David Shields, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season
(2000)
This is the second book for Shields, an acclaimed fiction writer and a professor of English at the University of Washington. In this work, Shields follows the 1994-95 season of the Seattle Supersonics in diary form, attempting to illuminate "race" in the NBA. He attended the team's home games and watched away games on TV; interviewed whatever players were willing (most weren't); and logged call-in shows, local sports pages, internet Sonics chat groups and national NBA developments, including the release of Hoop Dreams, a documentary chronicling the high school careers of two players from the South Side of Chicago.
Shields thinks everything is racially coded, and much of this book concerns the author confronting his own issues with race, using the NBA team as a backdrop. He sets out to document how people think about and talk about black ball players, but spends most of the work quoting other sources and reflecting on personal experiences with race, most of which include his family: wife, Laurie and daughter, Natalie.
Nonetheless, from The Austin Chronicle: "The guy is a fan. He's also smart and brave. You want tepid sports journalism, you read David Halberstam, not David Shields ... Part diary, part memoir, part critical inquiry into our national mythologies, the book reads like an instant replay of our era, seen from all the angles, in slow mo and freeze frame."
MORE:
Author profile and review from Sports Jones magazine
Article from The Seattle Times
Author interview from The Austin Chronicle
