LeBron James and the impossible task of the black athlete escaping racism

One of the best sounds to ever hit our ears is Kanye West rapping in his 2004 smash hit “All Falls Down,” effortlessly breaking down the struggles attached to modern black life.

How he wrestles with his personal battle with consumerism, the limits of his body, and his wealth is astounding. At the end of verse two, tucked into his convincing flow and the sweet sounds from Syleena Johnson on the hook, sits a harrowing truth.

“Even if you in a Benz, you still a n**** in a coupe.”

In 11 words, Kanye issues a reminder of everything the black body must overcome to truly be free: perception. The majority’s view of black people represents a limit many can’t overcome. There’s a blockade between who they are and how they are seen.

It was notable Wednesday when LeBron James’ Brentwood home in Los Angeles was vandalized. Someone spray-painted a racial slur on his gate. James wasn’t home. But it didn’t make the incident less jarring to him. In one of his first public comments after reckoning with the racist act, James echoed Kanye, in a way.

“No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, being black in America is — it’s tough,” James said. “And we got a long way to go for us a society, for us as African-Americans, until we feel equal in America.”

When commenting on race, James’ messaging is usually sanitized. Not here. Here James hits on the truth he often avoids saying: No one has ever escaped the stigma attached to black skin. No matter how much acclaim black people gain, or money they make, escaping the effects of American racism is impossible. It’s a symptom of the systemic issues America has made, faces, and continues to grapple with.

More specifically, black athletes have often struggled through issues of racism and hostile welcomes to white neighborhoods, like James’ entry into historically white Brentwood in 2015.

The Bacharach Giants, a Negro League baseball team that played in Atlantic City in the 1900s, faced similar hardships. Their name was granted to them, just like other white teams in the city, based on the area or neighborhood or park the team inherited. Bacharach was a famous black-inhabited park on the island.

Long before playing, the differences between the Giants and their opponents were made clear. As Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City detailed, team names alone made the racial differences clear between the two.

These street name changes created subtle boundaries that were observed by both races, especially blacks, who knew they weren’t welcome in white neighborhoods except as workers.

White neighborhoods became understood as unwelcoming of black people and athletes, but that didn’t stop them from moving in. Black athletes playing for local teams had to find places to live and moved there anyway. As more and more black folk entered this domain,the risks of black people moving into white spaces continued to be publicly highlighted.

Bi-racial Hall of Fame guard Lenny Wilkens wrote in his 2001 book, Unguarded: My Forty Years Surviving in the NBA, about how in St. Louis his neighbors poisoned and killed his dog because they didn’t want him in their neighborhood.

We had a collie puppy named Duchess. After a while, the for sale signs weren’t enough, the cold shoulders and stony silence from the neighbors weren’t enough, the ugly glances when they saw us outside weren’t enough.

They had to poison our little dog.

...

Part of you wonders, “What will they do next?” But my wife is a very strong-willed person...if anything that made her more determined to stay. No one was going to scare us, to run us off. We had as much right to live on that street as anyone.

One of the more notable instances of this type of racism was Bill Russell’s documented fight with homeowners and vandals in Boston during his reign with the Celtics. In the ’60s, robbers broke into his home and shit on his bed for buying a house in a white neighborhood. Russell’s teammate K.C. Jones recalled the same in a 2008 interview with Boston Magazine.

“We were living in Framingham when I was a player,” Jones said. “I went to buy a house about five blocks away….The neighbors said they didn’t want any blacks to move into the house.” On another occasion, Jones applied for membership at a country club, but was told they weren’t fond of “entertainers.”

Crime and vandalism is an inescapable reality for black athletes attempting to exist in white spaces. Pro players received hate mail and death threats for decades simply for being black and playing sports. That tradition has now transferred itself to social media, with cowards skulking behind avatars and spewing hate at their athlete of choice.

The change in eras, from letters to Twitter-related racist steam, has not lessened actual hate crimes and personal racist attacks on black people and players. After the 2016 election, New York Giants’ fullback Nikita Whitlock had his home in New Jersey robbed, swastikas spray-painted on his property, and “Go Back To Africa” letters placed around his apartment. His response was, essentially, “if you’re black, this will happen.”

“It just re-establishes that no matter where you are, no matter who you are, this can happen to you,” Whitlock said. “It’s about to be 2017. Oppression, violence, racism, hatred, violence, there’s no need for that.”

These are constant indicators that socioeconomic status does not change how the majority views an individual’s blackness. It is not enough to simply know or say “racism is bad.” We know that. We see that. The ultimate change begins when the conversation transforms from “this is a few bad eggs” or “this is a racist city” to “America is racist.”

The behaviors of few, when consistent, are indicative of the systemic issues in place in every environment in the country. It’s not that Los Angeles, or Brentwood — famous for O.J. Simpson and how his being ignited separate conversations on race — has a history with racism. This is a collective issue, but the onus isn’t on the afflicted to right this transgression.

For the time being, James will be focused on basketball, because, really, what else is he going to do?

In that second verse of “All Falls Down,” Kanye describes running into the stifling brick wall racism can sometimes present. In Kanye’s riff on a sampled Lauryn Hill bop, there’s ecstasy in understanding his present-day America, the same America James still shares, the same America that will continue to see James — arguably the world’s most notable black athlete — as nothing more than just another black man.

“We shine because they hate us.”

And

“Floss ’cause they degrade us.”

Why?

“We tryna buy back our 40 acres.”