Professional basketball fans, by choice and circumstance, celebrate
black masculinity. But certain fans celebrate only a less-threatening
black masculinity. When it comes to basketball, those fans only admire
black hoopsters who play the game “the right way.”
And, yes, I too love the pick-and-roll, help defense, and the
midrange jump shot. If this were poetry, we’d refer to those basics as
rhyme and meter.
But in the professional game, the best players also create in free
verse. They are improvisational geniuses. They play beyond the
boundaries of the game. They are dangerous.
If Barack Hussein Obama wins the Democratic presidential nomination,
we’re going to find out what kind of hoopster poet he is. And I refer
to Obama by his full name because the right-wingers will create
campaign ads that fill our airwaves with that scary middle name.
They’ll show blurry photos of Muslim men, potential terrorists, who may
have once shared a classroom with Obama. Netflix will have to order
10,000 more copies of The Manchurian Candidate to fill the
requests of conservative cinemaniacs.
White liberals love Obama because he’s not dangerous; white
conservatives want to make him dangerous. Let’s see who wins. 