Well, hell. Say it ain’t so, Charles.
Charles Barkley, one of the great power forwards in NBA history and now a sports commentator on TNT, has never shied away from controversy and giving his opinion on, well, pretty much everything, whether he knows anything about it or not. Barkley is quite the conservative, even though he famously departed the Republican Party in 2006 because “they [have] lost their minds” with their penchant for “discrimination.” Unfortunately, like so many black conservatives ? Allen West or Ben Carson, anyone? ? he is stunningly ignorant about things he ought not to be ignorant about.
?I Don’t Know Anything About? Slavery but Black People Ought to Shut Up about the Cops
In early December, Barkley got into an on-air spat with another former NBA great, Kenny Smith, about the demonstrations in Ferguson. Because he’s a conservative, Barkley blamed the violence on the protesters. Smith wrote a sensitive op-ed in response to Barkley’s comments where he wrote, in part:
“Why is there so much distrust in the police and the legal system from the African American community? Without manifesting what the effects of slavery still have today, Dec 1st still marks only 59 years since Rosa Parks sat on that memorable bus. Many of our parents and grandparents have lived through those times and have passed those stories on to all of us. … I also don’t agree that slavery should be brought into this issue. I think the biggest aspect is a lack of trust in the African-American community, which is actually caused by poor economic situations, poorer recreational situations and poor education.”
Barkley couldn’t let that pass unaddressed. On camera, here’s what Sir Charles had to say about ?slavery times?:
“The only problem I had with Kenny?s, umm, open letter was, umm, I don’t think anytime anything bad that happens in the black community we have to talk about slavery. Listen, slavery is, uh, well, I shouldn’t say one of the worst things ever, because I don’t know anything about it other than what I read or what my grandmother told me. We, as black people, need the cops in our community. They’re not there just to quote-unquote kill black men, they’re there to protect us, and we, as black people, have got to develop a relationship with them.”?(Emphasis added.)
We won’t even go into Barkley’s other comments, where he called the Ferguson protesters ?scumbags? and said that black neighborhoods need heavy-handed police interventions to prevent them from turning into ?the wild wild west.? His ignorance about slavery, and his implied dismissal of slavery as having any further impact on American society, is enough.
Smackdown
Hank Sanders, a Harvard-educated Democratic state senator from Selma, Alabama ? a city with which Barkley ought to be familiar ? wrote a detailed and impassioned op-ed on his Facebook page with the purpose of telling Barkley ?why slavery was ‘not so bad,’ but very, very bad.?
And he does, at length.
I don’t care if you’re white, black or paisley, you ought not to need Sanders’s deliniation of why slavery was ?very, very bad.? But it’s obvious that Barkley needs instruction. And Sanders provides it:
“First, African people were snatched from their families, their villages, their communities, their tribes, their continent, their freedom . . . The whole continent was ravaged and still suffers to this day.”
“Second, African people were placed in ‘slave dungeons’ for weeks and sometimes months until the slave ships came . . . Millions died during the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas.”
“Third, African people were broken like wild animals. They were stripped of every element of their identity. Their names were taken. Their languages were taken. Their religions were taken. Their histories were taken. They were forbidden to have family. They had no rights to own anything. They were considered property. Their personalities were permanently altered. Their freedom was taken. They became chattel sold from ‘slave blocks.’ This crushing of identity impacts us to this day.”
Fourth, African Americans were worked from ‘kin to can’t;’ that is from ‘can see’ in the morning to ‘can’t see’ at night. There was no pay for their long, hard labor . . . Many were repeatedly raped. Their children and other loved ones were sold at will. Some mothers killed their baby girls so they would not have to endure the ravages of slavery.”
“Fifth, African Americans had no right to defend themselves no matter what was done and how wrong it was . . . This became the law of the land and its legacy bedevils us to this day.”
“Sixth, African Americans were perceived and treated as sub human . . . The legacy of being less human lingers with us today. Black lives are worth much less than White lives.”
“Seventh, it required great violence to implement and maintain the worse form of human slavery known to humankind. It required unbridled violence by enslavers, slave catchers, local, state, federal governments and the entire society. Maintaining the institution of slavery created a very violent society that infests us to this day. That’s why the United States has far more violence than any country in the world.”
“Eighth, even after slavery formerly ended, we still had Jim Crow. These same imbedded attitudes generated state-sanctioned terrorism for nearly another 100 years. The Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups hanged, mutilated, maimed and murdered without any punishment . . . That is why today Trayvon Martin could not walk the streets of his neighborhood and Jordan Davis could not play loud music in his car and Eric Garner was choked to death and Michael Brown was gunned down.”
After each point, Sanders writes simply,
“Mr. Barkley, this is very, very bad.”
No Excuses
There’s no excuse for Barkley not knowing any of this. He certainly ought to: since he grew up an impoverished black child in rural Alabama during the 1960s, it’s impossible to think he didn’t face his own share of racially motivated abuse, or that he didn’t witness his family members being racially targeted.
I can’t speak to that. What I believe about Barkley, and West, and Carson, and the other outspoken black conservatives being trotted out like self-programmed sockpuppets by the white conservative power structure, is that they have chosen to ignore their racial and social heritage, and instead embrace his position as a wealthy celebrity, with all that entails. Black Americans who have ?made it? are treated differently than ?ordinary? blacks who don’t get featured in TMZ ?News.?
(At least presumably. Ask award-winning actor Yaphet Kotto, an African-American, if he can get a taxi in New York City over Louie Bruno, a white convicted felon. In 1994, Michael Moore proved that cab drivers, regardless of their own race, would much rather put the white guy in their cabs than the scary black man. Would they have changed their minds if they knew Bruno had served hard time and Kotto had starred in their favorite 1979 sci-fi horror flick?)
As Chris Rock famously put it:
?If O.J. wasn’t famous, he’d be in jail right now. If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn’t even be O.J. He’d be Orenthal the Bus Driving Murderer.?
I can’t blame Barkley for not wanting to be just another black man who gets his head caved in, or his chest blown apart, because he isn’t deferential enough to a white police officer on a racism-fueled power trip. It’s a lot easier being Sir Charles than Chuck the Loudmouthed Mechanic, and Sir Charles is much less likely to end up with a nightstick upside the head. But that doesn’t justify his aligning himself with the people who routinely and relentlessly oppress black Americans like himself.
(There’s no justification for anyone, of any heritage, to align themselves with oppressors of any sort, but that’s another discussion.)
As a middle-aged white man who swims in an endless sea of white privilege I sometimes don’t even recognize, I have no business schooling Barkley or any other African-American on slavery. I’m very, very glad Senator Sanders wrote such an eloquent, impassioned, factually impeachable history lesson for Barkley’s edification.
I just wonder if Barkley took the time and effort to actually read it.
H/T Addicting Info.
Photo of Senator Henry “Hank” Sanders in the public domain, via the Alabama Legislature’s Web site. Photo of Charles Barkley free to share via Creative Commons license; original source R24KBerg via Flickr.
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Michael has been writing about politics, history and Web development since 2001. His first book is in development.
