Going Back In Time

So, an NBA owner is selling his team after he was caught that he had said racist things in private.  Let's see, I'm sure I can use the last post I made when that happened.  Just search-and-replace, and...

Shame on Bruce Levenson for what he said in private.  Of course, now he's going sell his under-performing Atlanta Hawks, and will probably make a big profit.

...Okay, maybe I can't reuse much more, but still, that is an embarrassing trend for the league.  It's also an embarrassing trend that in about two-and-a-half years of this blog, I've used the "race" tag five times now, with three of them in the past month.

Levenson wasn't nearly as overtly racist as the Clippers' Donald Sterling, though some have pointed out that he's probably a lot more representative of the racism in the NBA and throughout American business.  Since whites have more average income than blacks, there have probably been a lot of discussions about how to get more white people to the games. There may be a lot of incriminating e-mails out there.

One thing Levenson wanted was more white-friendly music, with more country and less hip-hop.  If we're going to complain about racist music at NBA games, I've been waiting to get this off my chest for a while:  A lot of arenas play House Of Pain's "Jump Around" before every jump-ball.  Yeah, it has "jump" in the title, but:

• It starts with a fanfare that most people won't recognize.
• The vocalist wears a Celtics shirt in the video
• There are so many other songs with "jump" in the title

While I appreciate that white people rapping about jumping confronts two negative stereotypes at once, you'd think they'd give diversity a shot.  I realize that The Pointer Sisters' "Jump (For My Love)" is a little too retro, but they could go with Kriss Kross's "Jump."  I know, I didn't like that song either, but if they were going for quality then their sop-to-whites choice would have been Van Halen's "Jump."