Raptors 123, Knicks 121 (OT): Clearly uncomfortable
A tough home loss wasn’t the biggest takeaway from this one.
“I received a letter this morning,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “from a white brother in Texas which said, ‘All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.’
“All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”
Yesterday the New York Knicks lost a basketball game, 123-121 in overtime against the Toronto Raptors, a game the NBA claims is a “celebration” of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The game came 10 days after President Joe Biden announced an expanded policy of denying immigration to mostly Brown people fleeing corrupt, violent governments, often in power due to support from the American government. “We can’t stop people from making the journey,” Biden said. “But we can require that they come here in an orderly way under U.S. law.”
To which King may have repeated another bit from his letter: “ . . . the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’”
People are risking their families’ lives to flee Hell. Quoth Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.” To which a president who is largely in power simply for not being the cartoonish racist that preceded him waves his hand, smiles his Skeletor grin and tells the huddled masses to wait for a more convenient season to be oppressed.
If you’re waiting for a deep-dive into Tom Thibodeau’s rotation decisions, this ain’t it. I spent yesterday’s game trying to understand how the same NBA that opposed its majority Black workforce boycotting games after Kyle Rittenhouse murdered Black Lives Matter protestors simply hands out some jerseys with social justice fortune cookie slogans on the back and here we are, a few years later, and . . . people are cool? With everything? People are comfortable?
By which I mean some people. By which I mean you know which people I mean. Maybe you’re those people.
When the final buzzer sounded at the end of the overtime loss, many people who will never be stopped or shot by cops because they’re on the light-to-white-is-right spectrum drove home to Westchester, or they took the train back to Long Island, whether West Hempstead or Smithtown or other “good” towns. Good night, sweet princes and princesses! May the legacy of white flight wing thee to thy rest.
If you need a basketball analogy to swallow the rest of this down with, here it is: the Knicks lost a game they were clearly uncomfortable playing. It was obvious the Raptors entangled them in the kind of scrap they’re not used to. Whoever you are reading this: what’s the last thing you did in life to make yourself uncomfortable in order to benefit a person or people you’re generally more comfortable than? Are you engaged in the work of speeding justice along? Or are you cool being comfortable, cool knowing millions of Americans are at an undeserved disadvantage because of racism, cool knowing there are others doing the work, as well as others working to stop justice in its tracks, so as not to discomfort the comfortable?
The Knicks next game is Wednesday when they host Washington. There will be no players with microphones reading MLK quotes before tip-off. Mike Breen will not ask Walt Frazier about being Black in this country. A Honduran child will die before they reach the American border. A school full of Black students will suffer from fewer resources and absent infrastructure, as did the students who were there 10 years ago and those who will be there 10 years from now. Martin Luther King Jr. is still a dead Black socialist who was mostly disliked when he was killed and who’s been posthumously watered down into a narcotic for white guilt. Republicans will still make racist jokes and policies. Democrats will decry the jokes while bedazzling those same policies to make the hate prettier. The Knicks, like every other NBA team, will feature mostly Black bodies producing billions in wealth for mostly white overlords; these MWOs will inevitably lead a work stoppage in the next few years, insisting that the workers receiving a 50/50 split of basketball-related income is tantamount to a charitable handout. “The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Jesus never told anybody they had to wait around for him to do right.
