Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "11.5.94-My initial impression, as I stand next to the Seattle SuperSonics in the locker room an hour before the first game of the season, is..." (more)
Key Phrases: press row, foul trouble, technical foul, Gary Payton, New York, George Karl (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his earlier work, David Shields came across as a fairly traditional storyteller. Even Dead Languages, his fictional rumination on a stutterer's tongue-tied existence, was essentially a coming-of-age story. But he began to show his true colors with Remote, a fractured, full-body immersion in media culture. This deeply amusing work of nonfiction revealed the author to be a neurotic, navel-gazing cousin of Nicholson Baker. Now comes Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, whose putative topic--professional basketball--would seem to return Shields to his extroverted roots. (His first novel, in fact, revolved around a college basketball player.) Yet this is ultimately as postmodernist a work as its predecessor, and it takes us not only into the author's heart but his boudoir. Black Planet's fusion of public spectacle with private mortification makes it his funniest book to date.

A word of explanation: technically speaking, Black Planet is a chronicle of the Seattle SuperSonics during the 1994-1995 season. Since the team blew its shot at the playoffs, there's no chance for an uplifting grand finale. Yet Shields had a different sort of hoop dream in mind from the very beginning. "The NBA," he writes, "is a place where, without ever acknowledging it--and because it's never acknowledged, it's that much more potent and telling--white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. Race, the league's taboo topic, is the league's true subject." It's the author's true subject, too, and he goes at it from every angle--attending games, recording call-in radio shows, and making some abortive attempts to cozy up to the players. Point guard Gary Payton is his true Penelope. Why? Well, his motormouth style does suggest an "indivisibility... of playing and talking, of life and language." But more to the point, he offers a handy tabula rasa for Shields's fantasy life, a trash-talking personification of bad behavior: "Which is why, in Seattle the Good, I so love Gary Payton. He's not really bad, he's only pretend-bad--I know that--but he allows me to fantasize about being bad."

If Shields were simply slapping society on the wrist for its half-submerged racism, Black Planet would wear out its welcome in the first quarter. But he's consistently hardest on himself, so the book becomes not only a social critique but a critique of social critiques, cutting the ground from under itself in an infinite and entertaining loop-the-loop. Shields may not be the first writer to transform a fan's notes into literary gold--Frederick Exley beat him to the punch--but he's the most rigorously intelligent one in a long, long time. Swish! --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly

"Race, the league's taboo topic, is the league's true subject," asserts Shields at the outset of this provocative look at the National Basketball Association and its significance in American society. Composed in diary form and told in an intimate, confessional style, the book chronicles the Seattle Supersonics' 1994-95 season. A novelist (Dead Languages, etc.) and professor of English on sabbatical to cover the Sonics for a local weekly, Shields spent the year attending games, listening to radio call-in shows, reading Internet chat discussions and deconstructing like crazy, "to the point of obsession," the relationship between white fans (like him) and the black athletes who make up the majority of players in the NBA. Filled with intelligent juxtapositions, bold observations and graceful writing, Shields's narrative is highly personal and studded with humor (which almost always comes at his own expense). He draws a connection between his fervor for the team and his latent desire to rebel in society generally, feeling that "I'm some sort of potentially subversive individual and the Supes are my surrogate subversives." More particularly, Shields is fixated on the Sonics' feisty point guard and leader, Gary Payton, reveling in Payton's zest for language even as he reflects on his own insecurities about a stuttering problem. In analyzing the ongoing community conversation, Shields often articulates his perception that the subtext of everything said in or about the NBA is about race, while in public the topic is never broached. Although Shields executes this obsessive dissection with aplomb, it's hard to match his zeal and a little exhausting, in the end, to read every daily interaction as code. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st Printing edition (October 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 060960452X
• ISBN-13: 978-0609604526
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,723,835 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Artest & O'Neal vs. Piston Fans: The Prequel, January 3, 2000

By A Customer

"Black Planet" is in the same excellent league as Frank Fitzpatrick's "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down", the story of the first NCAA Division I championship team to start five blacks (Texas-Western, now UTEP). Both books probe many of the same social and psychological issues at the core of the relationship between black athletes and white America. Although the periods covered by the books are 30 years and a generation apart the social and psychological racial divide so well researched and accurately chronicled in "Walls" remains relatively intact in the 21st century.

The difference between then and now, and one of the many ironies pointed out in the book, is that the players have amassed enough power and influence as a result of legions of adoring/resentful white fans, to maintain a distance from those same fans while exercising a much greater degree of control over the game/industry of basketball.

In summary I found "Black Planet" to be a stunningly honest set of reflections on the somewhat unique historical predicament of being an American white male spectator of a multimillion dollar game/industry dominated by a super-elite group of 300 black athletes.

Unfortunately I can't see this book getting the attention it deserves, way too many uncomfortable truths directed at individuals and groups (sports media, sports advertising, white fans) who see themselves as color-blind and become stridently indignant when anyone has the temerity to even suggest otherwise.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A shrewd take on (still) the American Dilemma, November 15, 1999

By A Customer

Racial pieties are a dime a dozen, but David Shields has given us something considerably more valuable here. His book is an unusually honest look at the agonizing and embarrassing thorn in our collective sides--race. Yet he never falls into the sort of gasbag generalizations and reflexive hand-wringing that the issue provokes in most pundits (the reason being that he's not, thank god, a pundit). It's also funny, which is more than you can say for Gunnar Myrdal.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This book is honest, September 4, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (Paperback)

This book is courageous in attempting to take an honest look at something we're all tired of talking about, but is still a very real problem facing America: the salience of racism.

What better arena to examine the still lingering remnants of racism in this great country of ours then sports -- and more specifically, the NBA.

In a league dominated by African American players, where the term "minority" is given a new meaning, Shields begins this book by observing and analyzing the very real, but often ignored racial dynamic.

Contrary to popular belief, and as this book shows, racism is a problem in this country -- one that doesn't end just because one steps off the street and onto a basketball court.

BUT THIS BOOK ISN"T ABOUT RACISM, per se, but the power of human perspective.

Shields has a fascination with observing African American players, but documents his very real opinions and emotions as it relates to what he observes.

The twist is he goes back-and-forth analyzing how his opinions, judgments and thoughts are all shaped, in part, by who he is as a middle aged white man (not meant to sound negative, just truthful).

Truth is everybody, black, white or whatever, uses such lenses when viewing society. Sociology supports this theory (but that's another subject).

Shields uses his book to function as somewhat of a microcosm for how whites view blacks in this country by exploring how sport -- specifically here the popularity and racial makeup of the NBA -- exploits, exposes and reveals every racial attitude, myth and misconception some whites have about blacks.

Black Planet is a magnifying glass that flips the script on the mainstream while showing the power of difference and misunderstanding.

I, as an African American sports writer, also find this book humorous just to see the number of white-bread reporters whose attempts to sound more urban, hip & cool when dealing with black athletes are, unbeknowngst to the reporters, igorant, condescending and insulting.

This alone is a bold-faced reflection that books are still judged by their covers.

The astounding part of the issue Black Planet addresses is the fact that White America can pretty much live in ignorance -- involuntarily and unknowingly -- to the great divide in how African Americans experience this country.

But one of the few avenues in which White America is forced to care and at least deal with the difference in experience is sport -- and especially the NBA.

Shields' is honest and I'd say accurate in his assessment of how race does in fact play a critical part in how sports reporters interact with and interpret the actions of black athletes -- something to think about the next time we pick up our papers and read a story about Allen Iverson, Randy Moss (or for that matter, Kobe Bryant).