Commodifying Black Expressivity: Race and the Representational Politics of Streetball

Theorizing Streetball and Black Expressivity

Although it shares certain similarities, streetball largely operates with alternative logics and motives from that of traditional basketball played in the NBA and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA; Mohamed, 2017). The “get-two-points-by-any-means-necessary” attitude of traditional basketball is subverted by a streetball culture that emphasizes the quality and elegance of the performative action more than its quantitative output. The athletic body is not merely an instrumental means to a predefined end; rather, aesthetic corporeality is valued and memorialized as an end in itself (Woodbine, 2016). Winning and competition are still central, although mainly for the sake of identity construction, maintenance of masculinity, and relational social status (Vieyra, 2016). Top-down authority of any kind is rejected in favor of a more collectivist and relativist evaluation of rules, infractions, and traditions. While streetball certainly contains distinct normative structures that encourage some behaviors (ranging from subversive to problematic) while limiting others, the body itself enjoys much less restraint than in traditional basketball. The score of the game is less important in streetball than the corporeal artistry that galvanizes a crowd to react with “ooh” and “ahh.” Traditional basketball and street basketball are widely understood in popular culture as “White” and “Black” forms, respectively. Exemplary is Greenfield’s (1999) claim that this binary is “clear as day,” with Black basketball thriving on deception, the unexpected, and “superb athletic skill” characterized by leaping agility, speed, quickness, rhythm, and finesse. White basketball alternatively, according to Greenfield (1999), entails the “complete pulverization of that space by sheer intensity” (p. 374) with a jaggedness, sweatiness, and a lack of frills and flow. This reductive and dangerous binary—which continues to inform depictions of streetball—must be rejected. Binaries such as this advance an antiquated racial ontology, that insinuates that the social categories we designate as “racial” contain essential natures (such as the myth of the naturally-superior Black athlete), which then universally predetermine the characteristics harbored by individuals socially assigned to their respective racial category (Gilroy, 2000).

Hall’s (1996) interventions in theorizing what constitutes forms of popular culture as “Black” assist in constructing a more precise and contextual distinction between traditional basketball and streetball. In explaining how the Black diaspora has used the body as a canvas of cultural capital, Hall explains that cultural forms that become signified as Black are not those that reflect a pure or essential Black subjectivity; rather, they are forms that have “enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation” (p. 473). Hall’s conception describes the Black expressivity at the heart of streetball: the corporeal and stylistic signification of the traditions, struggles, persistence, counter-narratives, and tactics of survival of the Black community. Rather than a product of biological or cultural essentialism, streetball must be situated within the Black, diasporic, vernacular tradition of locating expressive outlets of joy, creativity, and autonomy from the periphery, arising (consciously or unconsciously) as a response to racial capitalism’s marginalization and exploitation of Black bodies (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Farred, 2003; Marable, 2015). Cultural forms such as streetball become “Black” when they evolve from an embodied “cultural willingness to improvise, from a cultural imperative to adapt” (Caponi, 1999, p. 3), exemplifying “the will to spontaneity, stylization of the performed self, and edifying deception” (p. 5). The Black expressivity exhibited in streetball, then, must be understood as a resistant technology of stylization developed by, for, and through the Black community, in opposition to the “White man’s rules” of traditional basketball (Mohamed, 2017). This nuanced conception of streetball, however, is not translated to its mediated representations and thus prohibits the development of conjunctural understanding of contemporary racial politics.

