D.C. Could Use a Little Local Understanding for Gilbert Arenas

At 2:40 p.m. EST Friday Chad Dukes, co-host of an afternoon 106.7 The Fan radio show in Washington, D.C. told a story about getting pulled over by a policeman after he was out drinking with his girlfriend. Dukes admitted that if the policeman desired he could have arrested him for drunk driving. Instead, he received a warning from the cop, who told him to let his girl friend drive the remainder of their way home.

And this is the disconnect White people like Dukes have when it comes to race.

Dukes and former NFL linebacker, and show host, LaVarr Arrington, were discussing the Gilbert Arenas-Javaris Crittenton incident. Dukes had embarked on a barely logical diatribe about the alleged comfort level the two players must have had to, so readily pull out their guns in the locker room; that they must feel the locker room is a safe haven where they are just hanging out.

The point is, the locker room is a safe haven and the players know this. It is their personal space where, for between eight to 10 months NBA players spend most of their time.

Dukes, though, already stoked the racial fires when he wholly agreed with a caller who isolated the NBA as the only professional league that has a “violence problem.”

A singular and primary problem with our perception of athletes is derived by people like Dukes who, for all their wishes and no matter who it is they sit next to at work, are racists. Unthinking racists? Perhaps. But unthinking and action are another by-product of the privilege with which White people in America live.

Imagine what happens every day to unthinking black people who engage in negative behavior, the Black person who is pulled over and is found to be driving drunk; the Black person who publicly makes known his dislike for White athletes.

Or Gilbert Arenas.

And Arrington, rather than calling out his co-host, wholly agreed. It is Black people like Arrington, black people who co-sign on racism, or do not recognize that the verbiage being used is racist are just as culpable as the racists themselves.

Arrington went further and averred that if the Wizards were winning, this incident is never known by the public. Arrington went on to comment on the manner in which athletes are raised, how they a protected “put into this cocoon” where every thing they do is taken care of for them. But when an athlete cannot produce as expected, this is the time when an incident like this becomes public knowledge. Though some of what he said is true, it must be know that Arrington was a player who overestimated his worth and was, as a player, and continues to be a verbal bully.

A show producer brought up the valid point that perhaps the Wizards are cooperating with the police as they are because they want the story to go away and not further damage the franchise. Arrington’s theory is that the sole reason they are being very cooperative with the police is to rid themselves of Arenas and his contract. While both thoughts have merit, the producer is more likely to be correct. What happens to the balance of Arenas’ $111 million contract will play itself out as it will. However, since Wizards owner Abe Pollin died recently the team has fallen into the hands of his family and they are seeking to quickly sell the team to a buyer or group of purchasers. Every moment this incident remains in the news the value of the Washington Wizards franchise decreases. It is the Pollin family’s worst financial nightmare.

But rather than even consider the producer’s thoughts, Arrington bullied him into silence, scoffing at the man as if he had no understanding of how the world of sports works. Dukes was right there with Arrington, scoffing at the producer peeking from behind the big, Black bully.

Then there’s Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post. Now Dan is to be respected for his versatility as a writer. His ability to seamlessly slide between funny and sober, often within the same writing, is 21st century Catskills humor at its best (the art of the comedy-drama, though certainly not reserved for one peoples – goodness knows Black people can pull humor from a disaster – the Catskills was and is a refining ground for some of the best-known comedians in modern America… and print journalism is like finding that the Catskills exist everywhere – I know you catch my drift, Dan).

But in his most recent offering, “Why the Crittenton Tale Doesn’t Exonerate Gilbert,” is another signpost in favor of racial understanding. Not a superficial sort of racial understanding in which Lavarr Arrington and Chad Dukes engage; where a simulacrum of a postmodern race neutral society where White, Western, male-dominated ideology rules, where playing the game, and discerning which way the money tree blows are the factors which forge a relationship, but racial understanding that has roots in respect for racial-cultural differences and fighting to find common ground are the binders among peoples.

Gilbert Arenas is a man who grew up from an impoverished background, who was and is a little quicker mentally than most of his peers, a little more understanding of the myriad vagaries of humor and their various effects, and a little more comfortable with shifting shift cultural gears than most of his peers.

