Wildcats: Race and Hoops in the Bluegrass

Southerners don't like when others say that the South is racist, partially because Southerners don't believe they are racist. Or more accurately, they know that racism is 'bad,' and they're sure they aren't 'bad' people, so therefore, they musn't be racists, right?

So the definition of what a racist is in the South varies significantly from what it might be to coastal and midwestern academic types. Ideas like 'blacks are lazy at work b/c they know they won't get fired' aren't considered racist in the South. Those ideas, occasionally 'proven' by a lazy individual who happens to be black every once in a while, are considered simply empirical evidence.

ESPN has a variety of articles right now about Wildcats and Hornets star Rex Chapman. It seems Chapman was discouraged from interracial dating by boosters, and saw more than a handful of despicable attitudes and behaviors that would leave William Faulkner taking notes for his next novel.

Chapman was particularly bothered by his belief that sports writers in Kentucky didn't hype high school stars such as Derek Anderson and Allan Houston the way he was hyped as a prep. Chapman was known as the greatest high school player the state of Kentucky ever produced.

"I ended up going to [the University of] Kentucky, and on the one hand, I was the Great White Hope and had 24,000 people cheering for me every day and every night," Chapman said. "Off the court, then I'd hear the whispers that I was a n----- lover. It was just asinine and ugly. That was part of the reason I left school early."

Chapman dated a wide variety of women while he was at Kentucky, including black women. He said his color-blind dating habits were frowned upon by Charlotte Hornets owner George Shinn, who selected Chapman with the eighth pick of the 1988 draft. Chapman said the first time he met Shinn, the owner had just one question – and it had nothing to do with the purpose of the meeting, which was to end Chapman's weeklong rookie holdout for $25,000.

"He asked me if I ever dated black girls," Chapman said. "I told him that I wasn't right now, but that I probably would. My contract was done 20 minutes later. To this day, I believe he thought I might go to the press. [Shinn] started, 'Well, I guess, what I'm saying, you know we live down here in the Bible Belt. I'm just saying be careful.'

Also, Pat Forde sums up his related experiences since he moved to Kentucky in the late 80's.

I moved to Louisville in 1987, after Rex Chapman's freshman year at the University of Kentucky. Everywhere I went, people rhapsodized about King Rex.

And then they'd literally lower their voices and say, "You know he has a black girlfriend, don't you?"

“ I believe everything Rex Chapman told The (Louisville) Courier-Journal this week about the institutional and popular backlash to his occasionally dating black women. I believe some Kentucky officials warned him to keep it on the down-low, and I believe some fans reacted like Neanderthals. I believe it because I've lived in conflicted Kentucky for 18 years now, where race and basketball have always been fractious. ”

Yes, it was out there. And yes, it was considered too scandalous to be spoken in normal conversational tones.

I believe everything Rex Chapman told The (Louisville) Courier-Journal this week about the institutional and popular backlash to his occasional dating of black women. I believe some Kentucky officials warned him to keep it on the down-low, and I believe some fans reacted like Neanderthals. I believe it because I've lived in conflicted Kentucky for 18 years now, where race and basketball have always been fractious.

The most important aspect of this problem will be the reaction of Kentuckians, who will by and large believe either A) well SOME people act like that, but not me, and not most people, or B) what's the problem?

One of the South's greatest weaknesses since the beginning of our nation's history has been its inability to take criticism. Southern pride is so great that it prompts perfectly sane individuals to fly the confederate flag or even have it tatooed on their bodies not as a sign of overt racism, but as a sign of such pride that it doesn't matter if the symbol used to express that pride is linked by many others to horrors second only to the Holocaust in the Western World over the past 200 years.

Pride, or xenophobia.

Nobody likes being told what to do or what to think, but Southerners especially don't like it. Hell, they lost a war over it.

I'm pleased to see that these stories are being brought to national attention. Not to indict the South, but to help it finally understand that Southern pride is a great thing, and the greatest act of pride a Southerner could undertake would be the condemnation of the racism that has plagued it so heavily.

People who take pride in their bodies shed weight, get sleep, exercise, eat well. They toss off the bad things to pursue better approximations of perfection. The South needs to do the same thing with its understanding of its own workings.

Germany has dealt with its past crimes, condemned them, and even if it still struggles to deal with its recent past, the past is not the present. The South would do well to proceed similarly in shedding the baggage of sordid history.