ESPN’s No Crossover and the Criminalization of Allen Iverson

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“We’re Talking about Practice”?

ESPN’s No Crossover and the Criminalization of Allen Iverson

by David J. Leonard

Before there was the Jena six, Marcus Dixon, and Genarlow Wilson, there was Allen Iverson. In 1993, then the top-rated basketball player in the nation, Iverson, along with three other black teenagers, was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison (3 concurrent sentences of 5 years) as a result of his alleged involvement in an interracial fight at a bowling alley on. Charged with “maiming by mob,” a statue in Virginia enacted in the 19th century in an effort to combat lynching, Iverson was convicted of merely being present during the fight; whether or not he participated was superfluous. Seventeen years later, Steve James (Hoop Dreams) documents how the arrest and trial impacted Hampton, Virginia with No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, which originally on ESPN April 13, 2010. “Ultimately, I want to revisit what happened sixteen years ago so I can learn what the lasting legacy of it is for the city’s black and white communities, and for Allen Iverson himself,” writes James, who grew up in Hampton. “I hope this film can have something to say, not just about race and sports, but race and American society at this particularly crucial moment in our country’s history.”

At a narrative level, No Crossover explores the ways in which racial identity and the varied experiences (the degrees of privilege) impacted communal reaction to both the arrest and trial of Iverson. Specifically, the film illustrates the predominance of a dominant white racial frame and how it guided media coverage and white communal views about the case. Noting the ways in which colorblindness and the idea of “equality-and-justice”(p. viii) are central to post-1960s American racial discourse, Picca and Feagin, with Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage, argue that “the white racial frame is deeply held and extensive, with many stored ‘bits,’ including stereotyped knowledge, racial understandings, and racial interpretations.” Accordingly the dominant white racial frame is invoked “to interpret society” and in doing so contributes to the formation of a “common cultural currency” (p. 9)

Likewise, the film focuses on why the black working class (as opposed to the black middle class, whose adherence to a politics of respectability limited their willingness to join this struggle) rallied around Iverson because of their daily experiences with injustice, mistreatment, and systemic demonization.

The film is quite successful in illustrating how varied levels of privilege and how desperate relationships to injustice fostered very different interpretations of the Iverson case. It is a powerful commentary on the powers of whiteness and blackness and how those racial signifiers and the lived experienced of those signifiers influence thoughts about particular racial spectacles. It illustrates in powerful ways how, as argued by Bob Blauner, “blacks and whites often talk past one another.” Arguing the existence of “two languages of race in America,” Blauner, in “Talking Past Each Other: Black and White Languages of Race,” concludes that “racial languages incorporate different views of American society itself, especially the question of how central race and racism are to America's very existence, past and present. Blacks believe in this centrality, while most whites, except for the more race-conscious extremists, see race as a peripheral reality.” No Crossover brings to life this disconnect, giving voice to the myriad of ways in which blacks and whites in Hampton viewed the Iverson case in opposing ways. These divisions and the alienation fostered by economic, residential and political inequality world worsen as a result of the case. No Crossover makes clear that while Iverson may have moved on, the City of Hampton has yet to recover. Just as slavery and the city’s history of Jim Crow has left an indelible mark on the city’s racial landscape, so did the case against Allen Iverson.

Although No Crossover tries to be a film about race relations in Hampton, merely using the Iverson case as a window into a broader racial history, its narrative choices ultimately tell a different story one that further criminalizes Allen Iverson and by extension the black body.

No Crossover begins with writer and director Steve James articulating several questions, providing viewers with a clear narrative point of entry to Allen Iverson’s life. Using images of Iverson as a backdrop, he asks if AI is “Inch for Inch the most talented player ever” or “uncoachable,” “as selfish a star as there ever was;” “is he an icon who stayed true to himself” or a “thug in basketball shorts.” With a clip of AI’s legendary “talking bout practice” moment, a coach describing him as great on the court but someone who will cause grey hairs for the other 22 hours and comments about his attitude, his arrogance, and his cussing out a coach during high school, the film emphasizes questions about AI’s character and value.

Establishing a trajectory for the film, its introduction demonstrates how it too will weigh in on the questions about Iverson and not the American justice system, its media coverage of black athletes, or the history of race relations inside or outside the South. Despite being a film about the trial, its narrative focus rests with his “priors” -- his history of bad acts, bad behavior, and troubling attitude. In starting the film with this representation of Iverson, No Crossover once again marks Iverson and his blackness as essentially a disruptive and uncontrollable source of “cultural degeneracy.” Blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140), simultaneously rendering the trial as of secondary importance (it is an example of a lager story) all while convicting him within the viewer’s imagination because of his purported history and the meaning of the black athlete within the modern racial landscape. Irrespective of its intent and the other elements of the film, some of which point to the history of racism within the criminal justice system, the positioning of Iverson through the dominant white racial frame further criminalizes him alongside of blackness.

