writing

Part 2 Journal Prompt:

Reading Reflections will consist of the following requirements. "Throughout this course topics will be

covered concerning the African American athlete. One of the activities that you will participate in

during the course will be reading reflections. You will be required to write a reflective essay (250-300

words) on the assigned reading. Minimally, reflections should include (1) Topics you found interesting

and important; (2) Topics you found challenging; (3) Topics that enhanced your understanding of the

subject. These reflections will be due on assigned Fridays by 11:59pm.

Below you find the chapter the journal prompt is based on

Chapter 8

EIGHT The River Jordan:

The Dilemma of Neutrality And Moses said unto God, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh,

and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” —EXODUS 3 : 11 ON AUGUST

28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the foot of Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and

addressed 250,000 people who converged on the nation’s capital. The March on Washington, at

the time, was the largest demonstration in the nation’s history. That summer was one of great

national crisis, as well as deep personal anguish. On August 4, a month shy of my thirteenth

birthday, I lost my mother to breast cancer. We had been living in Phoenix, Illinois, a tiny hamlet

outside of Chicago and hometown of basketball star Quinn Buckner. The United States was

being ravaged by the cancer of racism. The world sat and watched as the self-appointed bastion

of democracy confronted its demons: police brutality and vigilante violence aimed at African

Americans demonstrating for equality. In a span of three months there were an estimated 1,412

Civil Rights demonstrations. Many of the protesters faced tear gas, police dogs, and

high-powered water hoses as they fought for their right to vote, their right to equal access to

public facilities. Sociologist Manning Marable said that some decades are worth only a year, but

some years are worth an entire decade. Certainly 1963 was worth a decade. In June of that

year, Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the NAACP, was shot and killed in front of his home in

Jackson, Mississippi. In September a bomb exploded in the basement of the Fourteenth Street

Baptist Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls in Sunday school. In

November, John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, was assassinated in Dallas. At

a time of great national moral crisis, Dr. King rose to the occasion and delivered one of the most

compelling speeches in United States history. Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech resonated for

decades. Everyone from white racists and black conservatives to liberals and black nationalists

have used selective parts of the address to fit a multitude of agendas. Six months before the

march, an event of little note but great future consequence took place in Brooklyn, New York:

On February 17, 1963, Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born. Not even in his wildest dreams could

Dr. King have imagined that thirty years after his address, a young black man would become the

world’s best-known athlete, the most recognizable American in the world, admired and revered

from Shanghai to Saudi Arabia. He would be showered with the sort of acclaim, riches, and

notoriety reserved for state officials. By the year 2000, Michael Jordan, basketball player, would

be widely considered the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. Three years after Jordan was

born, Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase “Black Power.” To some, Jordan in his prime

became the embodiment of Black Power; to me he is the antithesis, however, the embodiment,

if anything, of the destructive power of the Conveyor Belt and the perversion of the nobler goals

of integration. If his vast influence had combined with the vision of a Rube Foster, Jordan could

have singlehandedly consolidated Black Power in sports and transformed the entire industry.

Michael Jordan could have been a messiah who marshaled African American athletes into a

strong, powerful collective. Had he said “jump,” had he said “protest,” most athletes would have

jumped; most would have protested. Instead, Jordan said, “Be like Mike.” Which raises the

question: Who is Mike? What was the River Jordan? Was he Moses, leading us into the

wilderness, or Judas, stranding us there? Jordan was in many ways the fruit of the Civil Rights

movement, which reached its apex in the year of his birth. His right to remain silent is what we

won. Jordan didn’t have an obligation to speak up on racial injustices, but he had an unmatched

opportunity. Michael Jordan’s story provides a revealing look into contemporary black culture in

the wake of integration and the Conveyor Belt: fragmented, stratified as never before, stuck in a

sprawling wilderness, but also more materially successful than ever. Jordan is a map of where

