Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/23/karim-abdul-jabbar-explains-th.html
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KA-J has actually become quite the prolific writer and activist since his NBA days.
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Nice. I think this sorta explains why I had mixed feelings about the new Chapelle special. When he’s talking about certain topics, like race, drugs, and his personal life he’s doing the one thing - making people uncomfortable to expose prejudice. When he talks about certain other topics - like Louis CK and cancel culture or LGBT people he’s doing the other thing. Making us uncomfortable to take the conversation back to a time before we had progressed.
(Edited because my phone does weird incorrect autocorrects when I’m typing)
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He has at that.
There is something about old school athletes like him that have transcended their original profession. Compared to modern guys like Antonio Brown and others.
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I would say Dwayne Johnson, but he wasn’t much of a professional athlete per se. He was always an actor. Professional wrestling is glorified acting/stuntwork.
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He’s also a serious historian of black America. He was one of those rare superstar student-athletes who insisted on taking academics as seriously as basketball when he was at UCLA.
While I’d love to see him run for public office and bring his knowledge and life experience with him, I also know he’s too decent an individual for that world.
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He has an incredible ability to explain ‘why something is wrong’ to people who are looking the wrong direction.
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There’s plenty of older athletes who were assholes too, you just don’t really hear about them much any more.
And as far as modern athletes, there’s more than a few modern athletes that have done good work off the field that has transcended their athletic achievements (Chris Kluwe, Lebron James, and Colin Kaepernick, for example).
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Agreed; he has a very accessible, down-to-earth way of communicating.
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That’s a really succinct and accurate way to describe his skill. It’s a distinct contrast to those who use “hey, look over here!” to point people away from where they should be looking.
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Given how troubled and belabored that production was (Game of Death) I would suspect a lot of good natured clowning around and jokes during the frequent down time. Because I can’t picture either of them acting like prima donnas on the set.
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my statement was not an absolute (all older athletes are amazing, all newer are terribad). It’s more than there are more of an older grouping who have come out in later years as advocates in various degrees for a variety of social good.
And the percentage of modern athletes post-career is greater wherein they are bad examples of anything positive.
There’s a major selection bias there though since we haven’t yet seen what younger generations of athletes will choose to do with their “later years.”
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The entire article is really good; totally worth the read.
And his personal standards for assessing bigoted behavior in current times is a really useful guide, IMO:
"The best way to assess the difference is to ask three questions:
First, when were the offensive remarks made?
We have to accept that historical context is a mitigating circumstance.The second question is: Has the person changed their attitude to reflect the current times? While a person may have made derogatory comments in the past, they might have learned from those mistakes, and that learning should be reflected in their current commentary.
The third question is: How sincere is their apology?"
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As we recently re-discovered in the Trudeau topics, there are still too many people (including self-described progressives) unwilling to ask those questions if they bring into doubt the “right” of white cisgender males to do or say whatever they want without facing consequences or criticism.
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I’m down with this, as long as people aren’t arguing that about bigotries that were generally known to be bigotries, even generations ago.
It’s also not useful when people use that to argue that everybody in the past was fine with all expressions, when they usually truly mean white people in the past or some other limited set that excludes anybody offended.
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