Steve Nash was chosen as this
year’s most valuable player in the National Basketball
Association, and other than that he grew up in British Columbia and
now plays for the Phoenix Suns, you might ask what this has to do
with the West. A fair question, and one I will get to.
Nash is a guard with long, black hair and a frenetic style of play
that enables him to penetrate defenses. He is also white, the first
white player to be named MVP since Larry Bird 20 years ago.
Bird created a stir last year when he said professional
basketball needs more stars who are white. Because most people are
white, he said, they will identify with white players. He’s
right to a certain extent. All of us like to cheer our homies,
however we define them. Millions of Chinese are cheering Yao Ming,
Houston’s skyscraper center, while down in Buenos Aires they
are fervently following San Antonio’s human razor, Manu
Ginobli. Meanwhile, Mexicans have been cheering the renewed
fortunes of Eduardo Najera, a forward for Denver who grew up in
Chihuahua.
Birds of a feather do flock together. I sort
of identified with John Stockton, the now-retired all-star guard
for the Utah Jazz. He was white, like me, but also 6-foot-2, same
as me, and furthermore he grew up in the West, in his case in
Spokane, Wash.
But what I found bizarre about
Bird’s statement was his way of defining who is white and who
is not. To be white, he seemed to be saying, you must have blond
hair or, like Steve Nash, at least straight hair. You must have a
narrow nose, or at least one that is not flared, like that of an
African-American. You must also talk white.
What about
white skin but black, kinky hair? Well, that seems to make you
black or, to use the current term, African-American. Black skin but
blue eyes? White skin, a shaved head, but flared nostrils? Again,
African-American.
Strom Thurmond’s daughter, a
teacher in Los Angeles, was regarded as African-American because,
in fact, her mother was a descendent of a slave. But she was at
least half-white. Why wasn’t she considered white?
In fact, In fact, many of the best NBA players — Tim Duncan,
Jason Kidd and Mike Bibby come to mind — look at least as
much white as black, at least on my television screen. So why
can’t they be what used to be called with no embarrassment,
Great White Hopes?
We are already blended more than we
sometimes realize. A study of the DNA of students in a class in
race and ethnic relations at Pennsylvania State University yielded
some surprises. Some students who thought of themselves as black
had ancestors who came from Europe. A few were surprised to learn
they were half-white.
Indeed, the Thomas Jefferson family
reunions have enlarged considerably since the descendents he
fathered with the slave Sally Henning are now included. They had to
exume Jefferson and pluck some of his DNA to get those with kinky
hair in the door, but the deed has now been done. Some
African-Americans can now trace their ancestors to the writers of
the Declaration of Independence. Collard greens and apple pie on
the Fourth of July?
Even the Census Bureau has
acknowledged the futility of our white and black and red and yellow
thinking. There is too much rainbow, which the agency concedes with
its check-off boxes for “other.”
In the West, our largest
minority is often a majority. “Hispanic” is the term generally
used, although it’s an umbrella that awkwardly stretches too
far. It can be used to describe an Argentine with German heritage
who speaks Spanish, somebody from Chihuahua, Mexico, with much
blood of the Maya, and the baseball player Sammy Sosa, who is black
and comes from the Dominican Republic.
To be Hispanic
means only that you come from a Spanish-speaking country.
It’s not an improvement on the West of my youth, where
anybody with dark skin, black hair, and a Spanish accent was a
“Mexican,” even if their ancestors had been U.S. citizens longer
than me and my ancestors.
It’s heartening that many
young people today want to identify with a culture of mixed races.
It won’t happen in my lifetime, or in yours, but I root for a
time when the races become pureed. For the present, I hope we move
past the stage of defining our heroes on the basketball court by
the shape of their noses. How ridiculous is that?
Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives
and writes near Denver, Colorado.
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