African Americans have been, where they are, and where they might be headed. Jordan is the

one who fully exercises the won right to be publicly neutral, not to have to deal with quotas and

segregation, and even to have the “black” elements of his style and image—bald head, baggy

pants, soaring acrobatics—not just accepted by the mainstream, but revered, freeing him to be

obsessed with wealth and image. Freed by the Civil Rights movement to be neutral, he’s lightly

shrugged off the historical mission of black athletes to push for progress and power. But Jordan

and his generation of African American athletes are merely a microcosm of the dilemma facing

today’s black community. The problem of the African American athlete is not an absence of

resources—which are more abundant than ever—but an absence of vision and leadership to

help define the next stage in the struggle. As it is, black athletes like Jordan have abdicated

their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason. He followed the

most passive tradition of black sports heroes down a lucrative path, becoming a symbol of black

prowess, but he could have been so much more. With the resources and possibilities at his

disposal, simply being a paper tiger was really not enough. For athletes born in the 1970s and

1980s, a disconnect has grown between their own experiences and the experiences of those

who came before them; for many of them, the brutal struggle for freedom seems like fiction.

Jordan attempted to explain his position of neutrality when he said, “I don’t think I’ve

experienced enough to voice so many opinions…. I think people want my opinion only because

of the role model image that has been bestowed on me. But that doesn’t mean I’ve experienced

all those things.” Not only for Jordan, but for an entire generation of young African American

athletes, the notion that they belong to a larger community with a shared history is a hazy

concept, if it exists at all. The greatest distinction between Jordan’s generation and those of

Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and even Muhammad Ali lies in those

generations’ connection and identification with “the black community.” In many cases this was a

forced identity—forced by crushing racism and suffocating segregation. But there was a

collective identity nonetheless. That’s changed. Jordan didn’t stand for a larger community; in

fact, he stood for little beyond making money, hawking product. Jordan became the face of Nike

in the 1980s and infamously refused to publicly support black Democrat Harvey Gant in his

1996 battle against former segregationist Jesse Helms for a United States Senate seat. During

the final two weeks of the 1990 campaign, Helms went so far as to air the now infamous “white

hands” TV commercial in which a pair of white hands crumples a letter that supposedly tells

their owner that he has been passed over for a job because of affirmative action. But even this

race-baiting didn’t draw Jordan into the fray. His defense: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

Since then, Jordan supported the presidential candidacy of Bill Bradley and the senatorial

campaign of Barack Obama. Throughout his career, Jordan was criticized for being inactive in

the fight for racial equality, but he stood silently by in other areas as well. When details emerged

regarding Nike’s use of Asian sweatshops, Jordan made no official statement. He said that he

would “look into the problem.” When children and teenagers began fighting and killing each

other over his high-priced basketball shoes, he simply said that the victims should relinquish the

items without a fight. During his playing career, from 1984 to 2003, Jordan led the Chicago Bulls

to six NBA titles. But his greatest gain came off the court. Jordan surpassed O. J. Simpson as

the world’s most marketable black man, becoming a major marketing tool and proof that a

dark-skinned African American could be embraced as a pitchman for all. With Jordan at the

forefront, the National Basketball Association became a global empire, a purveyor of American

culture, with a black twist. The league would foreshadow trends in fashion, language, and

music. The adoration of Jordan was phenomenal. He was described not only as one of the best

players ever to grace the basketball court, but as one of the best humans to have graced the

earth. His followers raised him to superhuman level. After the 1986 playoffs, for example,

Boston Celtic superstar Larry Bird told reporters, “I think he’s God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

Phil Jackson, who coached Jordan through all six of his championship seasons, said that

Jordan “had somehow been transformed in the public mind from a great athlete to a sports

deity.” During a 1992 press conference for the Barcelona Olympics, a Japanese correspondent

asked, “Mr. Jordan, how does it feel to be God?” Following his trailblazing path, African

American athletes today are worth billions of dollars to the United States economy as marketers

of all kinds of products, from sports gear to cars to deodorant. A handsome, strong, but

harmless black man, Jordan would become the paradigm for the black star in a rising sports

culture, setting the tone for others who aspired to commercial success. In a 1998 column, Joan

