{"id":10,"date":"2012-03-13T08:38:30","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T13:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/?p=10"},"modified":"2015-07-26T13:58:49","modified_gmt":"2015-07-26T18:58:49","slug":"michael-jordan-in-chinatown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/2012\/03\/13\/michael-jordan-in-chinatown\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Jordan in Chinatown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wing Young Huie and Doug Hartmann share two passions: playing pickup basketball and talking about race in America. So it seemed only natural, when they started to think creating about The Society Pages\u2019 Changing Lenses project, to start there. Doug asked Wing to take a look at a book chapter he\u2019d written on Michael Jordan and see what, from his extensive portfolio, sprang to mind.<\/p>\n

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Chinatown Bar, from Looking for Asian America. \u00a9 Wing Young Huie.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The chapter came out of historian David Wiggins\u2019 collection of biographical sketches of the most famous African American athletes of the 20th century. Doug says, \u201cI didn\u2019t have any new information or inside insights to contribute about Jordan\u2019s life or career. Instead, I looked at the evolution of Jordan\u2019s public image over the years of his career, focusing on representations and discussions of race.\u201d He wrote about how Jordan\u2019s admirers and handlers talked about how MJ transcended race, both as a basketball player and an advertising pitchman, but using media archives and historical records, Doug thought it was pretty clear that Jordan was always defined by his race. Even asserting that the reverence of Jordan rose above race only served to underscore the fact that he was black. To be fair, it wasn\u2019t always negative; indeed, some of his legendary popularity (market research in the 1990s claimed the back of Jordan\u2019s head was more recognizable to mall patrons than a photo of the President of the U.S.!) stemmed from the brand of blackness he represented and embodied. Ultimately, the piece turned into a case study of the paradoxical structuring force of blackness in post-Civil Rights America, and Doug has since given talks using these insights to make sense of other racial phenomena, including Barack Obama\u2019s campaign for the Presidency.<\/p>\n

For his part, Wing quickly thought to this photograph from his Asian American\/Ethnocentric Tour. \u201cIn the nine months I spent driving through 39 American states photographing the cultural landscape,\u201d Wing recalls, \u201cthis scene as much as any reflects my own confusing, idiosyncratic hyphenated American experience. I am from Duluth, Minnesota, the youngest in my family and the only one not from China.\u201d As he looked for Asian America, Wing says, \u201cThe closest you can get to anything resembling my Motherland is Chinatown, and the mother of all Chinatowns is in San Francisco (sorry, NYC!).\u201d So it was \u201cwith peculiar pleasure\u201d that Wing settled into a bar in this \u201cfaux-exotic destination\u201d and watched Michael Jordan retire for the last time in what Doug calls \u201ca semi-sacred, semi-profane context.\u201d \u201cBuddha was a foreign concept for me,\u201d said Wing, \u201csince I was weaned on Snoopy, Mary Tyler Moore, and the Vikings. I grew up Presbyterian.\u201d But sport in America is a sort of secular religion.<\/p>\n

Doug responds, \u201cAthletes occupy a special place in our culture. They\u2019re prominent social figures and cultural icons. Whether we\u2019re considering race or masculinity or something else, we can learn a great deal by observing athletes, how regular folks view and talk about them, and how and when all of this happens\u201d\u2014even if it\u2019s in a cozy bar\u2019s confused shrine somewhere in just one niche of this vast country. Michael Jordan may not have transcended blackness, but seeing him in the unique context of Wing\u2019s photo complicates and expands our visions of race and multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wing Young Huie and Doug Hartmann share two passions: playing pickup basketball and talking about race in America. So it seemed only natural, when they started to think creating about The Society Pages\u2019 Changing Lenses project, to start there. Doug asked Wing to take a look at a book chapter he\u2019d written on Michael Jordan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,42,50],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-race","tag-religion","tag-sport"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/files\/2012\/03\/A78-28.finished.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/changinglenses\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}