Background of the NBA and its interactions with Racial Justice

Over the years, the NBA has become more than just a sport and broadened its horizons to become a platform for players to voice not only their opinions but issues and matters around the world. It is clear that the impacts the NBA have had on society’s view and perception of matters has drastically changed not only since its inauguration in 1946 but also a major leap has been made in the recent decade. The objective of this Digital Humanities (DH) project will be to present information related to “How has the NBA impacted the social perception of matters related to social justice, more particularly looking into the BLM movement over the last decade?”.

With this objective in mind, some of the minor questions that may be answered during the evolution and analysis of the project would be:

• Who were some of the prominent figures over these certain years in advocating for racial justice?
• How big of an impact did individual players and staff have compared to more collaborative efforts done as a league?

What Methods were used in this Project

Over the last decade, the NBA has been a part of many messages, protests, and movements. Given that the NBA player base consists of over 74% of the black race as of 2019. Given this, it made a lot of sense to choose their impacts on the BLM movement.

I will be using two tools learned in the class to help analyze these impacts.

1. A timeline showing the impacts the NBA has had on racial justice movements
2. A second timeline displaying the overall impacts of the movement in relation to the NBA timeline
3. A Voyant outlining the keywords used in phrases of the NBA player’s free speech Jersey campaign.
4. A second Voyant to represent the more prominent words used in speeches and press conferences.

Timeline of the impact the NBA has had on the BLM movement and society

I chose to prioritize the movements that were initiated by the organization’s players and staff related to BLM. This was done through the aid of finding multiple articles on news and sports sites. (Ie. CBC News, ESPN news, etc…)

Interactive Timeline of the overall impact the BLM movement has had on society

The overall timeline was used to incorporate the overall implications the BLM movement had on society, and organize how society may have responded to the NBA’s messages.

The NBA has implemented racial hiring practices as of 2012, and according to a report by UCF’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports [PDF] they have received at least an A grade for their practices. But a players’ coalition led by Avery Bradley and Kyrie Irving pushed for the league to do more. Data from the 2019 report shows that while the NBA is ahead of other men’s leagues, Black professionals in leadership roles remain underrepresented relative to the pool of players. (Table Below)

	BLACK	WHITE
PLAYERS	74.8%	18.1%
MAJORITY OWNERS	2.9%	91.4%
VICE PRESIDENTS	14.8%	76.1%
GENERAL MANAGERS	21.7%	73.9%
HEAD COACHES	26.7%	66.7%

Voyant Corpus of social messages related to racial justice

The purpose of this Voyant was to condense and interpret the key social justice messages the league players were trying to send out. As players in 2020-2021, NBA season advocated exchanging last names for messages to be written on their jerseys during the restart of the season. Among the 350 players, 300 chose to replace their last name with a message. The players were given a list of 29 approved messages they could use in place of their last names. 

• Black Lives Matter, Say Their Names, Vote, I Can’t Breathe, Justice, Peace, Equality, Freedom, Enough, Power to the People, Justice Now, Say Her Name, Sí Se Puede (Yes We Can), Liberation, See Us, Hear Us, Respect Us, Love Us, Listen, Listen to Us, Stand Up, Ally, Anti-Racist, I Am A Man, Speak Up, How Many More, Group Economics, Education Reform and Mentor.
• A surprising statistic was that among the top 10 players in the league at the time, most of them did not choose to represent a phrase on the jersey. With major league mogul, LeBron James stating “I commend anyone that decides to put something on the back of their jersey. It’s just something that didn’t seriously resonate with my mission, with my goal. I would have loved to have a say so on what would have went on the back of my jersey. I had a couple of things in mind but I wasn’t part of that process and that’s OK.”

The key considerations done when applying the corpus were that I chose to purposefully not prioritize the words that were just translations of a phrase. (Ie. lgualdad (Spanish for “Equality”)).
The actual words were kept in the corpus, with the edit of the English translation of the word also added to retain more consistency of which messages were actually used.

Voyant Corpus of press conferences related to racial justice

Of the 5 press conferences and speeches evaluated and analyzed, it was found that the 4 most prominently used keywords used were People, Black, NBA, lives, and Change.
Some of the corrective measures made in this were that names of people in the transcripts were taken out with the use of Stopwords. (Ie. Joe Biden, Mark Cuban, Paul Pierce, etc…)

Conclusion and future insights

After the overall analysis of the work I got ahold of and chose to compile, it is safe to assume that the overall impact of the NBA to do with racial justice has been exceptional. Major contributors to the impact the NBA has had were LeBron James, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony as well as some more retired players of the league such as Kareem Abdul Jabbar. 

As seen in multiple instances, the use of hashtags has given rise to empowering and uniting individuals to create powerful groups to send meaningful messages. Even in the BLM movement, #BlackLivesMatter has seen much popularity since its rise in 2012.

The direct impact the NBA has had on social cues has been phenomenal. Whereas the indirect impact the NBA has had on social cues has been a little more lackluster, it still has done very well. 

The impact of the NBA has even resulted in major clothing companies such as Nike, a proud and prominent sponsor of the NBA and its players pushing towards attaching the anti-racist messages not only onto the player’s jerseys but also began creating adverts and commercials that encouraged viewers to stop ignoring the problems we have with systemic racism, especially in America (because of the recent passing of George Floyd). The significance of the NBA allowing players to exchange their last name for a message was major as the last time the NBA had done anything to change the nameplates was in the Holidays of the 2014 Season and no other time prior to it.

Ways of communication could be through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to keep a proactive and live rendition of the information being shared and added to the project.

As this was only a proof of concept and not a complete DH Project, there were certain elements that weren’t touched upon. If given an adequate amount of time, resources, and funding, this project can be further built upon by others. Information relying on transcribing more press conferences that have been done as well as going over a more broad scope of racial justice is supported by the NBA such as instances with China and Hong Kong could be added.

The use of this information can help us decide whether voices are being given to individuals who will actually use it for the greater good of humanity or if we need to re-evaluate how the idea of media and relevancy is being interpreted.

References

Fagerjord, D. M. B. & A. (n.d.). Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a digital age.Fagerjord, D. M. B. & A. (n.d.). Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a digital age.

Groeger, L. V. (2012, March 13). Some thoughts on timelines. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/nerds/some-thoughts-on timelines#annotations:c8j2eF4CEe2VFTukp_BecA

http:/\/electronicbookreview.com\/author\/ebr-admin\/#author. (2020, July 2). electronic book review. Electronic Book Review › Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts. http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/digital-creativity-as-critical-material-thinking-the-disruptive-potential-of-electronic-literature/

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