Ryan compared Jordan to the Shmoo, the creature in the Li’l Abner comic strip that could taste

like any food you wanted. She wrote: Jordan is whatever we want him to be, according to our

own values, dreams, and biases. He is the living embodiment of class, or hard work, or grace, or

sportsmanship, or heroism. We have imbued him with all these qualities, even though—or

rather, because—we know so little about him. Despite his global fame, Jordan has managed to

give no clues about what issues he cares about, if any, or even what makes him tick. He has

contributed little politically or socially, beyond the usual golf tournaments and chicken-dinner

appearances. His public persona is like the perfect-looking man in the white dinner jacket in the

board game Mystery Date, who was funny, caring, strong or rich, depending on the imagination

of the twelve-year-old girl rolling the dice. Some of the most useful insight into Jordan comes

from the man who played a large part in inventing him: David Falk. Falk has described himself

as apolitical and said Jordan was cut from the same cloth. The beauty of Jordan, Falk said, was

that they didn’t have to “indoctrinate him,” work on him to be more neutral in his views. “People

say that in order to market Michael we had to get him to back away from political issues,” Falk

said. “The truth is that Michael is apolitical by nature. That’s who he is.” Largely because of

Jordan, professional basketball became a hybrid sport, a cross between an ultimate team sport

like baseball and an individual sport like tennis and golf. But Jordan’s singular

importance—outside of his phenomenal ability—was knocking open the marketing doors that O.

J. Simpson had broached in the 1970s. With Falk pushing the agenda, Jordan broke corporate

barriers in 1984. Falk said he wanted to prove to Madison Avenue that African American

athletes could be sold to the public. This may be hard to recall, but in 1984 there were no

million-dollar Nike deals, no lucrative Gatorade endorsement deals. By 1984 the majority of

Falk’s clients were African American males, “and you had so much resistance in corporate

America to accepting them off the court in business,” Falk said during an interview. Falk recalled

that at this time there were “literally companies who would say, ‘What are we going to do with

the black basketball player in marketing?’” It was like talking a foreign language. The challenge

with Jordan was how to create access to corporate America with a really special raw diamond.

Falk saw his job as opening doors and getting Jordan to market. For Falk, 1984 was, along with

1492, a watershed year, proving the world wasn’t flat and that black athletes could sell products.

“People have no problems accepting Tiger Woods or a Ken Griffey, it’s become commonplace,

but thirteen short years ago it was heresy to believe that Michael Jordan could ever become as

popular as Larry Bird. “I’m not saying that it took a white person to do that,” Falk added, “but it

took someone who had corporate clout to do it.” Jordan became larger than black and white.

You could look at him and really not see his color. Like O. J. Simpson, Jordan was racially and

politically neutral. Falk said he didn’t coach Jordan to be racially neutral: “His parents had raised

him to be color-blind,” Falk said. “He’s proud as an African American male, he’s got a strong

sense of black identity, but he’s not exclusive. He’s apolitical by nature, that’s his personality.”

Here’s the problem with transcendence, however: The crossover black athlete often transcends

his own race. Falk said, “When players of color become stars they are no longer perceived as

being of color. The color sort of vanishes. “I don’t think people look at Michael Jordan anymore

and say he’s a black superstar. They say he’s a superstar. They totally accepted him into the

mainstream. Before he got there he might have been African American, but once he arrived, he

had such a high level of acceptance that I think that the description goes away.” Falk understood

the mixed blessing of so-called racial transcendence. It’s good because people accept an

individual for accomplishments, independent of ethnicity. “It’s bad because if you are ‘of color’

you want that person to be a role model. It’s like, you finally got a great role model and people

take away his leadership by assimilating him into the general culture.” Depending on whom you

speak with, Jordan’s life mirrors the vision Dr. King laid out in his 1963 speech, his success

determined by the content of his character, rather than the color of his skin. But Jordan was also

a dream come true for the NBA. The challenge for the NBA as it went from a majority of white

players to mostly black players was how to make a majority-black league palatable. How to take

black style and showmanship, but somehow leave behind all of the more “inconvenient” features

of blackness in America. How to make race visible and invisible simultaneously. The answer

was to have blacks act neutral, but perform spectacularly. Like Mike. There was nothing in

sports in 1963 that suggested this kind of breakthrough. In that year, an African presence in pro

sports and big-time intercollegiate athletics was modest at best. Quotas at both levels were still

in force. The African American presence in professional football, basketball, and baseball was

modest. The rival American Football League had most of the black players, relying heavily on

