The Last Dance, a Netflix documentary series about basketball player Michael Jordan, is a romantic reframing of his halcyon period that fails to engage with the politics of race in America.
output as Lee emerges as a black voice in Hollywood. There is the Jordan-wearing Mars Blackmon character in. There is the furious Buggin’ Out who wants to start a race war over someone scuffing his pair of Jordans inThen there is Jordan himself, posing with Magic Johnson in an X cap in that weird documentary segment at the end ofAs the nineties take flight, Jordan stands at the nexus of race, consumerism and the cultural currency signified by the widening global footprint of the NBA.
The footage corals us into the gym, the locker room and the routine of NBA season life. It’s a world whose contours we have come to know anecdotally and care little for, at least in the ways that it has been deployed to supposedly shine more light on Jordan. The access feels like a backdoor pass but it’s not, serving as a mere extension of Jordan’s on-the-court persona.
It is the more loaded, reflective statement in which he traces the template of the American way. “Many times America is quick to embrace a Michael Jordan, or an Oprah Winfrey, or a Barack Obama, so long as it’s understood that you don’t get too controversial around broader issues of social justice.” It is a forgiving and experiential analysis of the irrationality and permanence of racism.
Although Dyson acknowledges Jordan’s body as “the symbolic carrier of racial and cultural desires to fly beyond limits and obstacles …”, he rightly argues that, at points, our hero has “perhaps not understood the differences between enabling versions of human experience that transcend the exclusive gaze of race, and disenabling visions of human community that seek race-neutrality.” Perhaps the ultimate burden of the American athlete lies in being caught between these two states.
In a season in which he was posting career-best numbers, Abdul-Rauf was suddenly a target, with his team trading him by the following season. He became a pariah in the league’s fraternity, eventually extending his career elsewhere.
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