The film conclusion further criminalizes and demonizes Iverson, with references to recent troubles as a member of the Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies, and Philadelphia 76ers; it makes references to his reputation and a feeling that he doesn’t care about the community. In the end, viewers are left with a negative picture, or as mentioned in the film “a sad story with an unwritten ending”; “a troubled life.”

The product of a single mother, a drug inflicted and dangerous community, and hip-hop culture, Iverson is reduced to a symbol of “of pathology, fear, madness, and degeneration,” whose mere existence as a racial Other “warrants its very annihilation because it [he] is seen as impure, evil, and inferior” (Giroux, 1994, p. 75). In focusing on Iverson’s identity and behavior, in making No Crossover a cinematic trial of Iverson, the film replicates the patterns of new racism in focusing on culture, values, and individual choices. It misses an opportunity to offer historic context and to otherwise highlight the ways in which a dominant white racial frame operated in the context of Iverson and for all too many youth of color.

Vijay Prashad, in Keeping up with the Dow Joneses, highlights the fact that 56 percent of juveniles detained in correction facilities are black, with an additional 21 percent being Latino. In total, half of 700,000 youth sentenced to juvenile facility arrive as a result of a first-time drug or property offenses (p. 90). Brooks Berndt further highlights the centrality of race in looking at the juvenile “justice” system

Black youth, for example, were 15% of the youth population in Illinois in 1999. However, in Illinois that year, black youth were 50% of the youth arrested, 55.2% of the youth in detention, and 85.5% of the youth sent directly to adult court. For drug crimes in Illinois, black youth were 59% of the youth arrested and 88% of the youth sentenced to prison. This contrasts sharply with national statistics suggesting that white youth in Illinois would likely use and sell drugs at the same or a higher rate than black youth (Berndt 2003).

According to a report authored by Xochitl Bervera, of Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, similar inequalities defined the experiences of youth of color there. Although only a third of the state’s population, black youth account for 78% of those youth confined to the state’s correction facilities. “For Black youth, this is not the time of rising expectation—these are the days of mass incarceration, ugly demonization, and full-out criminalization” (“Katrina, Jena, and the Whole Damn System” 2007).

Beginning in the 1980s, amid the demands for law and order and truth-in-sentencing, states began to enact laws that led to the practice of trying youth as adults. By the mid to late 1990s, forty-three states had enacted laws facilitating the transfer of children into the adult criminal justice system, ostensibly eroding the juvenile justice system. Currently, all 50 states have laws on the books allowing juveniles to be tried as adults. According to a 2008 report from the Equal Justice Initiative, roughly “2,225 children under the age of 18 are serving life sentences in US. Prisons; almost two-thirds are children of color” (Jung 2008). “African-American youth are 62% of the youth prosecuted in the adult criminal system, and are nine times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence” notes Ayra and Augarten in “Critical Condition: African American Youth in the Justice System.” “The overwhelming majority of cases (83%) that were filed in adult courts involved youth of color. African-American youth constituted 62% of the youth, and Latino youth were 19%. With the exception of two counties in the study, youth of color constituted between 60% and 100% of all youth prosecuted as adults in the 40 counties included in the study”.

Notwithstanding the narrative of the film, one that focuses on Allen Iverson’s life and personality, the economic and cultural landscape of Hampton, Virginia, and even its racial context, the arrest, prosecution and trials of Michael Simmons, Samuel Wynn, Melvin Stephen, and Allen Iverson was/is not a unique story insomuch as it reveals a broader trend of injustice, especially in the last thirty years. No Crossover misses an opportunity to highlight the ways in which the story of Allen Iverson is representative of a larger pattern even though most black youth trapped in the web of racism, law-and-order, and state power don’t experience the media frenzy that Iverson’s trial elicited nor do most youth ultimately get pardoned by the governor. Instead of providing this needed context, No Crossover focuses on the ways in which the case/Allen Iverson divided the city of Hampton along racial lines. Reflecting James’ effort to tell a story about his hometown and to look at the ways in which racial tensions impacted and were affected by the trial of Allen Iverson, No Crossover fails to provide the necessary context to fully understand this history.

It is not simply a history of Iverson, Hampton, Virginia, racial conflict, and even the intersections of race, sports, and the criminal justice system, but a history that is all too familiar throughout the country. To understand Iverson’s story and to highlight its importance required greater attention to the systematic efforts to demonize, pathologize and ultimately incarcerate youth of color over the last three decades. In erasing this history, in ignoring the problems behind and replicating the existence of the dominant white racial frame, and further criminalizing Iverson, No Crossover reduces the issue of racial injustice to individuals, competing perceptions, and communal conflicts. It tells part of the story, one that contributes to, rather than repels the dominant racial narrative, one that criminalizes Iverson, who in the process becomes representative blackness “needing correction, incarceration, censoring, silencing” (Morrison, 1997, p. XXVIII).

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David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.