Historically Black Colleges for many of its players. African Americans, according to stereotype,

lacked the endurance to run long distances in track; were not smart enough to play quarterback;

did not have the guile to pitch. They could not manage or become head coaches. Jordan’s

ascendance, viewed from this perspective, epitomizes the dramatic distance traveled by African

American athletes from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end. The twentieth century

began with a bald-headed prizefighter named Jack Johnson stepping on white sensibilities and

being hounded and demonized. The century ended with another bald-headed black man being

idolized, even called a god. Three years into a new century, however, Jordan was fired from his

job as “God.” In May 2003, hours after his extraordinary playing career ended with the

Washington Wizards, Jordan was summoned to team owner Abe Pollin’s office and dismissed.

What a fascinating and ironic twist at the end of a career. After retiring from basketball with the

Chicago Bulls in 1999, Jordan had joined the Washington Wizards as team president. Soon

after, he came out of retirement to rejoin the team on the court, playing his last two seasons with

the Wizards on hobbled knees. After his final retirement at the end of the 2002–2003 season,

Jordan planned to resume his front-office duties with the Wizards, learn the business, and

eventually take over the franchise. That wasn’t Pollin’s vision, though. During their brief meeting,

Pollin told Jordan, “As a gentleman, I appreciate everything you did. You’re great. You’ve made

a terrific contribution to the franchise. But I want to go in another direction in terms of direction

and leadership.” Pollin then offered to reward Jordan financially for his contributions. The year

before Jordan joined the team in January 2000, the Wizards had reportedly lost $40 million.

With Jordan in uniform, the Wizards sold out eighty-two straight home games and made about

$30 million in profits. But money was “not what I was looking for,” Jordan said to Pollin. “I didn’t

do this for the money. I thought I was going to take over the franchise eventually.” Pollin replied,

“That was never part of the arrangement. I’ve worked thirty-nine years to build this organization.

I’m not giving it to you and I don’t want you to be my partner, Michael.” The firing of Jordan

marked the sudden end to perhaps the most remarkable career in sports history. Intentionally or

not, the dismissal served as a warning shot that reverberated throughout the NBA. The greatest

athlete of all time—“God,” “the deity,” His Airness—couldn’t prevent his own firing. Jordan was

effectively taken out into the yard and shot like a dog. He was just another black athlete—albeit

an extraordinary one—who had been put in his place. MJ had gotten too big for his britches. He

had become larger than the game he helped promote. He was bigger than Bill Russell, Wilt

Chamberlain, and all the rest. This was okay when he was promoting the NBA; the league used

Jordan to become an even more lucrative, international business. But when Jordan threatened

to take his skills and charisma and ambition over to the executive suite, he became a Negro

who had to be reeled back in. Abe Pollin did the reeling. John Thompson, the former

Georgetown coach, said this was exploitation in its crudest, cruelest form. Thompson compared

Jordan’s dismissal to Pollin’s sending Jordan back to the plantation after reaping profit from his

labor. “They exploited this man,” Thompson said. “The minute he was used up, they discarded

him. There’s something wrong with that.” A few days later, I was on the ESPN show The Sports

Reporters with Len Elmore, the former All-American from the University of Maryland and now a

television commentator and attorney. In his parting commentary, Elmore, who is African

American, blasted Thompson for using the plantation analogy. There was bad blood between

Thompson and Elmore going back to Elmore’s days as a player agent, when Elmore

complained that Thompson steered all of his clients to David Falk, then the hottest sports

attorney in the business. On the air, Elmore said Thompson’s plantation comparison was stupid.