Sport, Representation and Textual Analysis

Drawing from critical sports media studies, as well as cultural studies, I utilize textual analysis as a method of understanding how commercial media mobilizes language, visuals, symbols, and technology to produce meaning and shape popular perceptions of Blackness. Textual analysis helps one examine how representation is not merely reflective but constitutive and communicative of reality (Hall, 1997). Streetball is a convenient representational site for conceptualizing racial ideology because of its popular associations with Black culture, bodies, and spaces (Mohamed, 2017; Oates, 2017). The three chosen texts exemplify the “media-induced politicization of popular culture” that, through critical analysis, demonstrates the “importance of ideology and affect in the construction and experiencing of everyday life” (Andrews, 1998, p. 186). In particular, I identify how social power is embodied and expressed through representations of streetball spaces and bodies. I also examine how commodification participates in shaping representation in which sporting styles and bodies formulated in specific (marginalized) contexts are rendered decontextualized and semiotic “images used to sell itself and other goods and services” (Rowe, 2017, p. 237). The representations are expressed through three themes that were apparent in each text and in conjunction constitute a connected narrative regarding the regressive tendencies of sport media’s racialized constructions (Billings et al., 2018).

The three texts were chosen not only because they claim to be genuine commemorations of streetball but because scholars have recognized them as three of the most culturally prominent representations of streetball in mainstream media (Campbell, 2015; Giardina & McCarthy, 2008; Oates, 2017). The first text, Entertainment and Sports Programming Network’s (ESPN’s) former television series AND1 Mixtape Tour, is perhaps the most famous display of streetball that, at one point in the mid-2000s, “rivaled the professional league [NBA] in popularity and influence” (Campbell, 2015, p. 51). The second text, video game series NBA Street, included four video games (NBA Street, NBA Street Vol. 2, NBA Street V3, and NBA Street Homecourt) released across multiple gaming platforms between 2001 and 2007. The third text, 2018 film Uncle Drew, is a comedic adaptation of the viral YouTube clips of NBA-star Kyrie Irving competing at streetball courts across the United States disguised as an elderly man. AND1 Mixtape Tour and NBA Street are considered “classic” cultural relics of the 2000s and still are widely played/aired (Erk, 2016), while Uncle Drew was marketed heavily by NBA personalities and generated significant “buzz” on social media after its release. Despite their recognized prominence, these texts have received minimal critical examination individually, let alone placed into a cross-textual dialogue. Although each text is presented through a different medium, they share similar premises and appeals and, thus, exhibit similar (and harmful) representational politics regarding race and streetball.

Depictions of an Essential, Pathological Blackness

Unsurprisingly, none of the texts engaged with race directly and explicitly. However, each of the texts implicitly linked streetball with Blackness in ways that obfuscated the contingent nature of their association. Each of the texts portrayed streetball as an urban phenomenon played by and for predominantly Black men, with a particular importance for Black culture. Yet the texts failed to articulate why this was the case, in effect falsely implying that the Black cultural styles depicted were inherent to Black individuals. In doing so, all three texts implicitly drew upon and further reproduced cultural tropes that positioned streetball as indicative of the imagined deficiency, degeneracy, and inherent inferiority of Black culture.

The playfulness with which the texts assigned essential biological and cultural traits to Blackness was apparent in the NBA Street cover art. In the first game, NBA Street, a Black male adorned by an afro is shown as flying through the air, in the midst of dunking on a chain-linked net, with a backdrop of the high-rises of inner city, under the word “Street” written to signify a graffiti-like font, capped with a crown. The cover of NBA Street Vol. 2 is similar, though this cover features three Black males with more defined musculature and exaggerated limb length. The second volume also features a back cover art that explains how the game allows the player to “BRING IT on authentic urban courts,” relaying the content of the game in streetball colloquialisms. NBA Street V3 follows a similar formula, although this cover art features a solemn-faced NBA player Baron Davis protruding from a grimy urban backdrop. From merely the shelves, it is clear that NBA Street embellishes and fetishizes Black bodies and cultural forms, imbuing them with a “ghettocentric” manufactured authenticity that serves as a seductive commercial selling point (Andrews & Silk, 2010).

