I have no idea) for a postgame performance.  Apparently that was an acceptable calculation to him.


It would be easy to continue piling on where Levenson is concerned, even as the team is in the process of a highly stage-managed sale.  In the end this isn't where it's most useful to go, I don't think.

For one thing, it actually grieves me a little bit that the Hawks are going to come out of this with the "racist" label attached, while the Atlanta Braves, a franchise with quite a history of racially questionable visual presentation, are getting away with a virtual re-enactment of 1970s-era "white flight" in their impending move to Cobb County (never an example of racial harmony itself) and nobody outside of maybe a few locals is even questioning the racial politics of such a move.

Another point is that the Hawks haven't been all that good.  They usually fall somewhere in the middle of the pack in the NBA, which is not much of a way to get the house packed; doing a better job of building a team might have a bigger impact than anyone thinks.  One might also point out, on the other hand, that Atlanta itself never has been, except for very brief periods, an extremely supportive sports market for sports that don't involve long-term brain damage.

Most of all, though, it's not as if the Hawks are the only franchise guilty of such reasoning.  Even more, sports is hardly the only establishment in society guilty of this reasoning.

The church has, at various times in its history in this country, been hung up on the horns of racism.  The civil rights movement featured an awful lot of clergy in its legacy, a few (but far too few) white.  Whole heaps of clergy were on the opposing side of that struggle, of course.  The struggle over slavery drew clergy and churches into its ugly maw, on both sides of course, and split more than one denomination into pro- and anti-slavery factions.

Keeping with the above warning about false dualism, racially charged rhetoric about Native Americans certainly helped grease the skids for the continuing displacement of indigenous populations into further remote and smaller reservations.  Waves of Irish and Chinese immigrants in the 1800s drew both poison and compassion from Christian clergy.  Even today, some pastors can be heard demanding that unaccompanied migrants be shipped back home to certain death even as other churches provide shelter for those same children.

In short, the church has a tough time with racial issues.  Even if sport is sometimes caught struggling to remove the beam from its own eye, the church is hard-pressed to say much about it with multiple beams in its eyes.

Though Bruce Levenson apparently might have disagreed, the old saw persists that the most segregated hour in the USA is the hour of Sunday morning worship.  Some of the same premises of racism apply here too, it seems; a church that strings out lots of exuberant gospel music is "black" no matter how many people of whichever ethnic background show up.

I'm probably a typical example to some people.  I don't have a lot of appreciation for "loud" worship. I believe it holds true for me for a typical "contemporary" worship service with a big rock band (which would be described as a more "white" phenomenon, though by no means exclusively so) as much or more so as for any other type of worship.  Still, someone could point to me as an example of a white who doesn't or won't go to a black church if they wanted to do so.  And we again flounder on our own confusion about identity and practice.

I'm bothering with this (believe me, I could still be -- and still will be -- writing about the league that admits that 33% of its players will end up suffering long-term brain trauma) because I still can't avoid the nagging doubt about the church.  What are the unspoken, and thus unchallenged, premises of racism that we more or less accept as incontrovertible fact?  Would "whites and blacks can't worship together" be an example of such a thing, a manifestation of "it's us or it's them"?  Are we too quick to reduce the whole thing to black/white, forgetting a whole world of identity out there (gender as well as ethnic)?

What other premises of racism are out there to which the church submits, consciously or not?  I'm not talking about basic bigotries or obvious mantras of hatred; I'm trying to get at unquestioned assumptions or codes of thought that remain just subliminal enough, most of the time, to avoid being deconstructed for their connections to the unjust structures of the world in which we live.

What are we blindly accepting that would horrify us if we thought it through even a little bit?

Unbelievably timely book commentary: Against Football

Almond, Steve.  Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.  Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014.