Elmore was praised and applauded by the other panelists for his “strong” commentary; after he

finished, the host reached over and patted him on his knee and said, “Beautiful.” I said to

Elmore, before we went on the set, that he was wrong to associate money with slave status,

because there were slaves who in fact made money. For example, in the seventeenth century a

slave economy emerged in the Chesapeake region. Many plantation owners, to defray the cost

of operating a plantation and maintaining slaves during times of economic depression, entered

into an agreement whereby slaves, in addition to their normal work, could work independently

and earn their own money, with the understanding that they would feed and clothe themselves.

In Many Thousands Gone, historian Ira Berlin wrote: “Given time to attend to their own affairs in

exchange for subsisting themselves, slaves gardened, tended to barnyard animals, and hunted

and fished on their own. Occasionally, they manufactured small items and sold them to their

owners, neighbors, or other slaves.” Money was not the issue. The correlation to examine was

between work and power. Jordan, for all the work he’d put in, had no power. Black athletes, for

all the money they made, had no real power. Even the greatest athlete of all time was unable to

keep himself from being fired. But I also had a problem with Thompson’s comment. My problem

with Thompson’s putting Jordan on a black plantation is that Jordan consistently, throughout his

public life, has refused to identify with core African American values, issues, or problems. He

was racially neutral; we learned to accept that—neutrality became his calling card. I’m sure he

did things in private, working behind the scenes, as they say. What he did in public to inspire the

multitudes—that core of black people estranged from power, the seemingly permanent

underclass—beyond hitting game-winning jump shots, is hard to find. But to evoke the image of

the plantation in Jordan’s darkest hour—even when the analogy is correct—was disingenuous.

The point is that he was always on the plantation, he just didn’t know it or acknowledge it

because he was flying too high to notice. Jordan supporters made the right argument, but in

Michael Jordan, they were using the wrong model. When Pollin slapped him down and put him

in his place, Jordan suddenly recognized his surroundings. What Pollin did to Jordan was a

microcosm of what the NBA is doing to black athletes in general: phasing them out because

they are no longer needed, as they once were. The global game is on the way, and the African

American presence in the NBA, which was once almost stereotypically a black man’s league, at

least on the court, is in peril. Jordan was used for his muscle then discarded. Black athletes

everywhere should see this as a cautionary tale: As long as black people don’t take control of

the industry that feeds them, they will always work at the pleasure of the white power structure,

a structure that would like nothing more than to wean itself from its dependence on black

muscle, to finally shake free of the Faustian pact of integration. As neutral as he had been, as

great as he had been, as much money as he had made for Pollin and NBA owners, Jordan was

treated with the public disdain reserved for a menial worker. Ed Tapscott, now president of the

black-owned Charlotte Bobcats, said, “Now Mike knows what it’s like to be black.” I think Jordan

knew all along. He made a conscious decision to stay neutral. In the fall of 1997, I had a brief

but illuminating conversation with Jordan. He was still His Airness at the time. The Bulls were

coming off another NBA championship and Jordan had the veneer of invincibility. I met Jordan

at the Nike offices in Greenwich Village in New York. This was the first time I had spoken with

him outside of locker-room chats. We talked a little pro football and the conversation segued into

double standards—one standard for whites, the other for African Americans. This was around

the time when the sports announcer Marv Albert was involved in his sexual misconduct

scandal—the veteran broadcaster was on trial on felony charges of forcible sodomy, a case in

which he’d been accused of repeatedly biting a woman. He’d eventually plead to a lesser

charge but had already made the deals that would allow him to resume his lucrative career.*

“You know what they would have done if that was me?” Jordan said, referring to Albert’s case.

At that moment we became like two black men—Brothers—talking about the racism that most of

us take for granted as part of life in the United States. We agreed that Albert should not be on

the air—“at all,” Jordan and I said in unison. They yanked O. J. Simpson out of the booth on

suspicion. I left the office with a far different view of Jordan than the one I’d brought in with me.