His personality is not one that is seen often in the cookie-cutter world of sports. If not for Arenas’ amazing basketball acumen, his personality would preclude him from being anything other than a player in Europe. Even in the world of the NBA, where the players know that they must create an idiosyncratic image if they want to maximize their earnings, athletes in the league who truly think in ways not easily defined are not welcome. No NBA general manager would take a chance on having someone that quirky and unpredictable on their team. Yet, due to his incredible ability to see the court and process the happenings on it moves ahead of the opposition or his teammates and his obsessive practice habits which aided him in honing his jump shot, Gilbert Arenas exists in the NBA.

These qualities have allowed Arenas to fashion himself into a one-man corporation, the goal of every NBA player. But Arenas has done it with a genuine smile and a naivete that allows most negative events in which he is involved to slough themselves off his back. Though most of his teammates enjoy his company and are hypnotized by his pied piper-like leadership ways, just as many are miffed at the Wizards’ guard’s uncanny capacity for avoiding trouble and they are jealous of the way he saunters through life unimpeded ———- almost as if he was White.

That Javaris Crittenton, growing up in the Black caricature of a hyper-religious, puritanical background as attendee of tiny Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy, where he was Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard’s point guard and one year at secular but decidedly Southern, church-going and cloistered Georgia Tech would not understand Arenas surely understandable. That Crittenton apparently fled from the finger of god pointing down on his people values impinged upon him by the teachers at the Academy to the point where he has become a caricature – even – of the White person’s visage of the black thug athlete, pulling out his gat, sliding a bullet into a chamber, cocking back the trigger, while singing a song as if he was a supporting actor in American Gangster, not realizing he was singing away his NBA career is also not a surprise.

That Crittenton would take Arenas too seriously and try to one-up the Wizards de facto team leader in a vainglorious attempt to contrive a gross exhibition of his self-perceived “manhood” by pulling out a weapon with bullets at the ready (as opposed to Arenas’ bullet-less “toy” guns) is no surprise.

That Steinberg cannot differentiate between Arenas’ act and that of Crittenton’s and comprehend the contexts in which each man acted, is also no surprise.

But it is sad.

It is sad because Steinberg, and he is used here because he is mentally facile enough to “get it,” because if he doesn’t get it, there seems to be no black person or people for him to turn to who do get it themselves. These Black people have turned their backs on the reality of cultural differences within the American populations of Black and White people due to our distinctive historic and present lives. So, Dan Steinberg, instead of being a beacon source of enlightenment and providing context for Arenas and Crittenton, acts only to foment existing racial hate and fear of Black people, especially, men, and in turn does a disservice to his readership by forcing them to choose sides rather than forcing them to think.

But it is not just Steinberg or Dukes and his White-acting – through his seeming inability to provide any meaningful perspective to the matter -show host LaVarr Arrington, that are holding up the wall and missing the point. Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins hopped into the fray with her seven stray cents on Arenas.

Jenkins is another writer, a longtime sports writer and columnist, who is to be admired. Her knowledge of sports is vast and her perceptions of the games always lead to a better understand ing of the “why” of a game.

However, taking the Peter Vescey stance that there was some sort of standoff between Arenas and Crittenton is sensationalistic, but most importantly, according to the account of the incident as described by her WaPo cohort Mike Wise, dead wrong. And it seems that Jenkins, in a stretch to condemn Arenas, chose this path purposely. Why else go down the path of describing the incident thusly:

But it obviously escaped him, perhaps because he was too preoccupied with his standoff with Javaris Crittenton, and seeing which one could act more facetiously street.

Standoff? Really? Does she call laying out empty guns on a chair and leaving a note for Crittenton to pick one to figuratively shoot him in his surgically-repaired knee, a standoff? That Crittenton pulled out a pistol, loaded it with a bullet and cocked back the hammer does not involve Arenas. According to Wise, he left the locker room proper with two of his teammates and retreated to a treatment area, leaving Crittenton to his own devices. And when Arenas returned, Crittenton and his gun were gone.

Standoff?

This is what journalism has come to, even in D.C. And perhaps Jenkins’ reach of a premise for a column is emblematic for Washington, D.C.

This city, the Nation’s Capital, was known for decades as “Chocolate City” because it’s population was nearly 90% black. And most of the 9% White was made up of government employees.

After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. the Black denizens of D.C. rioted and destroyed much of the downtown black areas of the city. For 20 years those areas remained charred and empty; the White legislators in the Federal government categorically refused to rebuild the city. ‘Let them rot,’ was the in-your-face message given to the people of D.C. by the flaccid, White, limo-riding, Capitol Hill and suburbian-living Congress people and Senators.