Honestly, I couldn't have planned this so well if I'd tried, believe me.
A few days ago I picked up Steve Almond's new book Against Football.  I had to order it.  Strangely enough, neither the big-box bookstore nor the "local" bookstore were carrying it as football season opened.  I can't imagine why.
It had to wait until after a couple of writing obligations (including yesterday morning's sermon), but last night I finally settled down with it.  The first thing I can report is that it's quite brief, only 178 pages.  It is not a lifetime commitment to read the book.
Second, it is not a dense, evidentiary argument in the manner of League of Denial.  It is probably best described by its full title: Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.

By his own description, Almond is a rather pathetic sort about his football.  A former journalist turned author, Almond did a little sports commentary in his day.  That's not the substance of his book, although it does inform his pointed deconstruction of the role football talking heads play in the rationalization and justification of the game's routine brutality.  No, his viewpoint is strictly as a fan, particularly of the Oakland Raiders (adding a different level to the term "pathetic" applied earlier).  The opening chapters of the book establish Almond's bona fides as a fan, from his highly subjective review of the history of the sport's place in American culture.  While quite hyperbole-ridden in its estimation of football's hold on the culture before the 1960s (which does seem to mark the rise of the NFL in particular), he is quite perceptive on its courting of television, corporate culture in general, and even the military.
He touches on the Michael Sam issue, although at the time he was writing Sam had only barely been drafted.  He also goes as far as to suggest that the pervasiveness of football subconsciously encourages a tolerance of greater violence in society, and this is without any reference to Ray Rice at all.  The New Orleans Saints bounty scandal shows up, too, mostly to point out that in the culture of the game, the only "scandal" about it was the fact that it laid bare the stuff the NFL doesn't want you thinking about.  (You don't really think the Saints were the only team guilty of such a thing, do you?) There is of course much to say about concussions and CTE and their continuing march through the ranks of retired players, not to mention former college and high school players as well.  The implicit racism of a whole bunch of white guys running a league with about 70% black players is not ignored (not to mention such unseemly spectacles as the scouting combine and its creepy evocation of the old-fashioned slave market).  The obscenity of stadium-building and subsidizing gazillionaires with public funding of such stadiums is also skewered with righteous indignation, as well as the subversion of academics to football on the college level.  In short, this is not a one-issue rant; Almond is accusing the total culture of football in America and laying the blame at the feet of those most responsible: fans, like himself.  He reserves his hardest criticism for those who see the corruption inseparably woven into the business of football, on all levels, and can identify it as such, but who are unwilling to back up their words with actions.  Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, even President Obama fall into this category, along with Almond himself.
This is potentially where this blog entry gets offensive, and where I fully expect to lose some friends if anybody reads this.
Here's the deal: there is no more pretending that this doesn't apply to you, football fan who claims any kind of moral center.  Especially you preachers and preacher wannabes out there.
Did you get outraged at the Ray Rice news today?  Goody for you.  But if you're still devoting your entire Saturday/Sunday to consuming as much football as you can, you're still complicit.  Condemning an obvious monster is not enough to let you off the hook for supporting the less obvious monsters who run or participate in the game in some way.  The mind-blowing greed of league and ownership, the crippling effects of the game on the bodies and minds of its participants, the mockery of higher education (and even high school education in many cases), the homophobia, bullying (did I mention Richie Incognito shows up too?), and general thuggishness of the insidious Real Man Sport culture, the anesthetizing effect of the game on our own tolerance for violence ... that's on you.
The book is ultimately a gauntlet thrown down on American culture.  Not that American culture is going to go along with it, mind you.  As I noted before, bookstores are not going out of their way to promote the book or even acknowledge its existence.  Somehow I don't see ESPN (or any media with even a token financial interest in football) granting Almond an interview.
Merely acknowledging issues isn't enough, any more than it's sufficient to be outraged at the abuses in Ferguson without doing anything about the implicit racism in your own community, or to get all outraged about Ray Rice's assault on his fiancee without standing against domestic violence among your own congregation.  I've seen plenty of you on social media demanding an end to rape culture, or institutional racism, among other things.  Continuing to tolerate the monstrosity that football has become in American culture makes your words ring hollow.  There, I said it.  It's one of the biggest enablers of what you say you despise.  What are you going to do about it?