He was not a Ward Connerly–Shelby Steele type of reactionary Negro, not one of those black

people who, even in their private moments, mouth the notion of racism’s being dead and worry

over black people’s complaining and blaming “the white man” for our problems. I was

encouraged at least that Jordan was fully aware of double standards even at his level. He was

like most African Americans: playing the game, seeing racism and sidestepping it, grumbling

about it under his breath, but pushing it to one side in order to reap the full benefits of a

multiracial society. At the same time, even if his attitude about race was familiar and defensible,

his actions remained troubling. The image of Jordan I had before that meeting was formed a few

years earlier during a series of protests in 1992 that occurred at Jordan’s alma mater, the

University of North Carolina. There, at least a dozen black football players led approximately a

thousand students on a march to the office of Chancellor Paul Hardin to ask for the construction

of a black cultural center on the campus. A letter presented to Hardin said, “Failure to respond

to this deadline will leave the people no other choice but to organize towards direct action,”

which some players speculated could include boycotts of games. The march was the

culmination of months of simmering frustration on the North Carolina campus over the issue of a

separate center dedicated to the study of black culture. After the death in 1991 of Sonja H.

Stone, a popular black professor who had long supported the idea, a task force was formed to

consider building such a center and naming it after Stone. The idea attracted the attention and

support of Dolores Jordan, the mother of Michael Jordan, and the task force proposed that,

once built, the center contain the Michael Jordan Library, a library funded by Jordan and

devoted to black culture. The university was not receptive to the idea, especially if an entire

building was constructed for the express purpose of studying black culture. Hardin, in an

address to black students before school adjourned in June, said, “I favor a center that is by

geography and program inviting and inclusive, a forum, not a fortress.” In subsequent weeks,

though, the chancellor had softened his stance and asked students to submit architects’ plans.

But with school back in session, the university’s not having committed itself to the center, and

the football team now involved in the cause, the students’ stance had turned militant. At one

point a dozen black football players organized a march of four hundred students to Hardin’s

home in a peaceful demonstration that ended when police arrived and dispersed the crowd. The

off-the-field leadership role of the football players represented a dramatic departure for black

athletes on the UNC campus. Jordan, for example, was not a student leader as an

undergraduate there and, along with other black athletes, was accused of a lack of community

involvement after the riots in Los Angeles that same year. But the actions of the football players

seemed to tap into an older, pre-integration tradition—the tradition of Jack Johnson and Rube

Foster, men unafraid to stir things up and to take action without waiting for a white man’s

approval. “It’s not common for athletes, black athletes, to be in this type of leadership role,”

noted Tim Smith, a junior defensive back and co-founder of the Black Awareness Council, a

group founded by black athletes. “Athletes feel they have a chance to make it, as the white man

defines making it, in this society. You have a chance to go and make millions of dollars, and you

don’t want to jeopardize that by speaking out about injustice. “We feel it’s our responsibility to

speak out and lead. That’s what’s surprising a lot of people. As athletes here, we have a lot of

untapped power because we bring so much money into this university.” When Hardin attempted

to read a prepared statement at one demonstration, Smith told the chancellor that the students

wanted a meeting, not a prepared speech. UNC had 23,000 undergraduates at the time, about

8 percent of whom were black. The university already had a black studies center, named for

Sonja Stone, but it was housed in a renovated snack bar in the student center. The students

wanted the symbolism and respect of a separate building. “To me, when he says we want a

forum, not a fortress, he’s saying he doesn’t want us to have any power,” Smith said. “Having

our own building would give us a unique sense of power. As long as you can have us in a

glass-enclosed room where you can watch everything we do, every move we make—you can

control us. We want our own building. He knows now we’re willing to fight to get it. We’re not

going away.” There was a subsequent rally at the Dean Smith Center, where the film director

Spike Lee spoke on behalf of the building project. Lee said he decided to become involved after

learning that members of the North Carolina football team, with support from other UNC

athletes, were in the forefront of the push for the center. At the time Lee said, “I’m not getting

involved just because Sonja was my cousin. I’m a big sports fan and I always longed for the day

when black athletes would move to do something. Schools are making millions of dollars from

