LeBron and His Haters

There's a terrific article up at the brilliant new website The Undefeated about LeBron James and the (to me) inexplicable hostility that he has engendered among fans. Note to everybody: go check out The Undefeated. It's wonderful: it's sports and culture and race and reason all mixed together and shaken up.

Anyway, I've always believed that most of the fans who dislike LeBron do so out of, well, racism. Not necessarily burning crosses on the lawn, White Power, swastikas tattooed on the neck racism, but a more subtle, unconscious form of the disease. LeBron's big sin for these people is that he is a strong, oversized black man who decided to bypass the traditional framework of white ownership of black athletes and determine his own future.

LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh got together - eschewing any interference from the white men in suits who generally comprise the general managers of the various teams of the NBA - and decided that they were going to join forces and see what they could accomplish on the same team. I'm not sure if this move was completely unprecedented in the history of American professional basketball, but it is certainly a rare occurrence and, insofar as it was a direct attack on the logic of white ownership over dynamic and athletic black men, it presented a problem to many white people.

Again, in a vain attempt to soothe the hurt feelings of self-styled non-racist white LeBron haters out there, I am not saying that you are a Klansman, nor am I implying that you are a David Duke fanboy. Racism is rarely that overt. Racism often takes the form of the unconscious reactions that we have to external stimuli, the nagging discomfort that we get at a novel situation that threatens to undo our preconceived notions of how members of different groups of people are allowed to behave.

LeBron's sin, in my humble opinion, was that he dared to act like a professional man and grab the reins of his own destiny. The status quo of professional basketball in America to that point had been that white owners and general managers of teams have the God-given right to determine the future of the black players in their employ. Sure, players can earn their status as free agents and may decide to take their talents to any team in the league, and this is mostly uncontroversial these days. What LeBron, Dwayne, and Chris did, however, is to seize the role of general manager for themselves and to decide without interference how their team was going to be composed.

LeBron's sin, in other words, was to defy the racist hierarchy of the NBA and, by extension, the racist hierarchy of American society. And this is a sin for which many white people will never forgive him.