I’m not black, I’m Michael Jordan What is the measure of Jordan's impact on black culture?
In a passage in his biography Michael Jordan, The life Roland Lazenby talking about Jordan's childhood, reports one of his own words: "I considered myself a racist at the time. I was against all kinds of white people." Michael Jordan had found himself in the position where every black citizen in the south of the United States found himself at least once in his life, and had felt on his own skin what racism of the 1970s meant. Jordan was also born in Wilmington, North Carolina, at a time when the new Ku Klux Klan was home to the state, which was reforming at the time. It seems there have been more than 1,000 clan members in North Carolina, more than in all the other Southern states put together.
Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Morris, in a commentary piece on The Last Dance, wrote how Jordan "made "cause-free" celebrity - and black "cause-free" celebrity - possible, indeed preferable than having to account for all things." Jordan was for years the cultural outpost of a type of sports and lifestyle that rejected the political and social commitment to the consecration of pop culture. Jordan, however, has done all this from his position of privilege in a society, the American one, which has never really come to terms with the institutional racism it is imbued with, and that the backlash of the election of Donald Trump, the Colin Kaepernick affair, has only exacerbated. Michael Jordan was the kind of celebrity who could skip the NBA champions' annual visit to the White House to play golf with a man then arrested for money laundering. And to do so without that decision ever being understood in any way as a policy. And if today, in the media age of Lebron James, his propaganda commitment to the civil rights of African Americans, that kind of figure seems almost unrealistic is because we have always shaped our expectations of the communicative power of athletes, and black athletes in particular, on what Jordan himself had been able to do. And that is to change the world, just not in the way that everyone asked him.
