Cobb

Cobb, you're still missing the point. This is not fundamentally about race, but about privileged celebrities getting away with conduct you or I could never get away with. In the previous thread I said that anyone who didn't work for the NBA and acted like Artest would be fired summarily and effectively barred for life from the entire industry. After thinking about it some more, though, I think I was actually too generous. I doubt that the NBA tolerates that crap from the average employee, either. Players get away with murder, and a few top coaches might, but no one else would. Rather than protesting his punishment, Artest ought to be thanking a pusillanimous D.A. that he gets to spend the rest of the season on the sidelines rather than in jail, where he belongs.

To the extent his is about race, it's not about anyone going after Artest because he's black. Society does not tolerate white Artests, either, nor should it. Artest is an individual thug. Each race has its share of thugs, so they alone cannot confirm any stereotypes about race. What does confirm the stereotypes, good or bad, is how the greater community reacts toward its own rogue elements. O.J. Simpson did not confirm anyone's stereotypes about any race, but the idiot jury that acquitted him sure as hell did.

No it's not fundamentally about race. But how could you possibly be talking about the image of the NBA if you are not talking about the image of the black man? That's like saying American perceptions of cricket has nothing to do with their perceptions of the Brits. I contend that you cannot improve the perception of the NBA without tackling what people are willing to believe about black athletes.

I am not saying that Artest got jacked because he hit a white fan. In fact I still haven't seen the film and I only know Green is white because somebody wrote about it.

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If it is about celebrities getting away with it, then it proves my first point, which is there are two kinds of justice here - one for the rich and one for the rest of us.

That's a fair point, although if we're going to talk about bad stereotypes, maybe "football" (soccer) is a better analogy, since that's where the Brits seem to be at their worst. Even there, however, we're talking about how much bad behavior should be tolerated on the part of the fans, not the players.

Ultimately, to the extent that basketball serves as a proxy for race, the notion that basketball players should be allowed to behave in ways that we wouldn't tolerate for other professionals can only be bad for blacks as a group. It's basically the criminal version of what President Bush calls the soft bigotry of low expectations.

BTW, as much as I diss the D.A. for not throwing the book at Artest, that doesn't mean I agree with the fact he isn't going after the others involved, including the fan who started it all. I think he should throw the book at everyone involved.

I would disagree about Ron Artest's identity. Although, Ron Artest is not identified in going into the crowd and mixing it up with the fans, Ron Artest does have a name for being a short-fused, hot tempered basketball player. Normally, we associate that with Rasheed Wallace, but Rasheed is seemingly mellowed down. On the basis that he may be is racially profiled, who knows. What Artest did was unprecedented, and the NBA as well as other sports associations are known to racially single out their employees. Nobody is asking for him to be Robert Parrish, but you have to be an upstanding model as a citizen as well. We all know this from Wally Backman being fired this offseason, because he was arrested a few times and convicted once. Your job does take into account how you behave. Unfortunately in our society, those second chances seem to be as gifts and not granted by the institution themselves.