Someone, somewhere, got the too-bright idea of rebuilding the city ——– with the goal of gentrifying it. Ten years later Washington, D.C. became the only major city in America to witness Black flight, rather than the normative, White flight from the interior of a city. Black citizens who were not already ensconced in D.C., living in well-to-do areas and owning their homes, suddenly found themselves displaced, priced out of the city in which they were raised. young Black people either bit the bullet and lived check to check in overpriced, renovated studios, or fled for the suburbs of Maryland.

The legislators and their corporate-lobbyist friends snapped up the row houses condominiums, and apartments, looked around and said, ‘Mighty White of us.’

All this occurred after after a not-so mysterious – if you think about it for a second – ridiculously large influx of guns and crack cocaine. The city, underfunded with wide swaths in the form of blocks looking war-torn with their burnt-out store fronts and entire apartment buildings, became Crackville and was known as the Murder Capital of the U.S. The black budget operations responsible for the guns and drugs made billions of below the board dollars which people like Oliver North used to strafe the peoples of both Central America and the Middle East.

By the time the people of D.C. said, ‘I give,’ or more appropriately, by the time the, ‘drug money for guns for more drugs, for more drug money’ schemes dried up for a minute, Black people in Washington, D.C. were emotionally exhausted, had found their neighborhoods rebuilt in an image they no longer recognized, and, rather than go another 12 rounds with the well-monied Whites responsible for the theft of their homes, they left.

This is the Washington, D.C. Sally Jenkns knows. This is the city she knows, Jenkins, Save for her time with Sports Illustrated, intimately knows the aforementioned recent history of the city.

What purpose, then, does her description of Arenas accomplish? The hyperbole, the sensationalism, the resoluteness with which context is being eschewed relative to Gilbert Arenas is more than adequate proof that nothing was truly learned from the reportage surrounding Sean Taylor’s death. Though some reporters point to the restraint with which Chris Henry’s death was met, the circumstances of that case have been sufficiently smothered to the point where any writers commenting on the circumstances of his death must create a scenario out of that flimsiest of material —- whole cloth.

Instead, columnists around the country have reserved all their venom for Arenas; please leave context at the door when entering.

Jenkins column represents the new-look Nation’s Capital: a lily-white Federal Governing body surrounded by a lily-white population. The citizens picking up the morning WaPo on their way to the Metro are lily-white, dressed to the office nines, and chillin’; no Blacks allowed, unless you’re young and “hip-hop,” or a scufflin’ federal employee with a single-digit GS rating.

Sure, that is not a complete description of the denizens of the city, but Washington, D.C. is no longer Chocolate City, not by a long shot. And though more Black people watch the Wizards live than do Blacks in any other arena, many of those people live in the suburbs of Largo and Suitland, and the like.

And with the Gilbert Arenas-Javaris Crittenton incident players lied to the Wizards Black beat writer, Michael Lee, then turned around and told White columnist, Mike Wise, the truth. Then Jenkins  That unfortunate scenario is a little too much like the train porter, bus and shoeshine boy 1950′s D.C.

Yeah, Arenas is immature and pro athlete-protected naive, what’s new. Andre Agassi did speed and didn’t know it until it was too late. Situations like that occur with athletes far too often than anyone says or wants to know, unless you’re a writer for TMZ Sports. Yeah Arenas doesn’t know who he is, he hit the NBA at age 19 as a happy-go-lucky guy who worked his ass off on a basketball court to earn that $111 million contract he received in 2008. But the basketball court is the only place Gilbert arenas has been forced to work, forced to know himself.

Off the court how many athletes know themselves? Really now. And when they do begin to figure “it” out they are often nearing or at their career’s end. How many times haver we heard an athlete say oh-so wistfully, “If only I knew the game 10 years ago like I do now,” or, “If I only knew how much work I needed to out into the game 10 years ago…” It’s said so much you wonder why more young athletes don’t pick up on what the veterans are trying to tell them.

Then again, most young athletes are too busy ripping and running off the court, awash in big contract dollars and living the life of a well-monied star ——– living that elusive thing we’re all told to pursue, The American Dream.

“The Dream” can go awry a lot quicker than it can fly right. Just ask Dwight Howard and Arenas and Crittenton, and Agassi, and former world’s number one tennis player Marcelo Rios, or country music aficionado who for too long lived a Willie Nelson-type of off the tennis court lifestyle,  Mardy Fish, or Josh Hamilton, or Jennifer Capriati, or Chris Evert, or John McEnroe, or Bill “Spaceman” Lee, or Bill Walton.

Does the list need to continue to grow?

Thought not.

