Another Missed Shot: Kobe Bryant and the Politics of Homophobia

Another Missed Shot: Kobe Bryant and the Politics of Homophobia 
by David J. Leonard

Whistled four his 4^th personal foul and then a technical foul, Kobe Bryant headed to the bench.  With cameras focused on him, he shouted “fucking faggot” in the direction of the referee leading to an avalanche of public condemnation, a fine from the league, and ample debate.  As a Lakers fan, and someone committed to social justice, his choice in words was deeply disappointing.  “Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend” writes Mychal Denzel Smith.  “The use of this particular word reveals something deeper. It's the belief that homosexuality is inherently inferior and an undesirable trait; therefore, to refer to someone with slurs usually reserved for gays is an attempt to belittle that person further. The quickest and most efficient way to insult a man has become to call into question his sexual orientation.” 

Yet, as someone committed to social justice, I have also been disappointed by the reaction from both his critics and his defenders.  Not surprisingly, throughout the Internet many have used this as an opportunity to highlight their own anti-gay sentiments.  Others, however, have denounced Kobe Bryant, expressing shock at his comments, while focusing on the necessity of a fine rather than education of not only Bryant but also society at large.

Shortly after Bryant slur became a public story, the Human Rights Council offered the following denunciation of Bryant:

What a disgrace for Kobe Bryant to use such horribly offensive and distasteful language, especially when millions of people are watching.  Hopefully Mr. Bryant will recognize that as a person with such fame and influence, the use of such language not only offends millions of LGBT people around the world, but also perpetuates a culture of discrimination and hate that all of us, most notably Mr. Bryant, should be working to eradicate.  Bryant and the Lakers have a responsibility to speak up on this issue immediately. America is watching.

Others followed suit, demanding apologies, questioning what sort of punishment should be leveled at Bryant, and otherwise condemned not only the slur but also the person in Bryant.  Yet, amid all the shock and self-righteousness, John Amaechi attempted to provide context for incident: “I'm surprised that people are surprised. This is common language when I played. It was an everyday word that I heard. I haven't seen anything new put in place (by the NBA) to tackle homophobia. There's no reason for it to somehow get better.”  Hoping to capitalize on Kobe Bryant’s visibility (and possibly his already negative standing amongst segments of society) GLADD and Human Rights Council emphasized the potential here to educate and inform.

The Human Rights Council called Bryant’s situation a teachable moment.  While correct in a sense, unfortunately effective lessons have not been at the center of this pedagogical exercise.  By excoriating Bryant and demanding an apology, by focusing on his being a role model (the consequences of kids using it in their schools demonstrates that this isn’t an issue specific to role models) the issue of homophobia has been individualized and isolated.  Bryant’s multiple apologies are seen as a resolution as the focus rests with his learning a lesson.  Lesson learned, back to the game.  

Likewise, the decision from Davis Stern to fine Bryant $100,000 further illustrates the ways in which Bryant required disciplining and punishment as part of the education process. Yet, another lesson learned.  In fact, the denunciation of Bryant, the calls for apologies, education, penance, accountability, and punishment is commonplace within the NBA.  The culture of the NBA is one of control, disciplinarity and punishment for intruding, transgressing, and rule-breaking black bodies.  It is a cultural platform where respectability and appropriateness, as defined by the white racial frame, govern the day-to-day operations alongside its cultural reception.  This is especially true for African American players who have a responsibility to demonstrate their respectability, something that Kobe failed at this moment.

For example, GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios stated, “Professional sports players need to set a better example for young people who use words like this on the playground and in our schools, creating a climate of intolerance and hostility. The LA Lakers have a responsibility to educate their fans about why this word is unacceptable.” Likewise, Edward Wyckoff Williams, waxing nostalgically about a better era in sports, further emphasized his failure as a role model:

Older fans will remember the days when sports stars were heroes, admired for their talent and stature. They graced Wheaties and Cheerio boxes, encouraging young people to stay in school and eat a healthy breakfast. Now, in an age where headlines show the growing number of gay and lesbian youth committing suicide, Bryant's rant is both disrespectful and potentially dangerous -- sending the wrong message to young, adoring fans -- who may well take it literally. Members of the NBA and NFL should be governed not just by their professional code of conduct, but with a great sense of obligation -- reflecting the often quoted line -- 'with great power comes great responsibility'.  If our athletic icons use homophobic slurs, how can we expect our children to act any differently on the schoolyards and street corners?

