I feel compelled to speak to speak from my own experience, and from my heart.
I was a professional basketball player for the New York Knicks. From September to May for 10 years, I traveled across America with the team. Basketball was our work, and we did it every day–together.
Day in and day out, we lived together, ate together, rode buses together, talked together, laughed together and, of course, played together. During those years my dominant teammates were Willis Reed, Dick Barnett, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere and Earl Monroe. We created one of the first basketball teams to capture the imagination of a national TV audience. It was an extraordinary group of human beings.
I wish I had $100 for every time in the last 20 years that someone–usually a white person–asked me what it was like to play on the Knicks and travel with my teammates.
“Listen,” I’d say, “traveling with my teammates on the road in America was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life.”
And it was. Besides learning about the warmth of friendship, the inspiration of personal histories, the powerful role of family in each of their lives, I better understand distrust and suspicion. I understand the meaning of certain looks and certain codes. I understand what it is to be in racial situations for which you have no frame of reference. I understand the tension of always being on guard, of never totally relaxing. I understand the pain of racial arrogance directed my way. I understand the loneliness of being white in a black world. And I understand how much I will never know about what it is to be black in America.
