Angry White Men

"Like, free from labels, yaknow?"

There will never be an American history that excludes the Angry White Man, insofar as this group has principally defined how the electorate behaves. When those Jamestown natives rebelled against the Cavaliers who sought to protect inherited power, to reap the benefits of commonplace work, and to limit farmers' ability to profit, it was the first of many soft rebellions staged on behalf of the poor white male worker. The labor disputes of the early 20th century, the battles that felled the monopoly (momentarily), were indicative, again, of the Angry White Man declaring what was rightfully his. And now the Tea Party is the millennium era shout-out to those scrappy white folks, unwilling to concede anything without severe negotiations and entrenched discussions.
The NBA boasts these heroes too, often lost accessories in a game of leaping, smiling Negro youths. Only in the modern NBA does the white male experience the wholesale physical colonization that he so often administered in history. And though many of the team owners are white, white players struggle to experience kinship with the executive who would more likely send his family packing than invite them over for dinner. When a white player is able to free himself of the class shackles, stingy stereotypes and novelty amusement puns, he creates a loving tribute to an American tradition. White men can't jump but they can get down, goes the wisdom.

In the millennial era, white players have hued the game so varyingly that American white players, the ones who get compared to railroad workers and blue collars, are often lost in the shuffle. Something about coming through the American college basketball circuit seems to shunt the NBA glam Hollywood edge that would ultimately make white players "cool" by new age standards. But these types, they evade highlight reels like Delonte West does traffic stops. That's why they need their own essay, lest Glenn Beck start lending hugs to sensitive thugs.

In no particular order...

Rebounding: The Other White Meat

Not only does David Lee get the Laugh Factory treatment for his game, he gets traded from young upstart teams to BETTER young upstart teams in the blink of an eye. But you don't have to tell that to Kevin Love, who got his first taste of race discrimination in a draft night trade (by yet another benificent white man, Kevin McHale). The rabbit hole gets deeper.

What can we say about Chris "Birdman" Andersen that hasn't been said? For starters, bravo. Thank you for exposing the greater NBA fanbase to your abuse of drugs, free time and the ability to fly. To Jason Williams, who owns his white man's burden every day with the words inked into his knuckles, we salute you for dribbling the ball so hard, it seems like the ground suffers from your very crossover, rumbles in your passing wake. It's going to take way more than one Miami Heat championship to take the ghettos of Belle, West Virginia out of that man's heart, and fans couldn't be happier.

Just the thought of these ham-and-cheese eating fellows brings to mind the Old Western or Lucky Strike cigarettes, a white American tradition too old to be relevant, but still somehow revered and revisited decade after decade. Sure, Dirk and Pau and Andrea and Danilo are "white" in the sense that they share phenotypes, but they could not be more different in their approach and their rejection of the established in-game hierarchy of American basketball from their Californian and Midwestern counterparts. Even Nash, in his Canadian slick whiteness, parades as something other than the scrappy, utilitarian expectation of American white players. For that grit, we look to Brian Scalabrine, or even his namesake, Brian Cardinal. Imagine an NBA game with more than two Brians on the court at the same time, and you're likely dreaming up some blowout, powered by D-League bombers and 10-day contracts. Though we find these stereotypes problematic, it's been the only way to take notice of anything non-black in professional basketball. Affix white players with the hopes of thousands of Larry Bird fans, celebrate their attention to dirty work and detail, subtly undermine international players who do many of the same things, and here is a myth that's both imitable and rooted.

Still, they have been lost in the endless identity shuffling of the National Basketball Association, which is its own breeding ground for types yet unseen and niches undiscovered. J.J. Redick, for example, makes hay out of his college reputation by remaining a respectable shooter with a layer of defensive tenacity uncommon to most skillful white players. Troy Murphy, also a sharpshooter, has built his staunch reputation by grabbing rebounds with alacrity, a defiant part of his game that functions like a vestige of Angry Whiteness learned in his early years playing. Even when Murphy landed in the perfect role for a shooting player (with both the Golden State Warriors and the Indiana Pacers), he wouldn't easily abandon his dedication to rebounding like a traditional forward, sliding into the paint at opportune times to secure his meal. For every Wonder Bread eating Nick Collison, a fixed tall player limited to one duty, there is a Brad Miller, a tall player bent on exposing and exploiting the other facets of his game. That's what binds American white players in this wilderness: the ability to adapt four or five skills deftly in a game that encourages scattered dozens of skills. Often enough, we assign traits of "whiteness" or of "blackness" based on that adaptability or lack thereof. J.J. Redick is rewarded with a major contract offer after averaging a modest 9.6 points on the promise that his work ethic far outweighs what he could ever bring to the statistical crockpot. J.R. Smith, a better scorer than Redick on the NBA level but certainly as erratic as they come, will suffer both for reasons of perception and comparison. Since there are players doing more with less (white players at that!) Smith will forever be trapped by projections of his own potential. Ironically, Redick has shaken off those expectations by limiting his upside significantly, and making the shots he's best equipped to make, wide open, long-range threes. Although J.R. Smith operates in similar territory, his dunking/slashing/stealing game seems to promise more, so he's evaluated more closely on what he doesn't do, and overlooked largely for his advantages. That's not to say that only white players are noted for their work ethic or for their ability to apply given skills, but there's certainly little mention of black players who do the same unless it's on those aforementioned terms of "whiteness." What's more, when those black role players, blue collars, lunchpails and the like achieve this apogee of skilled play/lesser talent, they're often treated as stars, the implication being that as soon as it's black, it's magic. There can be no black role player if there is also a black star because they're one in the same. Stars get there not through hard work, dedication and focus, but through the enabling powers of his franchise, his agent and starry-eyed fans. Similarly, the white player who has tremendous and surreal abilities (see: Birdman) is written into the same history as Nick Collison, rather average and human in comparison.

So we haven't fully confronted the workload that a post-racial society requires when we reward J.J. Redick and Kevin Love for their ability to hide huge athletic minuses, but sour on Ron Artest when his game takes a turn for the Hoosier, methodical and understated. Even so, the NBA is the one league chocked with these examples of stereotype-busting white boys and hard-to-label black boys; and it forces us to look at why we haven't strayed far from the Jordan/Magic/Bird examples when there are so many descendants of those types who fall squarely in between their fault lines.

Lately, I haven't been feeling like myself.