The efforts to link Bryant’s slur to heroes through a paradigm of nostalgia reflects the historic myopia here in that homophobia has always been present within sporting cultures (and the larger culture as well).  In fact, (white) heteronormativity is central to hero worship historically and present nostalgia for it.  Homophobia is not new, nor is it reflective of the a new type of athlete.  

The effort to use Bryant’s offensive remarks to highlight the pervasive problem of homophobia ironically erases the ubiquity and the systemic impact of homophobia inside and OUTSIDE of sports.  In effect, the public condemnation, the fine, and the overall discourse effectively isolated homophobia, linking it to blackness and Kobe’s visible signifier as basketball player.  In other words, Kobe gets constructed as the face of homophobia, evidence of yet another example of homophobia within the NBA and black America rather than society at large.  As evidence by Bryant’s deployed slur and the public criticism, blackness is once again marked as essentially disruptive, uncontrollable, as a source of “cultural degeneracy.”  Rhonada Williams, in “Living at the crossroads: Exploration in race, nationality, sexuality, and gender,” reminds us that blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (1998, p. 140).   The ways in which homophobia has been attached onto Kobe’s body is evident in both media discourse and reader comments.  Imagined as evidence of his “immaturity” and “ignorance,” linked to culture of sports and basketball, denounced because of his failures to be a role model to kids, the responses consistently focused on Bryant as the beginning and end to the conversation.

To fully understand this situation, one needs to understand it within a larger history of the NBA. In 2007, after former NBA player John Amaechi announced that he was gay, controversy and debate ensued as to whether or not homophobia was particular to the NBA culture.  Such questions increased after Tim Hardaway, responding to a question about Amaechi’s announcement and the surrounding media coverage, told Dan LeBatard, “You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known,” Hardaway said. “I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States.” Hardaway was quickly banished from the NBA’s All-Star weekend, while David Stern dismissed the controversy arguing that “the question of the NBA is always, “have you got game?’”   (Breton 2007).  While the invocation of meritocracy is both instructive and without much evidence (think Craig Hodges), what was most revealing in terms of race and the ongoing culture was the efforts to isolate homophobia within the NBA, with hip-hop culture functioning as the source of homophobia within America’s basketball arenas. 

Efforts to invoke Allen Iverson’s rap lyrics, where he uttered the phrase “faggot tendencies,” or the reactions of many players, who spoke of discomfort around having a gay teammate, served as the basis of a simple conclusion: Amaechi’s decision to remain “in-the-closet” and the firestorm that resulted from his “coming-out-of-the-closet” demonstrate the heightened level of homophobia within the NBA (Thiel 2007; Whitley 2007).  It was not a societal problem, but an NBA problem; it was not an American thing; it was a black/hip-hop thing (if an NBA thing it’s gotta be a black thing).  LeBron James fueled the controversy, offering the following: “With teammates you have to be trustworthy, and if you're gay and you're not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy. So that's like the number one thing as teammates . . . we all trust each other. You've heard of the in-room locker room code. What happens in the locker room stays there. It's a trust factor.”. In response, Michael Wilbon similarly confined the issue to the sphere of basketball

Not to be too cynical, but I don't want to pay too much attention to reactions from a 22-year-old ballplayer with incredibly limited exposure, whose life has been little more than a series of tip-offs from biddy ball to AAU to high school to the pros. LeBron's reaction simply reflects the self-absorption of the day when it comes to young athletic gods whose transition from boyhood to manhood is in too many cases put off until retirement from the pros.

If we're lucky, the men and women who are both enlightened and emboldened will not only be supportive but will drown out the knuckleheads and Neanderthals and everybody who wants to slow the march of progress. Even one step away from tolerance, whether we're talking about race, gender, religious beliefs or sexuality, simply slows the march to the day when none of this stuff matters (2007).