The glorification of Black aesthetics by NBA Street stands in heavy contrast to the blame cast upon them by the NBA during the same mid-2000s time frame. The NBA blamed Blackness for the 2003 “Malice in the Palace” fight, perceived diminishing respectability, and a stark drop in ratings, responding by placing Blackness “under assault” (Leonard, 2012). This most famously included the installation of the 2005 dress code that outlawed predominantly Black fashion attire, as well as punitive measures aimed to intensify surveillance of player conduct. While the NBA was invested in moving away from its reputation as a Black expressive space in favor of an image they perceived as more comforting to White mainstream consumers, the NBA Street video game series marked an attempt to profit from the same Black expressivity that, in real life, was being policed.

The film Uncle Drew contains similar regressive racial tropes. The premise of the film is that 50 years after the disappearance of 1960s streetball legend Uncle Drew (played by Irving), the main character Dex attempts to form a team to win the Rucker Park Streetball Tournament. After Dex finds the elderly Uncle Drew and begs him to join the team, the pair travels the United States to convince Uncle Drew’s former streetball teammates to come out of retirement for one last tournament run. Foundational to Uncle Drew’s motive throughout the movie, and thus central to the film’s plot, is the perceived lack of respectability among today’s Black males. This is highlighted by the “style” in which the film’s Black urban youth play basketball. In his first appearance in the film, Uncle Drew derides some young Black streetballers whom he believes, like all others, are playing the game “wrong.” He eventually challenges one teen to a game of one-on-one where Uncle Drew, ironically, defeats the teen by playing an even flashier and braggadocious (streetball) style of play. This moment serves as the point in which Uncle Drew decides that he wants to play in the Rucker Park tournament as a way to return respect to the game of basketball, primarily by showing the “youngbloods” the “right way to play.” The film emphasizes Uncle Drew’s position as a generational anachronist in numerous ways, one of which is his proud intolerance towards hip-hop music (purposefully naming it “hibbity hoppity or whatever”). These moments extrapolate this right way/wrong way discourse to a pessimism of Black youth in general, in which expressivity and corporeal autonomy absent of discipline, order, and structure—exemplified by street basketball, hip-hop, and other forms of Black expressive culture—is constructed as inherently problematic. The narrative structure of Uncle Drew suggests that the youth choosing to do things the “wrong way” inhibits their progress, an issue that only a return to the respectability of the romanticized good old days can rectify (as opposed structurally focused anti-racism). Situated within the context of a perceived increase in selfishness, individualism, and conceitedness among emerging (Black) NBA players described previously (Leonard, 2012), the (racialized) right way/wrong way dichotomy is presented and naturalized through the film’s enshrined hero Uncle Drew.

The perception of streetball styles as the “wrong way”—as in, inferior to the orderly style of traditional basketball played in the NBA—is reinforced explicitly when NBA coaches discuss former streetballers from the AND1 Mixtape Tour. What would become the AND1 team began in 1998, when a group of Black males from Harlem, New York recorded themselves playing expressive and flashy streetball. The videographed mixtapes garnered national attention, with Volume 1 selling 100,000 copies by the end of 1999 and achieving word-of-mouth virality. The sports apparel brand AND1 soon began to sponsor these streetballers, providing them with gear, plastering the AND1 logo at the bottom right corner of each mixtape, and exclusively selling the mixtape to customers who purchased a pair of AND1 sneakers. The tour aspect was initiated soon after as AND1 funded the team’s travel to various cities such as Chicago, Washington DC, and Los Angeles to compete against local streetballers. ESPN struck a deal with the tour in 2002, airing the doc-series Streetball: The AND1 Mixtape Tour until 2008. The immediate popularity of the series launched some AND1 streetballers from localized underground fame to the status of national sporting icons. Attaining ratings second to only ESPN’s flagship “SportsCenter,” the show stimulated the rise of the AND1 team’s streetballers—such as Philip “Hot Sauce” Champion and Anthony “Half Man, Half Amazing” Hayward, among others—whose (nick)names became as widely known as those of many of the mid-2000s NBA players (Erk, 2016). In fact, it was a common belief that many of the AND1 team members were more talented than many NBA players and were only denied inclusion into the NBA because coaches and executives bought into the stigma that streetballers were illegitimate and incapable of succeeding in traditional basketball (Sepkowitz, 2019).