Tell you what, Sally —– Dan Steinberg, too. Rather than re-spout and untruth about the Arenas-Crittenton incident or attempt to tell us how an unthinking prank means Arenas should continue to be vilified, how about letting us know how it is that Javaris Crittenton could go from Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy and being Dwight Howard’s point guard to being the player loading a gun and breaking out into song.

Or, better yet, next time Brandon Jennings comes into town, tell the young, black people of the Washington, D.C. suburbs – and more importantly, the White adults who scammed their way into a spot around Dupont Circle or Adams Morgan with a beautiful view about Brandon Jennings; tell them something more than he lives in a modest dwelling and drives a hybrid, just like them. Fill them in on what it’s like to grow up Black and athletically gifted, how the instinctively racist emphasis on “athletically” led so many sports writers to take cheap shots at the young man not only before he left for Europe, but while he was there and averaging just a few points and a few assists less a game. Tell them about how he kept his confidence – hell, how it grew and blossomed once he hit the Summer League. Tell them why he is an example of what young athletes can do, how they can take control over their lives from all the middlemen trying to get them to the college of the middleman’s choice for a few dollars more, how they can leave behind the “college experience” that gives them nothing other than a place to eat and sleep and play basketball that is not in a ghetto, or a suburbian high school gym. Tell them how all but a very few colleges could even get Jennings to come to their school without offering something substantial – and illegal, according to NCAA rules and regulations. Tell them how Jennings can ward off all the hanger-ons at such a tender age and how he represents a new breed of athlete.

Then follow that story with another about Kentucky point guard, John Wall. Tell those same people about how Wall played for the same AAU coach as Duke freshman Ryan Kelly. Tell them how Wall is getting raked through the mud for playing for that AAU coach – Brian Clifton – while no one says a peep about Kelly, though Kelly’s high school principal mother asked the Clifton to be her and her son’s confidante and front man, and help Ryan navigate his way to Duke. Tell them about how, eventually, Wall shut out everyone including Clifton and his mother who wanted him to go to either NC State or North Carolina, and chose Kentucky on his own.

Tell them about how Wall asked a former well-known sports radio show host in the Triangle area of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel HIll, North Carolina how to go about setting up a charity ———– while he was in high school. Tell them why he chose Kentucky instead of Jennings’ route, why that’s best for him, best for that charity he’ll begin once he hits the NBA.

Do that for all those White people who are so stupid that they use “thug” as code for the “N thing,” Black people used to be called – you know, White people who don’t know the word is derived from the British, “thuggie,” the term used to describe Indians who revolted against British-imperialist oppression. That’s right, a thug is a revolutionary who is resolute in their fight against colonial imperialism.

I know the Arenas deal is local and it’s your duty to comment. But don’t go all Peter Vescey-New York Post on your readers and make the incident something out of A Few Dollars More; they and the WaPo deserve better. And just because Crittenton didn’t invest enough of himself in knowing his teammate and felt Arenas’ leaving his empty guns on a chair with a note asking Crittenton to pick one represented a threat to Crittenton. It was an invitation to laugh at a silly joke and keep walking, or attach a note to one of the guns telling Arenas maybe his children should have taken the guns from him and stored them out of the house so their father wouldn’t get the bright idea to play with them.

But it was not an invitation to look at all of Arenas’ guns, pull out one of his own, toss a bullet in the chamber, and cock back the hammer.

Keep the story in its proper context for your D.C. readers, Sally and Dan and nix the sensationalism in the form of events that didn’t take place. Notice Dukes and Arrington are not included in this plea: 1) shock jocks get no respect and 2) Dukes and Arrington somehow failed to discern the difference between Dukes’ treatment by the police and even Black superstar athlete’s treatment.

Foster some understanding by showing you have some.

Maybe, just maybe, by setting that constant precedent you all might just start something new; something a lot of Black people have been hoping for for a long, long time… equal representation by the press.

And what a better place to start than the Washington Post, right in the heartbeat of America, the Nation’s Capital?

It’s a Capital idea.

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Addendum:

I know what Gilbert did in Andray Blatche’s shoe. That is a way separate issue from the the gun incident. And that Arenas laughed at Crittenton when he loaded his gun and cocked the hammer elucidates the non-standoff that occurred.

And the whole Wizards “purging” of Gilbert Arenas? You can’t even purchase a customized “Arenas 0″ jersey, but you can get a “Crittenton 8″ from the NBA store???

All the more need for a reality check from the District’s sports writers.