During Tuesday night’s broadcast of the Boston Celtics at Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game, notwithstanding the horrifying live broadcast of Gordon Hayward’s dislocated ankle/broken tibia, a long-form advertisement by Nike once again showed the world what too many assume are one of the few options of upward mobility for cinematically-depicted impoverished black people.
Basketball.
Given my background, I look at everything we see on television or video as something someone had to initially conceive and another to approve. In the case of this ad, not sure I think much of either.
Nike and the many entities that perpetuate the black Basketball Jones give off that racist impression that the sport is one of the two major industries we gravitate to as THE way out of poverty. The other being gangsta’ rap and/or what’s now called “R&B”, but that’s a topic for another post.
However, numbers are something never addressed by those who continue their soft bigotry of low expectations.
According to the NCAA, as of 2016 there were over 547 thousand children playing basketball at the high school level, of that only over 18,000 made it to the higher-tier college level, of that only four thousand were eligible for the NBA draft, and of that only 44 were drafted by a team. In simpler words, the chance of a high school student making to the professional level is 0.00008052296 and the odds probably haven’t improved noticeably since.
Marketing sneakers to the millions who play is smart. Promoting what amounts to a pipe dream is another.
Then again, it appears Nike and the left don’t think blacks have potential for much else and Apple isn’t any better.
We dance for their entertainment.
See a pattern?
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