Some disconcerting news over the past week or so. It's funny how these stories pile up over the course of one week. I was only going to report on one of them, then one became two, which became three, then four...Mark Cuban reported on
Genarlow Wilson. After you read the gripping and infuriating
ESPN article on Genarlow, written passionately by Wright Thompson, you'll definitely want to go sign the
online petition. Sign one for each of all your family members, please.
We've written about
James Love,
Allen Iverson and
Kevin Johnson, and the
"Iraq at home" before, and Genarlow's hometown seems to similarly have a
high crime index when compared to a big city like SF.
Things don't get any brighter with Richmond High hoops star
Eli Holman forced to move away from the "Iraq at home" so he can attend Indiana University next year in one piece, in a story told by SF Chronicle's Chip Johnson.
And speaking of Iraq, guess what suffers from the zero-sum game of war financing,
"a casualty of other wars" (from Josh Meyer of the Los Angeles Times)? Yep, the very war on drugs, of which our kids who love to hoop just like us are trying to avoid becoming innocent bystander victims.
In the SportsBusiness Journal this week Femi Shote reports that William C. Rhoden's book,
Forty Million Dollar Slaves, whose title is a reference to a fan who heckled former UNLV and NBA star
Larry Johnson as "nothing but a $40 million slave", is basically on point:
Rhoden demonstrates how reintegration [of the modern black athlete into white ownership structures and institutions] resembles a reckless mining operation when precious raw materials are extracted, leaving the environment, the cultures and the people of the area laid to waste. Reintegration extracts the labor of black athletes but leaves black institutions in ruin.
As an observer who is neither white or black, at first you wonder if the term "slave" attached to a $40 million NBA contract isn't disrespectful to those ancestors who were truly slaves, just as you wonder after watching the movie
The Pianist if "ghetto" is an appropriate term for the modern-day "projects", but then you consider some of the environments that young blacks and perhaps other people stuck in similar class structures must grow up in, the James Loves, the Genarlow Wilsons, the Kevin Johnsons, the Eli Holmans...and you start to see their point of view.
It's as if there's an invisible Civil War going on.
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Labels: allen iverson, eli holman, genarlow wilson, iraq, james love, kevin johnson, larry johnson, mark cuban, violence
