(Originally published on June 20, 2019)
When Zion Williamson goes number one in the NBA draft tonight, many platitudes will be offered. Some will be completely basketball based, such as his explosiveness, his “handle” (dribbling ability) etc. Others will not have anything to do with basketball, such as his humble beginnings and the one that annoys the hell out of me most will be, “he has such a great smile!”
I have been a sports fan for my entire conscious life. I am now 52 years old and not once can I recall sports commentators swooning over the smile of a White athlete the way they do over that of a Black athlete.
The Black athlete’s smile is one of many “dog whistle” codes in sports used to discuss race while maintaining plausible deniability that one is in fact talking about race. Others are “how hard he works” and “how scrappy he is”. Translation: White. Then there is “God-given talent” and “head case”. Translation: Black
Surely, some will say that I am over-reacting and that it is really just a simple compliment that actually could lead to lucrative commercial endorsements for the Black athlete. There certainly is something to the endorsement angle. My contention is that the Black athlete’s smile is selling more than a product or service to America. It sells the assuaging of White guilt for America’s past AND present transgressions and oppression of Black people. The Black athlete’s smile reassures America that everything is all right and that Black people are content and have no interest in rising up and revolting. There is no better platform for the delivery of this reassurance than one in which the highest profile Black men in America reside and that would be professional sports. Not only are they the most recognizable, but they are, relatively speaking, the biggest, fastest, and strongest. If they are reassuring, there is little reason to fear the rest of us.
In reality, it is just the opposite. The professional Black athlete’s life is so diametrically at odds with that of the masses of Black people from a material perspective, to the point of it being a total misrepresentative sample. The rebels of Ferguson and Baltimore should be what America pays more attention to than the smile of the Black athlete.
What is fascinating about this is the fact that it is not at all a conscious process. Even marketers, who correctly think that Zion Williamson would be a good pitchperson, do not fully understand the WHY. We have been so well schooled in the do’s and don’ts of racial etiquette and social mores to the point that we act and react on automatic pilot.
That etiquette has been interrupted by the current presidential administration which has unmasked and put away all of the previously agreed upon rules regarding race. At the same time, the president has made it blatantly clear how he feels about Black athletes, when he referred to NFL players who kneeled in protest to racial injustice, overwhelmingly Blacks, as “Sons of Bitches”.
Perhaps now, more people can understand why the great sportswriter William C. Rhoden called his book, “40 Million Dollar Slaves”. One of its central points is that regardless of the Black athlete’s wealth, his ultimate role is his usefulness to White America, be it from an entertainment standpoint, commercial standpoint, or psychological guilt relief.
The good news is that the Black athlete is perhaps more conscious of these factors than at any time since the 1960s. We have the various intersectional movements to thank for this to include Black Lives Matter.
If America is interested in moving forward on the issue of race, it must pay much more attention to the pain and experience of everyday Black folks. One way to do this would be to honestly assess, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, the legacy of Slavery and Jim Crow. The current reparations discussions in Congress is a place to start. If we have that honest assessment, we will come to understand that all of the combined wealth of the Black athlete to include Michael Jordan and LeBron James would be pennies on the dollar compared to the wealth created by slavery and inherited by White America, be it in terms of privilege and or capitol. That reality cannot be dismissed with a smile.
