Black Planet: Facing Race During an Nba Season - Hardcover

The acclaimed author of Remote and a lifelong basketball fan provides a season-long study of the Seattle Sonics, discussing the players, coaches, agents, games, fans, and the role of race in a sport dominated by African-American athletes. 35,000 first printing.

Basketball Association is a place where, without ever acknowledging it, white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. In Black Planet, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans--including especially himself--think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies.

During the 1994-95 NBA season, Shields went to the Seattle SuperSonics' home games; watched their away games on TV; listened to interviews and call-in shows; talked, or tried to talk, to players, coaches, and agents; attended charity events; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the Web. He kept a journal and over the next few years transformed that journal into this book, which is focused sharply on white spectators' relationship to black athletes, in particular Shields' own identification with Gary Payton, the team's language-besotted point-guard.

Through the apparently simple veh