All-White Basketball League A Slap in America’s Face

White Men Can't Accessorize

SportsChat is in a state of shock. It’s normally so hard to take the news seriously. But every once in a while there is a story so offensive that you can stop pretending to care who Tiger Woods is sleeping with.

An all-white basketball league called the All-American Basketball Alliance is looking to get off the ground in 12 cities this summer.

League commissioner Don “Moose” Lewis said there is a need for the league because the NBA has “shut out” white players. SportsChat calls that discrimination based on athletic talent.

All joking aside, this is messed up. This is happening today, not in black and white news reel footage from the 1950′s. SportsChat is not the preachy type, but this is the sort of thing that truly should have us all up in arms. This is beyond excusing as the typical ass-hattery of the celebutards cluttering our bandwidth.

The “alliance” has laid out straight-up racist criteria for players interested in signing up: Players must be born in the U.S. (because obviously Americans are the only real white people), both parents must be white (SportsChat isn’t sure whether you just check a box, or a group of neo-Nazi thugs visits your parents home/office to confirm) and tattoos must be kept to a minimum (we can assume “a minimum” means “prominent swastikas preferred”).

Even in his denial, Lewis exposed himself as an unapologetic bigot when asked if his league was racist:

No. It’s not gonna be the street-type ball mentality. It’s going to be different.

That is worse than Scott Baio using the old “some of my wife’s best friends are black” routine. That’s the thing about racists. They are so out of touch with what is right and just that their explanations often condemn them as much as their initial transgression.

Lewis called the whites-only angle a great marketing tool and a form of “nostalgia entertainment.” Oh, for those halcyon days in Atlanta when black players were forced to defer to far inferior talents or expect to be traded, or worse, “blackballed” permanently.

This news clip from a local Atlanta affiliate is pretty jaw dropping:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBsm-4WHkmk

SportsChat is confident that this league will fail because Americans will not stand for it.

But just the fact that someone would try and pull something like this should be a clenched fist in the face to anyone who really thinks we live in a post-racial America.