You can take my Bling…when you pry it out of my cold, black hand.

When I first got wind of David Stern’s new dress code, I logged my prediction on a message board I frequent that within 24 hours, someone would play the race card.
I’m not precisely sure when Stephen Jackson opened his mouth, but the memo went out Monday and the press is reporting it first thing Wednesday morning, so I’m pretty damned close.

Stephen Jackson isn’t pissed about do-rags or sport coats or dress slacks or anything like that. He’s pissed that he can’t sport his bling. And in his head, that’s racist.

The NBA’s dress code, in and of itself, is not a racist policy. In any stretch of the imagination.
A company has a right to insist that its employees dress in a certain manner, provided it’s reasonable. And it’s perfectly reasonable for David Stern to expect his young, successful millionaire employees to dress like young, successful millionaires.

The dress code is not about race, it’s about what’s good for business. Right, wrong or otherwise, there’s a growing segment of NBA supporters that don’t like the hip-hop look. And that segment is usually the one whose corporations are buying the courtside seats and the luxury boxes. And that segment is probably, predominantly white.

So if you want to play the race card, start with the people who are scared, intimidated, disgusted, or whatever by the lifestyle/culture that the hip-hop style of dress represents. The fact that hip-hop scares Whitey IS grounds to play the race card, because it’s a symptom of how far we HAVEN’T come.
Shit, I remember when I was in high school and the USA Today ran a cover story about Public Enemy and I was scared of the way they looked in that picture. Flavor Flav had his silly clock thing going on, but the guys behind him were in full military garb with dark sunglasses and a stone-faced look that was screaming at my young, ignorant, white ass “We hate you, Cracker, and we’re going to get you.” Since then, I’ve grown up and realized how irrational and silly that may have been, but I guarantee I wasn’t the only one who thought that way. And although I’m not the only one who’s grown up to know better, sadly, there are too many who haven’t.

It’s almost like Americans have transferred their racist tendencies and feelings off of the color of someone’s skin and on to hip-hop culture itself because it provides and easy, semi-plausible though flawed excuse.
“I don’t hate black people, I just hate THAT kind of black people.” Which in my opinion, is the same damned thing.

I don’t follow hip-hop, so I’m not someone who can explain what the culture actually represents, but if I were to turn on the TV and go strictly by what I see in the popular media, it’s about misogyny, excessive displays of materialism, and a “don’t fuck with me” attitude.

But if I turned the clock back to 1987, I could write the exact same sentence and replace “hip-hop” with “rock music” or “heavy metal” since those were the predominant pop music of the time.

Yet no one was scared shitless that Axl Rose and Bret Michaels were going to rape their daughters and shoot their children.

And that double standard of fear is a perfect example of the underlying racism that has led to David Stern’s dress code. Pop music is about selling an image and lifestyle to kids. And that’s what so many NBA players are now—they’re just kids. In the NBA’s heyday, the younger kids were in the minority. The older guys dressed professionally and the younger guys followed suit. Now, the “older guys” are only in their late 20’s and they still dress like younger guys so that expectation of how one should dress as a professional NBA player (as Stern’s dress code tries to establish) is no longer something that’s created and enforced by influential veterans, so the Commish has stepped in and made a policy change.

So if Stephen Jackson or anyone else wants to play the Race Card, they need to dig a little deeper and get to the heart of the issues creating and sustaining racism. Not the fact that you can’t wear your $40,000 necklace on the team bus anymore.