In the 32 years since I retired from the NBA, I have been writing books, articles, documentaries,
and movies about many of the overlooked giants of color
throughout American history.
No group has had more influence on society, and on me, than athletes.
Because of the courageous men and women who play games for a living,
I have not only seen further, but been able to achieve more in a profession
and a country that for so long routinely resisted people of color, and sadly still does.
Now come the Summer Olympics,
where people will jump higher, run faster and leap farther than ever before.
The rest of us will watch in awe, fervidly believing that the human body is an unstoppable vehicle of the imagination,
rather than a thick tether of aging flesh.
To watch Olympic athletes soar is to feel, if even for a few moments, untethered.
In 1968, I was asked to join the Olympic men's basketball team,
but i refused as a protest against the police violence and brutal racism bubbling up throughout the country.
I didn't feel comfortable being an envoy of the American way to the rest of the world.
After watching Muhammad Ali sacrifice his heavyweight championship title,
endure three years of being banned from boxing and face imprisonment,
simply because he was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War,
I had to heed my conscience as well.
For the past hundred years, sports has been both a litmus test and a spearhead for racial progress.
Black athletes trying to break into white sports was like climbing up a rope that
stretched up into the clouds while someone set the bottom on fire.
My own climb up that rope has not been without feeling the heat from down below.
But the greats who came before me were like thick knots, each helping us all climb just a little faster, just a little higher.
Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell and Arthur Ashe
are only a few of the giants on whose shoulders I ascended.
More important than how to be a winning athlete, they taught me how to be a significant athlete,
taught me that by speaking out about injustice, I was providing strong shoulders from which the next generation could climb higher.
When I was young, sports seemed like a welcome oasis from the open racism around me.
I had been shaken by reading about the brutal slaying years earlier of 14-year-old Emmett Till,
whose murderers were appointed by an all-white jury, and who once released,
bragged to Look Magazine that they'd killed him.
Then, when I was 17, I accidentally got caught up in the Harlem Riot of 1964,
which broke out after a white cop killed a 15-year-old black kid, James Powell.
How was I to feel safe in a country where that could happen to me, simply because of the color of my skin?
With basketball, the ball didn't care who put it through the hoop.
The game was based only on ability.
If you had better skills, people wanted you on their team.
No one cared who your parents were or how many friends you had.
It seemed a pure, sweaty meritocracy.
But the more successful my high school team became, the bigger the crowds and the more I could hear the racial slurs and taunts.
Even my beloved coach used the n-word in a misguided attempt to fire me up.
While playing at UCLA, I heard the same slurs, and it wasn't just the overt racism that polluted the purity of the sport.
I started playing for UCLA in 1966, and a year later, the NCAA banned the slam dunk.
The ban, which lasted until 1976, was popularly known as the Lew Alcindor rule, because I'd made liberal use of the slam dunk.
It was no coincidence that many of the frequent slam dunkers were Black.
Some would say, 'Easy there, Kareem. That was all a long time ago. We've come a long way.'
Yes, but not as long away as many white people think.
There's been plenty of publicity about how COVID-19 is having a much greater effect
on the Black and Latinx communities, both in the death rates and the economic devastation.
And last summer, tens of millions of people marched to protest police brutality against blacks in
the largest protest movement in US history.
The headlines are also filled with the aggressive attempts of states across the country
to pass hundreds of laws to restrict access to voting, which will mostly impact minority and poor voters.
How much have times changed?
Amanda Gorman: "...but simply unfinished, we the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl..."
Amanda Gorman, the 23-year-old Black poet who read at President Biden's inauguration,
is now one of the most recognizable Black people in the country, yet in March she tweeted that she was followed
home by a security guard who said she looked suspicious and demanded to know if she lived there.
Or consider the two Black men waiting for a friend at a Starbucks in Philadelphia
whom the manager called the police on because they were not paying customers.
Where do we belong?
That's what Black athletes have been asking for decades.
Unfortunately, they are forced to keep asking that question because black athletes can't just perform for fans
and forget that while they're being cheered, their own children are in danger when they're just walking home or waiting in Starbucks.
When these athletes speak out against injustice, they aren't just virtue signaling,
they are fighting for survival.
For many African-American athletes and the Black fans watching them, winning isn't just crossing the finish line.
It's making choices during and after their career to ensure their legacy reflects their values and their cultural history.
We just have to remember that sports records come and go, but social justice can change lives forever.