TV contracts on basketball and football programs, and most of that money is being generated

by great black athletes. Maybe black athletes are finally waking up and realizing how much

power they have.” No doubt the events at North Carolina were monitored by presidents and

athletic directors of large Division I schools with football and basketball teams composed

predominantly of black athletes. It is unusual for athletes to take an active role in anything that

might threaten a scholarship or, as professionals, a contract. Activism is even rarer among black

athletes, who often learn to see themselves differently as they find themselves treated differently

from other black students. “A lot of guys on the team were reluctant to get involved at first, until

we explained how important it was and how it went beyond playing football,” Smith said. “It’s not

about just having a building, it’s about power, and building a monument to Dr. Stone and to all

the black people who used to own the land this university was built on.” The big question was

whether or not Michael Jordan would lend his voice to the students’ struggle. After all, they had

proposed that a Jordan library be a part of the project. Jordan’s involvement would have been

the tipping point. Here was a moment when black athletes—at his alma mater—had stepped off

the field to lead a political movement, a model that could have been duplicated at universities all

over the country, and even in the realm of professional sports. This could have been a pivot

point, the moment when black athletes broke their chains and started speaking their own minds.

Jordan, the world’s megastar, could have helped ignite a sea change in the role of the black

athlete in America. He declined. In the end, Jordan refrained from joining the movement. In fact,

he favored the building of a library for family life that had his name on it. He wanted something

for all students, of all races. This was his signature: the universal man. Although eventually the

Sonja Haynes Stone Center Building was constructed,† Jordan’s lack of public support was

telling. At a time when his voice would have strengthened the claims and resolve of the college

athletes who’d put themselves on the line, he was silent—and if anything his comments worked

against them. This little movement for a black cultural center may seem small, but it could have

been the model for how athletes can leverage their power for the larger community. It was a

chance for black athletes to show that they understood the difference between reaping the

rewards of an unfair system and using their real power to change the system. Instead, Jordan,

with one eye on his corporate masters, mouthed his mealy demurrals and stayed on the

sidelines. A lion on the court, he was a lamb when his community needed him. Jordan chose

not to speak on the racial and power dynamics of the NBA and America at large because he

does not relate to the struggle. Because life was not a struggle for him. Rather, he was whisked

down the Conveyor Belt to massive success. Young black athletes are essentially given two

paths: the well-worn Conveyor Belt of the capitalist or the uncharted path of a leader who leads

his people—or at least lends his strength—in struggle. Most choose the path of least resistance:

Most choose to be like Mike, and why not? Unbridled hedonism is a lot more fun than marching

with a tribe of malcontents and nonbelievers through the wilderness in search of an elusive

Promised Land. Mike was a multimillionaire who did not allow race, consciousness, or principle

to get in the way of a making a dollar. He once told a friend not to deal with race “unless they

slap you in the face.” Of course, Abe Pollin eventually slapped Jordan in his face. Jordan was

the carefully chosen prince of hype, the king of commercialism. He was the power structure’s

answer to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Visible so omnipresent, virtually unreal. Much of

Jordan’s commercial appeal was based on the fact that he was nonthreatening. But the

condition for Jordan’s global appeal was his racial and political neutrality. Jordan’s neutrality is in

the tradition of O. J. Simpson, who became the first African American athlete to have a major

presence in the endorsement arena. As Gordie Nye, a vice president at Reebok, stated, “It is

very difficult to find someone who doesn’t alienate part of your market. The thing about Jordan is

that he doesn’t alienate anybody.” “There’s something very American about him,” sociologist

Shelby Steele has said. “He’s the kind of figure who goes down easy with most of America.”

