The Wrath of Black Capitalists

Ja Morant and the Question of Meaning

Last weekend, Ja Morant was, for the second time in two months, seen on Instagram waving a gun while listening to music and hanging out with his friends. As a result, for the second time in two months, he has been suspended from the Memphis Grizzlies for displaying “conduct detrimental to the league.” The relative few who have come to his defense have pointed out that it’s the off season and he isn’t even being paid right now; if he’s in Tennessee, displaying a gun is fine since Tennessee is an open carry state; and he wasn’t aiming the gun at anyone. But the overwhelming many have resorted to publicly humiliating him for acting in alignment with black cultural expressions that have no regard for the image and interests of capital.

Particularly celebrated among Ja’s critics was the vitriol of ex-NBA player Kwame Brown - “Those white folks aren’t going to leave you with that type of money if you’re trying to be a street n*gga. Your daddy can smile at every game all he wants to, but the moment those white folks see that picture, you’re going to lose a shit ton of money. You’re just dumb. You’re just a n*gga who can jump. You’re a straight up n*gga. Somebody needs to tell it to you just like this. You’re a dumb, stupid n*gga. If that’s the point you’re trying to get across, I believe you. All this money these white folks are giving out, and you’re just trying to give it back?” For the record, Kwame Brown not only defended Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two people protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake, but also blamed Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, for her death at the hands of police.

The exchange between Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins on First Take was the same sentiment expressed differently - Smith: “The NBA is a private industry and the NBA has its own rules and if you’re going to be a part of the NBA and associated with the NBA brand, there are rules and regulations that you have to capitulate to.”; Perkins: “After the first incident, I watched Ja Morant very closely. I’m trying to see, are you going to change your image? Are you going to change the way that people view you? So, I’m watching him and he still has the gold grill in his mouth. I said, ‘he hasn’t learned yet.’ Because, if he did, he wouldn’t even put that in his mouth anymore because the gold grill is nothing but the culture that you don’t even want to be attracting. […] So, when this happened, I was sitting there saying that he’s just a dummy. […] The NBA doesn’t need you, Ja.”

All of these people have been praised for the candidness of their comments. For making plain the issue of what Ja is risking and how avoidable all of this was. How easy it is to fall in line so that everyone can keep getting paid. How obvious the proper values and principles to have are. How obvious it is that appeasing the entities in business with him (e.g. the NBA, Nike, Powerade, etc.) should be his focus. How obvious it is that the primary way he should relate to himself is as a corporation. How obvious it is that associating with unassimilated blackness is unacceptable. People have enjoyed seeing Ja be abused for his defection from the NBA’s cookie-cutter integrationist project and castigated as ungrateful for jeopardizing the opportunity to exist in the world as high value property.

The best, most empathetic response has come from Bomani Jones who identified that Ja might be struggling with the burdens of his age, meteoric rise, and the responsibilities of being, not only a franchise player, but a superstar of the league. Similar to other commentators, he concluded that Ja needs to demonstrate accountability for how his behavior is offensive to a lot of the NBA’s market. However, in a clarifying departure, he reasoned that money simply might not mean as much to Ja as it does to other people - “What if Ja doesn’t want it in a much larger sense? I saw a video of Ja Morant the other day. He was at some club, standing by a pool table that looked like it takes quarters, and he was taking a bottle to the neck. One of the things about being Ja Morant is the stuff that you can get into. The places that you can go. The parties and stuff that you have access to. Most cats like Ja Morant who play for teams like Memphis, aren’t staying in Memphis or South Carolina or wherever he is in the off season. Those dudes are trying to be in Miami, L.A., maybe even Houston. Those dudes are trying to be somewhere where you be Ja Morant and get the next level of stuff out of it. This dude is still at these old regular spots. He doesn’t move like a superstar, which is to say that the perks and trappings of being a superstar, outside of getting clothes and jewelry and a nice car, doesn’t seem to move him. And, if that stuff doesn’t seem to move him, what is he getting in exchange for all of this pressure?”

And this is what I want to think more about. Society positions massive wealth as the pinnacle of both personal achievement and morality without disclosing that massive wealth offers no guidance in the way of meaning but a financial advisor and the opportunity to engage in more bourgeois forms of violence like private equity and PPP loans. None of these commentators have criticized Ja for promoting gun violence and irresponsibly endangering black people. A few have begun to express the concern that, if he continues down his current path, he could put his actual life in danger. Mostly, though, he’s been criticized for engaging in self-destructive behaviors that they think should be left to poor black people. The criticism is about him fumbling the bag, ruining relationships with capital, and making multibillion dollar corporations look bad. But exactly what about him “messing up his money” is so egregious that it evokes ire and denunciation? It’s his blasphemous treatment of society’s most sacred thing - proximity to whiteness and wealth. It’s his disregard for an understanding of morality that is determined by a demonstration of fidelity to affluence.

What’s offensive to the NBA’s market, commentators included, is Ja’s inability to affirm the value (not the market value but the existential value) of aspiring to his position. To be clear, the refusal to break from blackness and, subsequent, corporate discipline isn’t unique. This trajectory, documented in any number of ESPN 30 for 30 films, was a common rite of passage in a league once dominated by black men who grew up in inner-cities. But the reason people are so disgusted with and confounded by Ja is that he isn’t supposed to have any interest in the culture of blackness typically associated with the poor and working class. He was raised in a two-parent, middle-class household. He isn’t supposed to want to hang out in the hood. Notable figures in black sports media like Keyshawn Johnson and Stephen Jackson have galvanized to tout the wisdom of their compliance with the white establishment in light of their superior street credibility. Exploiting their own impoverished backgrounds to highlight why Ja is “dumb” for wanting to be involved with “that culture.” Ja’s decision to play his game while abandoning the pristine posturing of whiteness is an affront to them because it is an implicit criticism of their claims to morality that rely on pathologizing and abandoning unmarketable forms of blackness.

I’m not trying to be casual about or dismissive of the dangerousness of toting guns and moving recklessly. My point is, instead, that people’s problem with Ja Morant isn’t really about his potential to harm himself or others. People’s problem is that he’s seemingly looking for something real to ground himself in beyond wealth and fame, and he’s doing so by attending to more unrefined forms of black cultural expression. We can call it self-destructive. It may very well be. Or, we can identify it as a kind of cognitive resonance with the reality that, even in the upper echelons of the plantation, there is no freedom for the slave. And the question of what he should do about that is a far more serious one to answer.