Good Enough to Cheer, Not Enough to Care

The Privilege of Choosing When to Love Us

I have lived through forty springs that turned to summers that turned to basketball seasons that turned to nights where I watch Black men fly. Where I watch their bodies stretched into impossible shapes, arms like wings, knees like the hinges on heaven’s front door, ankles threatening to betray them but mostly staying loyal enough to let them land with grace.

This year, it was the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers. Two teams, two cities, both boiling over with that particular hope only sports can conjure—where you tell yourself this is our year, our chance, our boys. And you stand in living rooms and arenas and sidewalks outside bars screaming for grown men you’ll likely never meet, as if they are your cousins, as if they are your blood.

I watched them—Black men in jerseys stitched with names that do not roll easily off the American tongue. And yet, here we are. White fans, drunk on adrenaline and domestic beer, pronouncing names that they might mock in a job interview or a classroom roll call. Names that teachers stumble over. Names that tell a story that stretches continents and ships and survival. Names shouted now with such precision that you’d think they were born knowing how to say them.

And you see it, too—grown men, big men, white men, wearing the names of these Black men on their backs. A name like Gilgeous-Alexander, letters curved around the shoulders of a body that would, on any other day, cross the street if Shai walked by with his hair twisted just so and his tattoos peeking out from a sleeve. But not tonight. Tonight, he is theirs.

When the foul comes, the crowd bellows, a unified choir of righteous anger. The audacity that someone would dare harm their hero, their franchise savior, the one they count on to deliver joy. The refs are heckled, the replays dissected. These people feel it in their bones: injustice, unfairness, violence done to a man they’ve decided to love.

And I think about how I wish—God, how I wish—white America would respond the same when harm visits Black people beyond the baseline. When the foul comes not from an arm slap in the paint, but from a bullet in a back, a knee on a neck, a lie told on a street corner that costs a boy his freedom before he ever knew what to do with it.

What would this country look like if they carried that same heat in their chest for our real names, the ones not sewn onto poly-blend mesh, the ones written on birth certificates tucked into drawers alongside social security cards and expired coupons? Would they chant our names when they saw the video, when they heard the verdict, when they stood outside a courthouse that never felt like ours anyway?

I know the answer. Or at least, I know the answer that feels true in my throat, like the sour edge of spoiled milk you keep tasting just to be sure.

There is a seduction in cheering for Blackness when it is performing, when it is leaping, when it is juking and twisting in midair, when it gives you something to believe in that costs you nothing but the price of a ticket and the comfort of your couch. You can scream for Shai and Tyrese and Jalen and Myles because they make your night worth watching. Because they are beautiful to behold, a blur of muscle and sweat and precision.

But to cheer for them as men? That’s another story. To cheer for the parts you don’t see on the highlight reel: the quiet dinner with family, the tears when their homeboys don’t make it out the neighborhood, the conversations with sons about how to stand, how to talk, how not to die.

This is the part where the cheering stops.

And I’m not so naïve as to believe that sports will save us. Sports are a mirror, one that does not lie but does not show the full picture, either. When OKC lifted that trophy, people poured into the streets. Strangers hugging strangers. White boys in snapbacks and white girls with glitter painted on their cheeks, chanting the names of Black men who would never be invited home for dinner but were, for this moment, part of the family.

In Indianapolis, they grieved. They gathered in parking lots and bars, heads in hands, tears for the men who came so close to something so big. You could see it in their eyes: they would have given anything for that win.

What would they give for a win that looked like justice?

There’s an old saying: the name on the front of the jersey matters more than the name on the back. But that’s not true in America, is it? The name on the back tells you whose body you get to possess for a night. It tells you whose excellence you get to consume. Whose labor you get to reap without tending to the field it grows in.

I’ve been thinking, lately, about what it means to wear someone’s name on your body. To walk around town with another man’s story pressed to your shoulders. How many of those people wearing Number 2 for OKC would trade it all if that same man asked for a job in their company? If he dated their daughter? If he moved in next door and his cousins came by on Sundays, loud and laughing in the yard?

I’m not interested in scolding fans for their joy. I know what it is to love a team so much it makes your throat raw, your knuckles sore from banging on bar tops when a shot rims out. There is an intimacy in fandom that binds people in ways church never could. But the intimacy I crave is bigger than the court.

I want you to love our names when they are not dunking on your behalf. I want you to care about the foul that doesn’t come with a whistle but a toe tag. I want you to scream at the TV when you see the footage, to stand shoulder to shoulder when the verdict comes down, to pour into the streets when justice does not.

The Thunder won. Good for them. Good for the city that once wept over the stolen Sonics and now dances in blue and orange confetti. Good for the kids who will grow up with posters on their walls, dreaming of the day their name might be stitched on the back of a stranger’s shirt.

But when the final buzzer sounds and the lights go out in that arena, we are still here. Black and breathing. Sometimes barely. We are more than your jerseys. More than your highlight clips. More than your drunken chants echoing off brick walls downtown.

Cheer for us like you do when we fly. Love us like you do when we win. See us, still, when the scoreboard goes dark.

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Liner Notes:

I have been sitting with the hush that comes after the roar. The way a stadium will quake for a Black body at full speed, at full leap, at full extension of its God-given wings—then go so quiet when that same body needs more than your applause.

I have been watching fans wave their foam fingers for the “good ones.” The ones who jump high enough, sing loud enough, dance smooth enough to make you forget your discomfort with the rest of us. I see it stretch beyond hardwood floors and hash-marked fields, spilling into arenas where Black artists bend their voices around your loneliness, comedians who make you cackle while they bleed truth on stage, actors who hold your tears in their hands and do not flinch.

There is a privilege in cheering for us when we are curated for your delight—when the jersey, the microphone, the costume, the helmet, the bright lights make our humanity a product you can possess.

What does that do to a people, to be so admired and yet so rarely cared for? To be so beloved for what we can do and so discarded for who we are?

I think often about this split: that you can shout our names until your throat is raw, but when our mothers cry out those same names into the wind—asking for mercy, for justice, for just one more morning with a son who won’t come home—those echoes do not bounce around your arena seats.

I wonder about the thin line between admiration and care, and how so many never cross it. And I wonder if one day, you will learn that loving our flight means nothing if you do not also love our landing.