Concluding that homophobia and ignorance concerning the GLBT community reflects the culture of basketball, Wilbon unknowingly constructs homophobia as exception, as a problem specific to the NBA.  Even Dave Zirin, often a source of progressive sports commentary, concludes that sports are unique concerning homophobia: “Sports is one of the last grand hamlets of homophobia. Amaechi poses a real challenge to the realities of the locker room, the press box and the owner's box: all places where I have heard homophobic comments used as casually as a comma. I give no credit to Stern's pretension that it just doesn't matter” (2007).  Others similarly wondered if hip-hop contributed to homophobia (Moore 2007; Amaechi 2007) or if other issues – violence, locker rooms – were at work as well.  In a league that regularly reduces women to sexual objects, that celebrates the hyper masculinity of its NBA players evident in the use of gendered/sexualized language (“Pau Gasol is soft”; “Sacramento Queens”), the hypocrisy here is endless.  Within sports culture that works to recode the WNBA as a heterosexual league as a counter narrative to assumptions about its lesbian presence, it is hard to accept the righteousness evident here.

Notwithstanding, the culture and the blackness of the league became a subtextual source of inquiry for the debate about homophobia within the NBA, ultimately exonerating whiteness/American through a scapegoating discourse.  While writing about Don Imus, Michael Awkward is particularly instructive in this case: “Put Simply,” Kobe Bryant “was made to stand in for millions of well-known and faceless” homophobes and other who tacitly protect their heterosexual privilege who GLBT communities and their allies “want desperately to identity, put on trial, and excoriate because of incontrovertible – but to this point often easily dismissed – ‘evidence’ of centuries of anti-gay violence, heterosexism, and homophobia.  With Kobe Bryant, we get a similar reductionist formula, where Bryant and all of his past experiences provide a supposed explanation for his use of this slur. 

The ease to which Bryant was condemned and the perceived self-righteousness reflect the hegemony of the white racial frame.  Bryant’s homophobic slur, his perceived homophobia, his emotional outbursts, and his evidence “childishness” here fit a larger script about black male bodies.  This instance and the claims about uber homophobia within sports culture (usually linked to basketball and football and not say hockey and baseball) and homophobia within the black community thus fit a larger narrative about black dysfunction, pathology and otherness.  “The casual sexism and homophobia reproduce the oppression of straight black men, providing a justification for ‘the denial of manhood to black men within a racialized society,” writes Michael Kimmel in “Toward a Pedagogy of the Oppressor.”  “‘You see,’ one can almost hear the establishment saying ‘those black men are like animals.  Look at how they treat their women!  They don’t deserve to be treated with respect.”  In other words, “the very mechanism that black men thought would restore manhood” – demonizing homosexuals, using anti-gay slurs, asserting and demonstrating traditional male values – “ends up being the pretext on which it is denied.” 

bell hooks takes up this issue with “Homophobia in Black Communities” arguing that “black communities may be perceived as more homophobic than other communities because there is a tendency for individuals in black communities to express in an outspoken way anti-gay sentiment.”  Furthering the distinction between black and white homophobia she writes, “yet a distinction must be made between black people overtly expressing prejudice toward homosexuals and white people who never make homophobic comments but who have the power to actively exploit and oppress gay people in areas of housing, employing, etc.”  Echoing the criticism offered by Dwight McBride in Why I hate Abercrombie and Fitch, I find myself dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the binaries constructed here as well as the tacit acceptance/privileging of one form of bigotry over the other. 