The stigmatization of streetball caused some streetballers to reject the NBA outright, remaining in the streetball scene as a source of pride. Some were drafted to the NBA, including Rafer “Skip 2 My Lou” Alston, the most famous AND1 player. Once in the league, Alston recalled that his streetball reputation had a nefarious impact on his perception:

I came up when coaches wouldn’t allow it or they call it junk ball or they’re like, “Oh, that street stuff is no good.” We grew up playing the game in the playgrounds and the gym, we come from playing the game with so much flair and passion for the game. I think the coaches had a hard time trying to blend the two. (Sepkowitz, 2019, para. 21)

Alston’s NBA coach George Karl admitted that Alston’s characterization was true, stating: “He played with the ball a lot. We had a little problem there, but I think I realized Rafer was young, youthful, maybe too playground-ish” (Sepkowitz, 2019, para. 22). Alston perceived a racialized double standard, stating that although coaches did not like streetball style in the NBA, they revered White 1970s NBA player “Pistol” Pete Maravich who played with a similar style. Alston stated, “I don’t understand how they can love him doing it and it was A-OK when Maravich had a lot of playground stuff in his game, but when a kid like myself comes from NYC, it’s all bad” (Goldman, 2009, para. 11). Even contemporary Black NBA player Ish Smith stated that he learned to dribble from watching AND1 Mixtape Tour, developing a style that got him “in trouble with a lot of different coaches” (Hughes, 2020, para. 13). The passion and flair celebrated in AND1 Mixtape Tour is coded as antithetical to the traditional styles of the NBA, particularly when associated with Blackness.

The three texts contain illustrations of Blackness through streetball that lacks nuance. These depictions conflate technologies of stylization formed in response to structural discrimination with reductive essentialisms and cultural pathologies that individualize the persistence of racial inequality. The texts collectively exhibit how streetball was “perceived as a threat to the integrity of the game, even while the styles associated with it became a source of mainstream fascination” (Oates, 2017, p. 99), a phenomenon which itself is indicative of the broader “intersection where the Other is both denigrated and turned into the object of xenotropic desire, the black body or history that is ridiculed or violenced against and the culture that is mimicked by the dominant society” (Farred, 2003, p. 18). The fact that streetball is perceived as antithetical to traditional basketball is precisely because it was formed in response to White-coded basketball styles played in an early NBA and NCAA that systematically excluded Black players, which then fed the binary perception that reproduced that exclusion (Vierya, 2016). Nevertheless, in its commodification, streetball is represented as an essential and pathological Black vernacular expression, most cogently when contrasted to styles associated with Whiteness.

Decontextualized Black Bodies, Spaces, and Cultural Forms

A corollary theme to the depiction of an essential and pathological Blackness is the ways in which streetball—and hence, Black cultural forms and spaces—is stripped from the context of its creation. Uncle Drew elucidates this point vividly. For a film predicated on the allure of streetball, there was a complete lack of engagement with the histories of racism, discrimination, capitalism, redlining, neoliberalism, deindustrialization, austerity, and other structural processes that produced the conditions for the proverbial “street” to exist at all (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Marable, 2015). Viewers are merely shown brief significations of the ghetto in the form of rundown buildings surrounding a random streetball court, presumably to provide a fleeting hint of “authenticity.” Uncle Drew’s uncritical celebration of the romanticized space of Rucker Park—a space central to the film and many other depictions of streetball (Oates, 2017)—conceals its historical constituent factors, as well as the reality that those factors were not (and are not) inevitable. The movie’s culminating Rucker Park tournament exhibits a spectacle of post-racialism in which the crowd is an equal (and spatial) mixture of Black and White, all reacting, cheering, and occupying space identically. The causes, operations, and implications of structural racism are washed away in favor of a comfortable, yet unrealistic, racial harmony that exists only in the “corporate imagination” (Kelley, 1997, p. 44).

