It was the synergy no one said wouldn’t happen: I have a guest lecture on FreeDarko today comparing racism and ethnic hatred in European soccer and the NBA. If you’re a basketball fan, and you read this site, and you aren’t reading FreeDarko, first of all, welcome back from your spiralling journey through remote dimensions of the unconscious, and second of all, you will want to check it out. If you’re mainly a soccer fan, start here, where there’s still some kicking.
Read More: Basketball, FreeDarko
by Brian Phillips · March 8, 2009
A fantastic piece Brian. Still, a troubling American assumption in analyzing race is the stale black-white lens. Asians and Hispanics are changing this dynamic with our trailers full of Catholic babies. We also cast light on the fact that, in a sense, Black-White relations stem from a tension in American society as a whole between the “self-made, meritocratic individual” vs. the society and what govt owes the citizen.
Oftentimes, we put on glasses to analyze individual situations. For example, we notice when a black person is on welfare, but not a white person. From a Hispanic perspective, when we are late, we worry if the supervisor is anglo.
Still, the success of African players in the EPL as compared to La Liga and Italy indicates that the “glaring differences” disappear between black/white. Tommy Smyth and co. use the discourse of “physical domination” when referring to black and white players. “Gerrard is a horse. Lampard pushes his team forward. Bendtner is so strong.” This discourse is not as highly valued in other parts of the world.
And it is a source of mockery. Oftentimes anglo and black players are ridiculed for “el efecto caballo,” whereby they play a vertical game and focus on the goal, as opposed to using width. Yet the UK isles love horse races. In Spanish, the word for horse “caballo” and gentleman “caballero” are similar. And teh saying is “its better to be a gentleman than a horse.” But Tommy Smyth does not agree.
brilliant, a juxtaposition brought about from the heavens, if only to be able to see both Avram Grant and Ajax mentioned under the big, bright Freedarko lights
Elliott, that’s one of the points I was hoping to make with the piece, actually. The black/white binary is absolutely central in American sports in a way it isn’t in Europe. Time and demographics are going to change that, and the faster basketball transforms into a global sport, the faster that change will be. My question is what happens to the American conception of the game once it’s no longer defined by the principal crisis of American history.