Deadline sports writer Carron J. Phillips described Sunday’s NBA Playoff games, held a day after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, as “what white supremacy looks like.”
WHAT HE SAID
“Sports only serve as an escape from society if you’re white,” Phillips wrote Monday, reflecting on the pair of Game 7s and the apparently racist massacre of 10 people at a supermarket.
“Three of the four head coaches are Black, along with the overwhelming majority of those teams’ rosters. However, in Boston — where one of the games was played — over 52 percent of the population is white, according to the latest census. And in Phoenix, where the Suns were the host, over 68 percent of the residents are white,” observed Phillips, who is black.
- “What does this mean? … That a day after Black America was shaken to its core because we’ve now realized that a grocery store on ‘our side of town’ has become the latest place where we can be killed just for existing, Black players from the Celtics, Bucks, Suns and Mavericks had to play in a win-or-go-home game to advance to the conference finals, despite the feelings that all of us were experiencing. And yet, no one seemed to care or ask them about it. It was clear that basketball mattered, but not Black lives or the Black psyche so much.”
- The article — headlined “White fans were entertained by Black athletes a day after a racist killed Black people in Buffalo — this is what white supremacy looks like” — was criticized by conservative commentators for reflecting black and white thinking about race.
SAME ENERGY
Many prominent liberals have suggested the Buffalo shooter was a product of systemic American racism, particularly on the right.
- “White people have told people who look like me … ‘It is fine to be a minority. You can do it!,” New York Times columnist Charles Blow said on MSNBC Sunday.
- “The moment that white people SENSE that they can be on the verge of being a minority themselves, many of them are responding with terrorism and KILLING people.”