Simply in terms of his economic interests, staying silent on race was the smartest business

move that Jordan could make. Remaining neutral was the only way he could continue to be

marketed as “the embodiment of American virtue.” Almost singlehandedly, Jordan shaped the

face of athletic and urban style: His bald head and long shorts became requirements to be

considered “cool” both on and off the court. Whatever his promotion of choice—be it food,

drinks, clothing, athletic equipment, cars, or restaurants—Jordan sold his playing ability and

personality to sway public opinion in his favor. As a competitor, Jordan’s vim and vigor—his will

to win, his willingness to criticize publicly and abrasively anyone he deemed counter to his

cause—are legendary. No one was spared: coaches, teammates, front-office staff. He reveled in

confrontation. Except when it came to confronting racism. Some have used their platform and

power to confront American racism and promote blacks’ acquisition of true power in the sports

industry. Paul Robeson, the Rutgers All-American, became a radical. Jim Brown organized

African American athletes to support Muhammad Ali when Ali refused to step forward for the

draft. In 1972, Jackie Robinson showed up at Yankee Stadium and said he would be contented

only when there was an African American manager in the dugout. When Kellen Winslow Sr. was

inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1995, he used the occasion to blast the NFL owners for

closed-shop hiring practices. In 1996, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the National

Anthem and was suspended. John Thompson, then head coach at Georgetown University,

walked off the court in 1999 in protest against NCAA legislation that he thought would limit

opportunity for young African American athletes. These are not easy models to follow; each

made some sacrifice. Jackie Robinson was a national hero when he kept his eyes and mouth

shut to injustices, but when he began to speak his mind, he was met with a backlash of

negativity by whites. When Robinson criticized the baseball establishment for its persistent

racism, his popularity plunged. “You owe a great deal to the game,” The Sporting News

instructed him in an editorial. “Put down your hammer, Jackie, and pick up a horn.” Repay

baseball, he was told, with “glad tidings.” During the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, two of the

world’s greatest sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, ran their race and then raised their

fists on the victory stand after winning the gold and bronze medal, respectively. Here they were,

running with USA emblazoned on their chests, and both wanting the watching world to know

that everything was not cool in this fool’s paradise. They protested the condition of inhumanity

that this great democracy imposed upon African American citizens. Smith and Carlos stood in

black socks and black gloves. Afterward, Smith explained that the black socks symbolized the

economic and social disenfranchisement of so many blacks in the United States. The gloves

symbolized the mounting anger, frustration, and fury of so many African Americans,

impoverished, brutalized, and marginalized in the world’s greatest democracy. Twenty-four

years later, Jordan made a “stand” of his own on the medal ceremony at an Olympics game.

Jordan’s “protest” underlined the thickness of his blinders and revealed where his heart lay. I

was in Barcelona in 1992 for the Summer Olympic Games. These games marked the ultimate

triumph of the NBA push for a global presence. Barcelona was the NBA’s Normandy. The 1992

games marked the debut of professional basketball players from the United States participating

in Olympic competition. This was the so-called Dream Team, but some of the things that

happened were a nightmare for Pan-African sentiment, as when Charles Barkley said an

opponent from Africa was concealing a “spear” and told him to go hunting. The most telling part

of the Dream Team’s triumph came on the victory stand after the United States had crushed all

competition. Rather than promote the team’s official sweatsuit, designed by Nike competitor

Reebok, Jordan instead draped himself in the American flag. Not out of patriotism or protest, but

to hide the Reebok label. Refusing to disrespect Nike, Jordan emphatically declared that “I feel

very strongly about loyalty to my own company.” Contemporary black athletes have ridden the

coattails of protest movements, benefiting from the sacrifices of the Robesons and Robinsons

and Jim Browns and Muhammad Alis, but have been content to be symbolic markers of

progress rather than activists in their own right, pushing progress forward. They have been

unwilling to collectively rock the money boat. Ironically, this new lack of interest in the larger

world has occurred just at the moment in their evolution when black athletes have more

economic muscle and cultural influence than ever. At a time when they could actually own the

boat—rather than just rock it—the level of apathy is greater than ever before. The Jordan model

has contributed greatly to this malaise.

* Albert was fired by NBC and resigned as the announcer for Madison Square Garden Network.

In 1998 Albert’s record of misdemeanor assault conviction was cleared. He was rehired by the

MSG Network in 1998 and by Turner Sports in 1999 to announce NBA games for TNT and TBS.

† In 1993, the university’s board of trustees approved the site for the center, assuring the

campus community that it would be integrated into the master construction plan for the

university and serve as a resource for the entire campus.