Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season - Softcover

Shields, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803293542 ISBN 13: 9780803293540

Publisher: Bison Books, 2006

Synopsis

The National Basketball Association is a place where white fans and black players enact virtually every racial issue and tension in U.S. culture. Following the Seattle SuperSonics for an entire season, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans—including especially himself—think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, and black bodies.   Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN USA Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 1999 by Esquire, Newsday, Los Angeles Weekly, and Amazon.com.   Purchase the audio edition.

About this title

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 the Back Cover

"You don't need to be a sports fan to experience this book as a rare, troubling map of the seldom charted, subterranean regions of the souls of white folk."
-- Charles Johnson

"Shields picks apart nearly every illusion we have about race and athletics in America, and the subtly pernicious ways in which they interact."
-- LA Weekly

"An invaluable contribution to the nation's dialogue on race."
-- Sport Magazine

"A risky and brilliant book -- an emotional journey into Jock Culture's heart of darkness."
-- Robert Lipsyte, New York Times

"Black Planet is a funny, wickedly observant, highly intelligent book about Us and Them, I and Thou, black and white, male and female, parent and child, spectator and star."         
-- Jonathan Raban

"One of Our Favorite Reads of 1999. Black Planet blends a deceptive informality with a relentless tendency toward self-reflection . . . . [Shields] picks apart nearly every illusion we have about race and athletics in America."--Los Angeles Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0803293542
• ISBN 13: 9780803293540
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226