ARTCREDIT TK
message: Being a politically active black
athlete should no longer be considered
radical, but commonplace.
But even James didn’t venture easily
into the hard space of activism. He was
shaped by the times when being an advo-
cate for African Americans meant some-
times wandering into the unwelcome
space that once belonged to the Heritage
but was purchased at auction by Shut Up
and Play. For when Tamir Rice was killed,
James did not show up in Cleveland and
walk arm in arm with the people, as
Carmelo Anthony had done in Baltimore
after police killed Freddie Gray. It would
have polarized the city and altered the
energy of his return to the hometown
Cavaliers after his years with the Miami
Heat. Like the rest of the modern incar-
nation of the Heritage, James was stuck
facilitating “conversation,” being the
bridge, ironically, to nowhere.
Then, in July 2016, James and his
fellow nba superstars Anthony, Chris
Paul, and Dwyane Wade took the stage
in Los Angeles at the espys, espn’s
annual glitterati and glamourfest
award show, and oi cially announced
joining the Heritage. Days before the
show, James’ representatives contactedespn on behalf of the foursome with a
request: They wanted to use the espys
to make a statement to America after a
week of vio lence between black commu-
nities and police so gruesome that even
Michael Jordan, now part of the ruling
class as owner of the Charlotte Hornets,
eventually released a statement.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 37-year-
old Alton Sterling was killed by police
after they confronted him for selling
compact discs on a sidewalk. Then, in a
suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, another
black man, 32-year-old public school
cafeteria worker Philando Castile,
was shot seven times and killed by a
police oi cer after being stopped for a
broken taillight. The next night, Army
veteran Micah Johnson ambushed and
killed fi ve police oi cers in Dallas in
alleged retaliation.
Anthony, Paul, Wade, and James
stood together on the espn stage,
each dressed in a black suit. James
went last: “It’s not about being a role
model. It’s not about our responsibility
to the tradition of activism. I know to-
night we’re honoring Muhammad Ali,
the goat [Greatest of All Time], but
to do his legacy any justice, let’s usethis moment as a call
to action for all profes-
sional athletes.”
The negotiations be-
tween espn and the play-
ers had been intense. The
network had tweaked
and edited comments
from the players that
sounded anti-police,
while the players worked
with their teams and
sponsors to ensure they
were not harming their
business partners. The editing of the
statements continued right up until the
show began. The message was powerful,
but it was the result of compromise, con-
cession. If the original goal of the Heri-
tage, as Tommie Smith described it, was
to support oppressed people around the
world, the black athlete today resembled
a privileged, corporate bridge between
the races whose job wasn’t to advocate
for black people—but to advocate for ev-
erybody. It was to be a peacemaker.
That meant being caught in the
middle during a time when there is
no middle. “The racial profi ling has to
stop. The shoot-to-kill mentality hasARTCREDIT TK
that made a stab at naming some-
thing that maybe you have felt,
too, makes the world more real
and makes us more capable of
recognizing each other.
mj: How has your own writing
played that kind of role?
ts:I’m working on an opera
drawing from the history of land
ownership in the South, so I was
visiting coastal Georgia with the
historian Erskine Clarke. He read
my memoir before we met, and
he said, “Seeing how you’re stir-
ring the cheese into the grits, I
know that!” And somehow, all
the distances between us—age,
culture, gender—suddenly got
really small. That can happen as
often as we’re willing to let it.
It’s really exciting when some-
body says, “You’re black, I’m
white. You’re from one place, I’mfrom another. I don’t know your
mother. And yet your mother in
this poem is my mother.”
mj: Tell me about your parents.
ts: My mom was deeply faith-
ful and believed that instilling
in our family a sense of duty and
trust in God would do a lot to
counteract all those forces tell-
ing me, “You’re small, you don’t
matter—because you’re black.”
My dad was an engineer, a
meticulous man who was fasci-
nated by how things were made,
how systems operated. So there
was this beautiful sense of curi-
osity and wonder that brought
to our home an order.
mj: Does that factor in when you
craft a poem?
ts: Maybe. He loved making
things—he used to make furni-
ture. So maybe you’re workingthrough feelings and questions
in the fi rst draft, and then you’ve
got to start sanding down the
edges and make sure every-
thing’s squared o.
mj: Was it hard for you, writing
this book, to relinquish the spot-
light to the voices of others?
ts:It was sort of involuntary. I
hadn’t written many poems after
Life on Mars, and I was invited to
write one about the Civil War for
the National Portrait Gallery. I had
to find material that was inter-
esting to me. Most ante bellum
history has to do with white
stakeholders. There are very
few even names of the enslaved.
In Dwelling Place, Clarke’s book,
there are all these letters from the
Colcock Jones family about how
much they love to bid on slaves
and how much a chore they are tomaintain, and “What are we going
to do with these people?” Read-
ing these letters, there’s another
story. I wanted to find what’s
between these lines.
mj: Your poem “The Greatest
Personal Privation” made me
physically angry. How do you
keep your wits about you
when you’re working with such
intense, emotional material?
ts: I have to fi nd a way of letting
the language guide me to under-
stand that I am as complicit in
what is wrong as I am certain of
what is right. If a poem can’t do
that, then it doesn’t feel honest.
If I use my moral convictions
like a crutch to point out, “This
is bad,” then the poem is doing
nothing more than just being, I
don’t know, what I might say at
a dinner party. —Chinaka HodgeBeing a
politically
active black
athlete should
no longer be
considered
radical.