In the NBA Street series, structural disadvantage is trivialized, appropriated, and gamified as an “achievement” to overcome. The gameplay follows from the significations of the cover art. After choosing a team (from a pool of NBA players), the user selects the court to play on from a selection of famous urban streetball courts, including Rucker Park (which has to be “unlocked”), as well as “the Cage” in New York, Foss Park courts in Chicago, and Venice Beach courts in Westside Los Angeles. In NBA Street V3, users can also create their own court, customizing the surface, backboard, urban backdrop, and wall graffiti, contingent upon how many “street points” the user has accumulated. During gameplay, characters are granted a hyperbolic athleticism to execute exaggerated streetball moves that require unrealistic feats of corporeal contortion and dexterity. The user is encouraged to care more about style than scoring. Expressivity quantified as “street points” are rewarded to players who conduct the flashiest and most intricate dribble moves, passes, and alley-oops; the more the move embarrasses a defender, the more street points are allotted, and the bigger reaction is heard from the unseen crowd.

Elements of NBA Street’s gameplay further engender a sensationalized and decontextualized Black culture. The overdramatized banter echoing through the game particularly stands out. The only voice heard is that of an ominous broadcaster, unseen and with an unknown identity, who reacts to each move with theatrical Black vernacular commentary that takes the (exaggerated) form of signifyin'; or the largely satirical loud-talking, testifying, calling out, taunting, and insulting that often takes place within competitive contexts (Gates, 1988). Over the sonic backdrop of rap/hip-hop instrumentals, effective moves and stylish baskets are met with humorous approval (such as “word, B! That was bananas!” and “that was sick, call the paramedics!”) just as missed baskets and turnovers are met with verbose trash talk (such as “you just got boomed on, what now?” and “he shook the sweat off you!”). In other game modes, users must travel the country, defeating a different Street Legend (inspired by real-life streetballers who serve as the game’s “bosses”) in each city, until the user competes with the final Street Legend “Stretch,” with the symbolic ownership of the streets at stake. Similar to Uncle Drew, the NBA Street series depicts streetball spaces and bodies as products of the decontextualized, fantasized, essentialized, and commodified “iconic ghetto” spatially associated with Black bodies (Oates, 2017), while lacking any engagement with the ghettos lived realities or constituent factors.

While some consumers undoubtedly view this sensationalism as a fun source of entertainment, such representations of streetball make a mockery of earnest Black cultural forms. Black expressivity is stripped of its contextual constitution and wielded as an innocuous commercialized game. The hyperbole of corporeal movement is driven by an ideology of inherent racial difference in physicality, one that only serves to legitimate the fear and fascination of the Black body that justifies the violence too-often cast upon it. Black (hyper)masculinity is constructed through a convergence of aggressive behavior, verbal theater, and physical dominance. Leonard (2004) explains that:

the popularity of the game has less to do with its game playability, but its emphasis on an imagined street (Black) culture. Whether the never-ending hip-hop soundtrack or the numerous shots of graffiti art, the game plays America’s love affair with urban America, particularly that which is imagined as Black. As the games glamorize inner city spaces commodifying them seedy and dangerous places, structural shifts continue to worsen these spaces of life. Reflecting the hyper-visibility and glorification of de-industrialized inner-city community, games like [this] reflect commodification of African American practices of play within popular culture. (p. 3)

Black urban spaces are rendered achievements to be unlocked and models to be replicated, rather than spaces symptomatic of racial capitalism, molded through discrimination and in desperate need of material investment (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Streetball Legends are displayed as heroes occupying a heightened symbolic position that the user, through NBA players, must defeat in order to restore balance. In reality, though, streetballers are often barred from mainstream basketball institutions and their affiliated financial benefits, instead often falling victim to drug abuse, mass incarceration, and the general ills of Black poverty in America (Woodbine, 2016). Through all its significations that attempt to depict a nonexistent authenticity and represent the ghetto as a “space of play and pleasure amid violence and deterioration” (Kelley, 1997, p. 44), the Blackness of the NBA Street series is a mere simulacrum of Black urban life that conceals its perilous reality.

