Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award and was named a Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 1999 by Esquire, Newsday, and LA Weekly. During the 1994-1995 NBA season, David Shields attended nearly all of the Seattle SuperSonics’ home games; watched on TV nearly all their away games; listened to countless pre- and post-game interviews and call-in shows on the radio; spoke or tried to speak to players, coaches, agents, journalists, fans, his wife; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the internet; read innumerable articles. “Although I’m a passionate basketball fan and Sonics fan,” Shields wrote in the author’s note to the original publication of Black Planet, “I wasn’t interested in the game per se-who won, who lost, the minutiae of strategy.I was interested in how the game gets talked about. By the end of the season I’d accumulated hundreds of pages of often utterly illegible notes, th