David Shields - Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

Brilliant.... In Black Planet, Shields uses his gift for mediated observation to astounding effect.A.O. Scott, Newsday

An invaluable contribution to the nations dialogue on race.Sport

Black Planet is an important bookone which bravely confronts the seemingly unmentionable workings of race in the NBA, and which also challenges long-standing, and relatively unsophisticated, notions about what it really means to watch sports.Rick Levin, The Stranger

A brave book.Sallie Tisdale, Salon

Part diary, part memoir, part critical inquiry into our national mythologies, the book reads like an instant replay of an era, seen from all the angles, in slow mo and freeze frame.Tom Grimes, Austin Chronicle

What Shieldss book lacks in scopeits an intensely personal work that views race through the eyes of one mans relationship with one basketball teamit makes up for in raw ambition: exposing the profound sense of difference, of otherness, that separates even the best intentioned white and black Americans.J. Peder Zane, Raleigh News & Observer

Black Planet is an extraordinary, unique, and utterly fascinating book. With unblinking honesty and unabashed affection for his subject, Shields makes a real contribution to the national non-discourse on race.Bob Shacochis

Black Planet accomplishes a rare feat by tackling race head on, gamely examining what Shields calls white peoples reverence for, resentment toward, and colonization of black peoples bodies.Steven Hill, Chicago Tribune

Filled with intelligent juxtapositions, bold observations, and graceful writing, Shieldss narrative is highly personal and studded with humor.... Shields executes this obsessive dissection with aplomb.Publishers Weekly

[Shields] artfully expose[s] his and other white basketball fans stereotypes about black athletes and, by extension, about all blacks.Sam McManis, San Francisco Chronicle

This year-long monologue, presented in the form of a daily diary, yields some fascinating insights as [Shields] deconstructs our ongoing, unspoken racial conversation.In These Times

David Shields brings our stunted racial dialogue to the surface in his funny, self-deprecating, and remarkably observant book Black Planet.Metropolitan Living

A much-praised literary writer from Seattle uses his intensely personal diary of the Sonics 199495 season as a clever method to examine, with searching honesty, notions about race and sports in America.John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A compulsively readable book. David Shields, as no writer before him, takes you into the obsessive mind of a sports addict: its shames and glories, over-identifications, repetitions, rationalizations, wonderments, and stoical detachment. I recognize myself only too well.Phillip Lopate

A fastbreak of a book. Black Planet is filled with deft observations about popular culture, the notion of manhood, players, fans, and the sports media, especially radio talk-show hosts.... Fascinating.Jeff Rivers, Hartford Courant

A fine, multi-faceted survey of ethnic elbow rubbing under the hoops.... A brave and honest collection of insights about subjects too often overlooked in the hypermasculine realm of professional sports.Chris Lester, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Black Planet is a classic book about white male sports fans obsession with black male athletes and its underlying cause: a desperate longing to be free of social constraints.Teri Bostian, SportsJones.com

In Black Planet, David Shields honestly (and ironically) uses himself as a test subject to peel away the layers of personal need, sexual longing, cultural sedimentation, alienation, and blatant prejudice that make even a season of the Seattle SuperSonics a disturbing microcosm of Americas 300-year-old Race War. You dont need to be a sports fan to experience this book as a rare, troubling map of the seldom charted, subterranean regions of the souls of white folkson the court, on the sidelines, and in society at large.Charles Johnson

Black Planet says its about basketball when its actually that rare thing, an honest love song, White Man Loves Black Athleteyou know, the tune with the refrain, Dear NBA Genie, make me hip, angry, and always, always in control. A song thats frank, embarrassing, and killingly funny.Jay Cantor

Shields is a perceptive observer of the subtle ways in which race considerations shape and distort relationships.Booklist

Black Planet is a funny, wickedly observant, highly intelligent book about Us and ThemI and Thou, black and white, male and female, parent and child, spectator and star.Jonathan Raban

To his creditand the readers great good fortuneShields tackles this complex and often painful subject with a blend of intense honesty and easy humor.... A thoroughly engrossing, provocative read. Shields writes about what many black Americans already know, and most white Americans never consider, in a style that is both daring and disarming. Digging deep into the mine that is American race relations, he strikes a rich vein and emerges with pure gold.Kate Tuttle, Africana.com

Black Planet is a tortured, bold, brilliant, and intimate series of meditations on race, relations between black heroes and white fans, the relationship of sports to the larger culture, and the relationship of the author to all of these things. The book is so replete with telling and disquieting observations and confessions that it is safe to say that there has never been another sports book (or, for that matter, another popular-culture book) quite like it.Fred Moody, Seattle Weekly

Shields picks apart nearly every illusion we have about race and athletics in America, and the subtly pernicious ways in which they interact.David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Weekly

BLACK PLANET

Facing Race during an NBA Season

DAVID SHIELDS

Introduction to the Bison Books Edition by

GERALD GRAFF

University of Nebraska Press

Lincoln and London

1999 by David Shields

Introduction 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

All rights reserved

First Nebraska paperback printing: 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shields, David, 1956

Black planet: facing race during an NBA season / David Shields; introduction to the Bison Books edition by Gerald Graff.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York: Crown Publishers, c1999.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9354-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8032-9354-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-5325-4 (electronic: e-pub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-5326-1 (electronic: mobi)

1. BasketballUnited StatesSociological aspects. 2. African American basketball playersSocial conditions. 3. Basketball fansUnited StatesSocial conditions. 4. Discrimination in sportsUnited States. 5. Shields, David, 1956Diaries. 6. Seattle SuperSonics (Basketball team) 7. United StatesRace relations. I. Title.

GV889.26.S55 2006

796.323089'96073dc22 2006003884

INTRODUCTION

Gerald Graff

David Shieldss remarkable book Black Planet is a record of the authors experience following his hometown Seattle SuperSonics through the 199495 NBA season. As its reviewers have all noted, however, Black Planet is far more than a book about sports. Shields tells us on the first page that he is less interested in the games themselvesthough he provides a vivid account of them on the basketball levelthan in how the game gets discussed. He is especially concerned with what our ways of talking and thinking about basketball reveal about American culture and its painfully unresolved conflicts over race.