Unlike Uncle Drew and NBA Street, AND1 Mixtape Tour does not completely ignore structural disadvantage. The series includes documentation of streetballers’ personal lives, which sometimes depicts their navigation of poverty, economic pressures, and lack of opportunity. Yet AND1 Mixtape Tour falls into the insidious trope of recasting poverty as a romantic struggle that is justified to the extent that it generates toughness, resilience, and dedication. In other words, the implication is that poverty is okay as long as it produces something good, such as the expressivity and creativity embodied in streetball. The glamorization of disadvantage suggests to the popular imaginary that disadvantage is acceptable as long as it serves as motivation for a performance that is entertaining, as long as its transcendence makes for an evocative narrative. Disadvantage becomes merely a trading chip in a metaphysical transaction as if a social contract that produces disadvantage is ethical as long as those who systematically face that disadvantage develop a ruggedness that can be heralded as symbolic of “cool.” Poverty, desperation, and historical injustices at the root of Black struggle are rendered mere plot points in an iconic streetballer’s origin story, rather than debilitating obstacles that should conclusively indict a social formation. Instead, through acontextual commercialization, the processes that create this disadvantage elude interrogation.

AND1 Mixtape Tour also demonstrates how the removal of necessary context creates space for commercial forces to infuse new meanings that blunt the political potential of Black expressive cultural forms. The structure of the ESPN series featured the AND1 team crashing streetball courts to interact with local streetballers around the country and eventually around the globe. The show also implemented a contest to become an AND1 Mixtape player, where local streetballers competed against each other in style, skills, and acrobatics to join the travelling team and sign an endorsement contract with AND1. Hall (1996) recognized how spaces that celebrate forms of difference are often “very carefully policed and regulated…there is always a price of incorporation to be paid when the cutting edge of difference and transgression is blunted into spectacularization” (p. 471). Hall’s observation certainly rings true for AND1 Mixtape Tour. The pre-televised tour was never free from the grips of capital, but the logic and structure of the television show transformed the tour into an implicit celebration of neoliberal capitalism. Although streetball has historically cherished camaraderie, the show’s format pitted young emerging streetballers against each other by making them compete for money and access. The economic aspect is depicted as the ultimate ticket out of disadvantage obtained through merit, while the social association with AND1 facilitated marginalized Black males mistaking corporate branding for cultural worth (Matlon, 2019). Competition becomes re-enshrined as dogmatic. Consumerism is portrayed as the modality through which the streetball identity is signified, with the adornment of the correct (AND1) apparel becoming as much a part of streetball style as the performance. The transcendence of poverty by the exceptional streetballers is depicted as “proof” that circumstances do not dictate one’s chances for success. Streetball, in these ways, is transformed through its commercialization from an end in itself to a means to strengthen a capitalist hegemony that continues to underdevelop Black America (Marable, 2015). When Black culture—through representations of streetball—is stripped of the context that shaped its meaning, the catalyst of Black urban subjugation is articulated as its antidote.

