October 19, 2005

Are NBA Players the New Jews??
by Lorraine Berry

David Stern, the Commissioner of the National Basketball Assocation has mandated a dress code for the league's
players. We're not talking on-the-court attire, where uniformity prevails. We're talking off the court.

Players must adhere to the following requirements at all team or league functions: collared dress shirts or turtlenecks; dress slacks, khaki pants or dress jeans; and dress shoes or boots or "other presentable shoes" with socks, and no sneakers, sandals, flip-flops or work boots.

Players are prohibited from wearing headgear, T-shirts, team jerseys, chains, pendants or medallions. Sunglasses while indoors and headphones, except on the team bus, plane or in the locker room, are also banned.

Players who are on the bench during a game but not in uniform must wear a sports coat.

Seems the people who pay the big bucks to watch these over-priced dandies strut their stuff are just a little too uncomfortable with the displays of wealth. They also seem to be a bit anxious over hip-hop and the too-obvious references to a "black" culture that the NBA's audience is not a part of.

Can I get a history witness?

David Stern has enacted, in effect, a sumptuary law. How positively medieval of him.

Sumptuary laws grew out of anxiety in the late medieval period in Europe. (Starting around 1200 or so.) Essentially, they were community dress codes aimed at banning conspicuous consumption--that is, wearing clothes that were too ornate, or too much jewelry or furs, or anything that might indicate that you had money to burn. Why? Well, two reasons. The first was to remind the growing merchant class, who found themselves with a growing cash infusion, that money did not make you noble. And dressing like a noble just served to confuse people. You were born into nobility; you didn't buy your way into it, and dressing like a noble didn't make you one. The second was to prevent Jews from flaunting their wealth. This was supposedly to prevent non-Jews from feeling resentment and going on some anti-Jewish rampage in which Jews might be murdered and their property destroyed.

But really, the sumptuary restrictions on Jews had a far more nefarious purpose, as written into church pronouncements that came out of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215: if Jews dressed like Christians, then Jewish men might get access to Christian women, and the sexual threat posed by Jewish men was pretty damn scary stuff.

(One of the best articles, ever, about sumptuary law and Jews is here Diane Owen Hughes. It's worth going to a local university library and reading the article in its entirety.)

But, for example, in England, the sumptuary laws were also designed to prevent the Elizabethan version of metrosexuals from ruining the cult of manliness.

The excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares thereto belonging now of late years is grown by sufferance to such an extremity that the manifest decay of the whole realm generally is like to follow (by bringing into the realm such superfluities of silks, cloths of gold, silver, and other most vain devices of so great cost for the quantity thereof as of necessity the moneys and treasure of the realm is and must be yearly conveyed out of the same to answer the said excess) but also particularly the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen, otherwise serviceable, and others seeking by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen, who, allured by the vain show of those things, do not only consume themselves, their goods, and lands which their parents left unto them, but also run into such debts and shifts as they cannot live out of danger of laws without attempting unlawful acts, whereby they are not any ways serviceable to their country as otherwise they might be

(Sumptuary law passed in England in 1574)

So, it's a puzzle. We know that the NBA is in "trouble"; cynical observers have argued that the NBA has become "too black;" that because white men supposedly can't jump, the game has been taken over by uppity Negroes who are street-smart, disrespectful, violent thugs. No wonder Mr. and Mrs. White Suburbia do not want to spend hundreds of dollars to go watch them play. It has nothing to do with the fact that the average family can't afford to attend any sporting event. Corporate boxes rule the day, and if white, corporate America is uncomfortable with the image projected by the NBA, well, money talks.

So, Stern, instead of addressing the ghettoization of the sport (and I use that term in its historical sense--it was Jews who were first confined to ghettoes back in the Middle Ages), chooses intead to focus on what the players are wearing.

What's the message? That a black man wearing a turtleneck and Dockers is less threatening than one wearing baggy pants and a skullcap? That he's less sexually threatening (ala the original sumptuary laws)? That he's less likely to have a bad influence on white kids if he wears the uniform of middle-class white America?

What the fuck????

Posted by in Consumerism, Culture, Entertainment, Fashion, Hip Hop, Image, NBA, Performance, Pop Culture, Prejudice, Public Relations, Race, Sports, W T F
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