Black Excellence on NBA All-Star Weekend

The NBA All-Star game is a culmination of all the greatest talent that the NBA has to offer. For years, the game has served as a proving ground for the NBA’s best talent to showcase just how great they are stacked up against their superstar peers.
For the past few decades however, the number of African Americans in the All-Star game has skyrocketed from an already large number into an obscenely huge majority.
In 2018, the NBA All-Star game roster was composed of 26 black players on a 28 man roster. If this is not black history in the making, then I don’t know what is.
Since the NBA’s golden age in the late 80s and 90s, the abundance of African Americans in the league has rose to unprecedented rates.
In the entire history of the league, the best player in the world in any given era has always been an African American. Whether it be Bill Russell, Magic Johnson, or Michael Jordan, the greatest of the league has always been a member of the African American community.
So, the question I would pose is simple: Why are we not giving such a historic run of black excellence the credit it deserves?
It seems to me, that as astounding as it may sound, that members of the African American community have begun to see the amount of black dominance in sports as a given reality. This is perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions of this generation.
There are roughly 19,000 kids playing basketball collegiately in the NCAA, with only 3.1 percent of those collegiate athletes making it to the NBA. In short, there are thousands of kids of all races playing in college in hopes of making a 15-man NBA roster, yet the best of the best in the game of basketball has been African Americans for as long as the game of basketball has existed.
Granted, there have been many historically great white players, such as the great Larry Bird, Steve Nash, and Dirk Nowitzki, who have each made their cases for the crown in their respective ages of dominance. But, when you think of the greatest players of their generations, the Magic Johnson’s and Kobe Bryant’s of the world will forever and always hold the title of kings of their respective eras.
The truth of the matter is that the All-Star game is a pretty meaningless affair as far as the final score goes. What makes the game special however, is the fact that it is only on this stage that you will see the world’s greatest basketball players putting their talent on display for the world to see.
So, for all the of the black boys and girls at home doubting the greatness of what they can achieve, seeing individuals who look like them is perhaps the most reassuring thing in the world. Those players on the court represent the dreams and hopes of every young, black kid in America, and when people like Lebron James, a simple kid from Cleveland, Ohio can become the best player in the world through hard work and devotion alone, then those kids are forced to ask themselves a simple question: “Why not me?”