Yet, hooks challenges readers to think about how and why a public discourse around homophobia relies and focuses on the uttererances of Kobe Bryant, Isaiah Washington or Chris Brown, and not the ways in which homophobia is ingrained in our culture, language, and institutions.  Why do these black men become the moments for public righteousness and concerns about bigotry and not the ubiquity of anti-gay slurs at American schools, anti-gay hate crimes, or any number of examples?  Similarly, these spectacle serve not as a means to interrogate homophobia, heterosexism, and anti-gay violence as manifested in a myriad of spaces but as a moment to celebrate “us” (“the normal) as accepting and progressive in the demonization of the other.  It becomes a missed opportunity to interrogate our own language and prejudices for the sake of imagining the Other as the Other. 

hooks’ comments also mirror the hegemonic belief that black males are likely to express and hold onto homophobic beliefs, a fact that is complicated at best and patently without basis in another sense.   In “A Comparison of African American Men and White College Students Affective and Attitudinal Reactions to Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Individuals,” Charles Negy and Russell Eiseman found that blacks were only slightly more accepting of anti-gay sentiments.  These differences, however, disappear when accounting for religiosity.  Noting, “that most ethnic groups are not very accepting of homosexuality,” the authors conclude, “for both African Americans and whites, gender and religious commitment predicted homophobia.”  Despite these findings and ample evidence about societal homophobia, the reaction to Bryant’s comments and commonplace discussions about homophobia within the black community erases the larger issues at hand.  A CNN poll recently found that 48% thought homosexuality was morally wrong.  In 2001, Human Rights Watch reported that 2 million American teenagers suffered because of anti-gay slurs and taunts.  Similarly, according to one study, “Gay students hear anti-gay slurs as often as 26 times each day; faculty intervention occurs in only about 3% of those cases” while another found that 97% of high school students “regularly hear homophobic remarks from their peers.”

Yet, these sort of spectacles that imagine homophobia as unique to the black community, as particular to basketball culture, as reflecting the values and ethos of hip-hop not only furthers the demonization of blackness but in term safely confines homophobia to the dysfunctional Other in need of education and punishment.  By scapegoating homophobia as a sports thing, a black thing, a hip-hop thing, or a Kobe thing, the discourse lets a lot of people and institutions off the hook.

Responding to increasing criticism directed at the African American community in lead up to the November 2008, which put the issue of gay marriage on the ballot with Proposition 8, Ta-Nehisi Coates succinctly highlighted the danger in ignoring or defending in instances of homophobia, yet not using it as a moment to scapegoat and demonize African Americans:

I don't like the idea of being an apologists for homophobes--least of all black homophobes. Also, I'm concerned that my defense not make black folks think that this isn't an issue worth our attention. But sweeping statements like "no ethnic community [is] as homophobic in America as African-Americans" should induce some serious pangs of skepticism. Are African-Americans really more homophobic than, say, Italian-Americans? Are we really more homophobic than Hasidic Jews? Than Caribbean Americans? Than Puerto-Ricans?

As a teachable moment, we must ask what are we being taught and why?  What is it teaching us about society, others, and our self? Does it teach us about a larger issue of prejudice, homophobia or bigotry?  Did it teach us about language and the normalization of heterosexism and homophobia in our everyday life? Does it push us to think about language constructs “normal” and “Other” and the impact/consequences of language as everyday violence?  When a person (Kobe or otherwise) “hurls that antigay slur at a referee or anyone else — let’s call it the F-word — he is telling boys, men and anyone watching that when you are frustrated, when you are as angry as can be, the best way to demean and denigrate a person, even one in a position of power, is to make it clear that you think he is not a real man, but something less,” writes John Amaechi. “It is an indication of the power of that word, and others like it, to brutalize and dehumanize. This F-word, which so many people seem to think is no big deal, is the postscript to too many of those lives cut short.”  Did we learn this lesson or have we been too focused on what Kobe did and not what Kobe reveals?

Amaechi efforts to contextualize, to move beyond the individual, to reflect on the consequences have been unique to the discussion.  Unfortunately, much of the public rancor has “become another spectacle, evidence of ‘deviance’ for a mainstream public condition to think of black people and black men in particular as such”   (Neal, 2005, p. 81).  By focusing on intent, on sports, on Kobe, and the larger discourse about black homophobia, we have missed an opportunity, creating another moment where the wrong lessons are being taught and learned.   Homophobia, anti-gay bigotry and harmful slurs directed at the GLBT community are not a black, hip-hop, or sports thing, but an American thing.  A me and you thing.  

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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.