Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

by David Shields

Book Overview

The National Basketball Association is a place where, without ever acknowledging it, white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. In Black Planet, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans--including especially himself--think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies. During the 1994-95 NBA season, Shields went to the Seattle...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 060960452X
• ISBN13: 9780609604526
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Crown
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating

Insightful, observant and brave, David Shields' Black Planet is a thought-provoking look at America's sports culture and, ultimately, America's culture in general. Never afraid to use himself as a subject, the author takes a look at the racial dynamic apparant -but rarely confronted upon- in the NBA. Even for the non-sports fan, this book will prove to be an enlightening read because basketball only provides the backdrop for the author's exploration of society and self. It should be noted that the author is not a sports writer. In fact, the author often seems out of place in the various professional basketball environments he roams and inhabits in the book. Such a feeling of disconnect, however, aids the text, I believe; such an outside-looking-in perspective gives the book a voice I suspect many readers will recognize--their own.

A sports book for intellectuals

Remote is an intelligent exploration of the deeper meanings of basketball. David Shields follows the Seattle Sonics during the '94-'95 season, commenting not only on the dynamics of play but also on issues of race and our need for the other, for transcendence from our lives through sports fandom.So compelling is Shield's case for an intellectual take on basketball that I, a nonsportsfan type, began watching basketball games after reading this book. If you're up for delving into the greater meanings of fandom and the catharsis of sports, this is a great book to read. If you're a fan looking for basketball stats and play by play description look elsewhere. This is more than just a book about sports--it's a book about what sports mean to us.

Not your typical sports diary -- thank goodness!

If you want a book that goes beyond the every day box scores and cliche quotes, and actually gets you to think about important issues such as race, this is the book for you. Shields dives into the NBA season and comes out with a perspective on how he and other white people view blacks, black athletes and the world both races live in. It had me thinking more about race than I ever have. In an arena composed of rich, white fans watching former poor black athletes rise to the top of the sporting world, Shields breaks it all down for us, and candidly reveals his own shortcomings and faults regarding this issue. It takes guts for a writer to take on himself. An excellent book on an excellent topic: race. Basketball is the sub-topic. If you want to THINK about race and have perhaps some of your own perceptions changed, get this book.

Don't believe the anti-hype

I do hope the sensible among you will ignore the two reviews posted before mine. These people are, simply put, missing just about everything important about the book. I truly doubt they did more than skim the chapter headings. Shields is, as literate people know, an astute and frequently brilliant excavator of the American psyche, and Black Planet is his most mature and unrelentingly provocative book yet. If you have courage, and appreciate a writer who can combine great wit, personal revelation, probing sociological analysis -- all while telling a strangely thrilling story of an NBA season, in diary form -- then please read this book. It is a truly important book. Shy of the work of Stanley Crouch, this is perhaps the most raw and honest work about race in America published in the last ten years.

A shrewd take on (still) the American Dilemma

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.