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Hot New Jam From Joe Bonamassa: "King Bee Shakedown"

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goddamnedfrank8/03/2018 10:10:30 pm PDT

I like how Trump felt it necessary to compare Lebron to Michael Jordan like the need to pigeonhole him as just a black NBA player didn’t come from a deeply racist place. Trump likes Jordan because Jordan generally doesn’t say shit. As Howard Bryant details in his book The Heritage, there was an entire middle generation of black athletes who generally kept their mouths shut, because for them success somehow meant crossing over.

But as journalist Howard Bryant reveals, this has always been more complicated for black athletes, who from the start, were committing a political act simply by being on the field. In fact, among all black employees in twentieth-century America, perhaps no other group had more outsized influence and power than ballplayers. The immense social responsibilities that came with the role is part of the black athletic heritage. It is a heritage built by the influence of the superstardom and radical politics of Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos through the 1960s; undermined by apolitical, corporate-friendly “transcenders of race,” O. J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods in the following decades; and reclaimed today by the likes of LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and Carmelo Anthony.