Material, Cultural, and Symbolic Exploitation of Streetball

It must also be understood that the NBA, commercial media producers, and corporations have a stake in the popular perception of streetball, which likely influences how they contribute to its representation. The way in which these external commercial interests benefit from the Black aesthetics of streetball, while simultaneously participating in their degradation, is visible at the meta-level. Beyond the use of Black styles and spaces as a seductive consumer stimulant described previously, the texts include other forms of material and symbolic exploitation. The first example is the benefit that the NBA extracted from AND1 Mixtape Tour. As discussed earlier, the streetball styles exhibited by AND1 players were castigated by NBA coaches and administrators who instead championed traditional styles based on order, rationality, and acceptance of authority. However, the rising popularity of streetball in the early 2000s—codified by the AND1 Mixtape Tour—appealed to and influenced the future stars that would take the NBA to new heights. Contemporary NBA stars LeBron James and Stephen Curry both watched the show and looked up to the streetballers, while other stars emulated the style of AND1 players, even while aspiring to make the NBA (Sepkowitz, 2019). Fan-favorite NBA player Jamal Crawford said he was mesmerized by Alston and the AND1 players, carrying their mixtapes with him everywhere he went, stating:

the way [Alston] passed the ball, the way he handled the ball, the way he just displayed that kind of flair…The creativity of it, the art of it, you didn’t see guys like that in the NBA. It just brought a whole different layer and viewpoint of how you could play the game. (Sepkowitz, 2019, para. 5)

Looking back, former AND1 members credit streetball for a much-needed shift of the NBA’s gameplay structure that led to a significant boost in ratings. These rule changes include more prevalent foul calls for defensive hand-checking and increased focus on the three-pointer, which effectively made NBA gameplay more open, free-flowing, and appealing (Sepkowitz, 2019).

In addition, the actual AND1 players benefitted the NBA by (inadvertently, and unfortunately) serving as surplus labor available for potential extraction, expropriation, and exploitation—a role long forced upon racialized subjects in capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018). AND1 streetballers comprised what Colás (2016) termed the NBA’s material and symbolic “supplement,” wherein the “NBA simultaneously depends upon pickup basketball and the Black men who play it and suppresses its dependency upon pickup basketball through strategies that have emerged historically in response to” the changing racial demographics of basketball (p. 131). The NBA’s extraction took the form of styles of play, cultural aesthetics, and practical skills, while the company AND1 certainly extracted symbolic cultural value from Black bodies for the promotion of its brand. However, this extraction also took the form of the streetballers themselves. While harboring pride for the streetball style, many of the streetballers oriented their lives towards making the NBA. Shane “Dribbling Machine” Woney stated:

we didn’t care about popularity, or TV, or money. We just wanted to prove that New York City had some of the best talent not in the NBA. The goal was to open up door for guys to make it to the NBA. (Erk, 2016, para. 4)

Even with streetball’s popularity, the NBA still maintained the ideological status as the ideal to strive for the culmination of “making it.” Some of the best streetballers did make the NBA, though with very little success, and most fell short. Yet the streetballers and their associated Black communities never received a proportionate benefit from the cultural, symbolic, and material value they provided to the NBA, AND1, ESPN, and all the corporate interests in between.

Uncle Drew serves as another example of the purported celebration of (Black) streetball expressivity that morphed into a celebration of, and de facto advertisement for, the NBA. The film was embedded with discourses and representations favorable to the interests of an NBA oriented towards strategic corporatization, spectacularization, and celebritization (see Andrews, 2019). First, the film’s main selling point is seeing the popular faces of the NBA in an alternative entertainment setting. All of the actors who depict the elderly streetballers are not only famous NBA players, but the retired players are ones who still provide value for the league (Reggie Miller, Chris Webber, Shaq, and Nate Robinson are all NBA broadcasters). Throughout the movie, jokes and insider references are made to their real NBA careers. Enjoyment of the film largely relies on a deep knowledge of the NBA and its history, while these roles further promote the celebrity status of the NBA’s corporate superstars. Corporate sponsorship is present throughout the movie as well. Beyond the centrality of Jordan sneakers (a brand under Nike), almost all the players in the tournament wear Nike gear, especially worn by Uncle Drew—unsurprising given that Nike has a sponsorship deal with Irving and is also the official outfitter of the NBA. Even Rucker Park itself was plastered with advertisements during the film’s tournament, which is highly unnatural in streetball settings.

