Some guys you don't want to give a platform, if you're uncomfortable hearing the truth. So maybe it was a tactical mistake on someone's part to offer one to Oscar Robertson last night, on the occasion of him being given a lifetime achievement award by the NBA.
Oscar, as he is wont to do as a black man in America who has never been shy about speaking out, gave us all some hard reality to chew on.
He said there was a lot of injustice going on in this country right now, same as there was when he was coming up. Oscar grew up in Indiana in the 1950s, not an optimum time or place to grow up if you were a person of color. He lived in a segregated housing development in Indianapolis, and when he and his Crispus Attucks teammates became the first predominantly black school to win the state basketball title in a state that regarded basketball as a religious artifact, they did not get the Milan treatment from the year before.
No, sir. The white kids from Milan got what amounted to a parade all the way back from Indy. The black kids from Attucks -- even though they had just delivered the first state title ever for an Indianapolis school -- were told they couldn't even hold a parade downtown.
That sort of injustice wounds, and, if you are a man of principle and character, it makes you unafraid to speak out thereafter. And so in the '60s, when they all came of age, Oscar spoke out and Bill Russell did and Jim Brown did. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists into the Mexico City night. Muhammad Ali gave up his title and his livelihood.
In so doing, they got pretty much the same pushback from white America that Colin Kaepernick and the NFL kneelers are getting now. Which suggests we haven't moved as far as we like to believe in how we regard racial injustice. African-Americans still see it every day; too much of white America still denies it exists or it's overblown or it's just those black folk whining again.
And so to last night, when Oscar Robertson said that had to change.
"The only thing that really bothers me is where are the white athletes when this is happening?" he said. "This is not a black athlete problem. You see injustice in the world. It's all around you. Just because LeBron steps out, I'm glad he does. I hope some other players -- because this is what they believe -- I mean, what do you want players to do? Shut up and dribble?
"I think it's time for them to say what they want to say about life and about politics and things about the street and whatnot. And about education. They're a lot of players donating money back into different colleges. But it seems that what we have today is a system where you don't want players to say anything at all."
He's right about that. The effective muzzling of Kaepernick and the kneelers by the NFL is Exhibit A. Cowed as men like Robertson have never been, the NFL knuckled under to the demagoguery of a regressive oaf whose racial sensibilities align as openly with white supremacists (sanitized these days as "white nationalists") as any president's ever have. The demagogue, as demagogues are so adept at doing, stole the message of the players' and made it about something it's not. And that, Robertson intimated, can only happen if blacks and whites -- particularly those with the platform professional athletes have -- do not stand together against it as a united front.
There is, after all, so much to stand against these days in the demagogue's America. So much.
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