Male Black Stars Are Cheered - But It's Different Outside The Arena

While watching one of the NBA playoff games on television over the weekend, I thought how ironic it is that this entertainment spectacle has so dominated the thoughts and minds of so many in this nation and what a contradiction that is to the social reality of America.

In a commercial-video collage paid for by the NBA, highlighting the previous playoff games and shown during the halftime, almost every sequence featured an African American star.

As I watched the 35,000 fans (nearly 90 percent of whom were white) who jammed the arena in San Antonio to root for their team, the Spurs, in a battle with the Houston Rockets, it became obvious that sports and entertainment are the only areas of our society in which African American males are held in high esteem.

In most of the 16 cities where playoff games were held, the overwhelming majority of those who bought tickets were white.

In no other sphere of American culture do white people come and root and cheer for black men as they do in sports or entertainment. Basketball, which is almost totally dominated by black males, is the most graphic example of the contradiction of how society as a whole views and treats black men.

This is particularly ironic in the political climate of today, when pundits say that white males are angry over affirmative action and other social programs that give minorities an advantage.

Many of the fans cheering the likes of David Robinson, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O'Neal and Reggie Miller would probably want police to lock up any black man they saw walking their neighborhood when they went home that night - especially if he were 6-foot-8 with orange hair.

Any San Antonio basketball fan seeing a 6-foot-8 black man with orange hair would recognize Dennis Rodman, the Spurs' power forward, who is one of the most talented players in professional basketball. And they would welcome him despite his hair color and bizarre behavior on the court.

So, black basketball players are the exception.

The reality on how African American men are treated is noted by author and essayist Ellis Cose in his latest book, A Man's World, which is about how men - black and white - are increasingly feeling victimized by discriminatory policies in our society.

"Black men have never had the luxury of assuming the world's congeniality," he wrote in a chapter devoted to black men and titled "Black, Bruised and Vilified."