Author Roland Lazenby's new book, "Michael Jordan: The Life," details the NBA star's upbringing in North Carolina and touches on the race relations that influenced his life. According to Jordan's interview about the book with www.news.com.au, the former Chicago Bulls star once felt racist "against all white people."
New book discusses a teen Michael Jordan’s feelings about race
Michael Jordan admits he was “against all white people” as a child in interview about new biography.
Mike Powell
According to www.news.com.au, Jordan, in the book written by Roland Lazenby, says he remembers being called the n-word by a girl in school in 1977.
“So I threw a soda at her,” he says. “I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people.”
Jordan said it was his mother who eventually convinced him not to see the world through the perspective of race.
Lazenby calls Jordan's story — from growing up in a Klan-influenced state to becoming an NBA owner — a "black power story." Sports Illustrated interviewed Lazenby about his new book, and the author said that researching Jordan's family history revealed the structure of race relations had a major influence on the player's life.
“As I started looking at newspapers back in this era when I was putting together Dawson Jordan’s [Michael’s great-grandfather] life, the Klan was like a chamber of commerce. It bought the uniforms for ball teams, it put Bibles in all the schools. It may well have ended up being a chamber of commerce if not for all the violence it was perpetrating, too.”
Lazenby said he needed to cut a bit of the race angle from the book, but it no doubt molded the state Jordan grew up in.
More recently of course, Jordan, an owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, was one of the many NBA owners to publicly detest the comments made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, whose was recently recorded spewing racially charged comments to his girlfriend. In a statement released, Jordan said he was "appalled that this type of ignorance still exists within our country and at the highest levels of our sport. In a league where the majority of players are African-American, we cannot and must not tolerate discrimination at any level."
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