Watching the NBA draft is pretty funny. Commissioner David Stern, a short, gray-haired, slightly portly white guy, gets on stage and shakes hands with a 20-year-old black uber-athletes whom he couldn't look in the eye if he had a stool. Few pairs of people have ever looked more diametrically opposite.
This past Monday, Stern proved that the difference was more than superficial. Or perhaps, in a way, it's not.
The league instituted a dress code for NBA players, mandating that they sport "business casual" attire when they're on team or league business. "Team or league business" includes arriving at and leaving from games, as well as on team flights.
Banned are t-shirts, sleeveless shirts, sunglasses while indoors, headgear of any kind, chains and medallions, and many other articles of clothing. Essentially, what Stern is most explicitly censoring is the look a middle-aged white man who has seen the trailer for 8 Mile would call "hip-hop."
Sure, lots of businesses have dress codes, but how many firms demand that their employees stay in their suits while going to and from work? Or on planes? On top of that, professional basketball players already have a dress code -- the uniforms that they wear on the court.
Stern claimed on http://www.espn.com that the dress code is only different for the seemingly narrow category of "NBA business," but his definition of NBA business is eerily broad. Players attending NBA games -- not playing in them or sitting on the bench with a team -- are required to wear sport coats and dress shoes.
It seems like any public appearance where a player could loosely be considered to be representing the team or league (which is always) falls under the dress code's jurisdiction.
Stern clearly wants to change more than just his players' clothes; he wants to change his players' image. In a game played by young black men and watched by old white men, Stern wants his players to look white. Threatened by how the white businessmen buying the tickets perceive these "gangsta"-looking black men, Stern had a kneejerk censorship reaction, compromising the cultural character of his league.
It's about time for me to bring out the R-word: racist. Throughout the media and especially in sports, racism has become so taboo that most people blindly choose to think that it doesn't exist. When these "uppity, rich black athletes" cry racism, sports journalists are quick to lambast them as spoiled without ever considering that racism might be alive and well in the 21st century.
It happened to Barry Bonds when he said that Boston was a racist city (even though history was on his side). It happened to Jermaine O'Neal when he decried the raising of the NBA draft age (despite his salient points about how no one has any problem with 14-year-old soccer phenoms or teenage golf pros).
And it's probably going to happen to the O'Neal's teammate, Pacers guard Stephen Jackson.
"I think it's a racist statement because a lot of the guys who are wearing chains are my age and are black," said Jackson, 27, to espn.com.
Jackson, who wore all of his chains in protest, isn't the only player speaking out. Allen Iverson has come out against the ban. Tim Duncan sat on the bench for a preseason game in jeans and a T-shirt.
These protests aren't coming out of nowhere. If Stern simply wants to make the league more "classy," then someone should note that the banned chains and "headgear" (read: do-rags) are not automatically classless. What they are, however, is predominantly worn by black people. Stern's ban on them sends a message that clothing that is perfectly stylish on the cultural stage is inappropriate for the limelight. What is appropriate, of course, is white-sanctioned business casual.
Black clothing stereotypes aren't new in the NBA. Charlotte Bobcats forward Marvin Ely was shot and robbed, and days later some of his jewelry was recovered. The headline in The Charlotte Observer? "Ely's Bling Bling is Found!"
Jewelry worn by black people is automatically "bling bling." Would anyone even think to use that headline for a white athlete? So too is Stern's dress code targeted, as Jackson pointed out, at young black men.
Moreover, Stern's dialogue about the policy rings of condescension.
"If they really have a problem," said Stern to espn.com, "they will have to make a decision about how they want to spend their adult life in terms of playing in the NBA or not."
No room for disagreement, valid concerns or not. And there are plenty of concerns, such as Stern's allusion to possible draconian measures of enforcement.
He didn't offer specifics, but he said to espn.com that the league "will use a broad range of authority" to enforce the policy. For infractions, punishment begins with fines and could extend to suspensions for repeat offenders.
Perhaps after Ron Artest charged the stands last year, the NBA needs a bit of an image makeover. But the answer is not dressing it up. As Allen Iverson said to the Philadelphia Daily News, "Just because you put a guy in a tuxedo, it doesn't mean he's a good guy." Covering a problem up is only so effective and only lasts so long.
After an outburst of religious violence, France issued a ban on publicly visible religious attire. That move, like Stern's dress code, only deepened the cultural rift between the two camps.
The NBA needs to embrace the symbiotic cultural relationship between its players and the entire youth culture (not even just black culture). Maybe then we'll see Stern shaking Stephen Jackson's hand, and it will make perfect sense.