The NBA Street series followed a similar formula. In 2004, executive producer William Mozell stated that the series was “[a] celebration of the culture and the inventive style of street basketball” (Thorsen, 2004, para. 3). Yet, like Uncle Drew, the NBA occupies the core presence. From its position in the series title and on the cover art to the user choosing NBA players to control while everyone on the court is adorned by their respective NBA jersey, the series strategically utilizes streetball and Black urban spaces as a means for further celebritizing and anointing their marketable players. The series represents the NBA’s subtle attempt to associate their brand with the novel stimulation of Black (imagined) spaces, one in which their target consumers can bask in “a ghettocentric virtual reality and pleasure derived from virtually transporting one’s body from suburbia to the ghetto” (Leonard, 2006, p. 334). The game is overall more NBA than street; the NBA is the star, while streetball and Black urban spaces, literally and figuratively, provide value from the periphery. Marketed mostly to fans of the NBA, the Street series is presented as a mediated transgression from rational sport and a reinvocation of spirit at the hands of the primitive yet amusing “Other” (Andrews & Silk, 2010), rather than depicting distinct Black cultural repertoires that harbor their own intrinsic (and political) value for the communities that cherish them.

Conclusion

In dialogue with the streetball and critical sport media literature, I have expressed how media representations of streetball are underpinned by regressive meanings and ideologies that have particular nefarious consequences for the perception of Black urban bodies, spaces, and cultural forms. The three media texts reveal how streetball—like Blackness, because of Blackness—is represented as pathological, essential, devoid of context, and often incompatible with White-coded cultural institutions that are imagined to encapsulate the order and rationality of modernity. These depictions are far from innocent, regardless of their intentions. As Hall (1996) explains, these depictions are regressive because they:

naturalize and dehistoricize difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment the signifier “Black” is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct. In addition, as always happens when we naturalize historical categories…we fix that signifier outside of history, outside of change, outside of political intervention. (p. 475)

The symbolic violence that regressive narratives of streetball inflict on Black communities is exacerbated by the benefit they provide to external entities. Despite their discursive relegation to that of the primitive, the Black expressive styles embodied by streetball are commodified, exploited, and utilized strategically in the promotion of brands, corporations, and media entities. Cultural expressions formulated at the margins of racialized differentiation and disadvantage are reappropriated as exotic fixations and acontextual aesthetics to be consumed by the White mainstream, for whom disillusionment with the logics of modernity can be pacified through visualization and immersion with the innocent spirit of the ghetto spectacle (Gilroy, 2000; Oates, 2017). Streetball and its concomitant bodies and spaces are fetishized through the external commercialism of corporate media entities and the NBA, in the process obfuscating the disadvantage responsible for their constitution and reaffirming the capitalist values that rendered an alternative politics necessary.

The implications for sport media scholars and producers are twofold. First, we must recognize that the values often considered neutral in a structurally racist society can augment the reproduction of racial hierarchies, while potentially harming the same communities they purportedly intend to celebrate. Second, sport media actors must proceed with nuance, vigilance, and epistemological inclusivity when engaging with marginalized cultural expressions, acknowledging fully their multiplicity and historically contingent nature while avoiding essentialisms and romanticisms. Improving representation alone will not precipitate Black liberation, as it cannot remedy the structural oppression responsible for marginalization. Yet, as Khan (2016) argues, “to be anti-racist, we not only have to look harder for racism, but we also must remain alert to race’s infinite correlates” (p. 41)—even correlates such as representations of streetball that (consciously or unconsciously) disguise as innocuous entertainment. Mediated sporting representations, as expressions and constitutors of popular culture, are always already political (Andrews, 1998). An anti-racist project that dismantles structural hierarchies first requires analyses of how deeply embedded racism is in our popular cultural institutions, which shapes our collective racial perceptions. Critically analyzing the politics of commercial representation—such as those that interlink streetball and Blackness—is the preliminary step in reversing the deleterious effects of racialized commodification, exploitation, and misrepresentation.