Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award and was named a Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 1999 by Esquire, Newsday, and LA Weekly.

During the 1994-1995 NBA season, David Shields attended nearly all of the Seattle SuperSonics’ home games; watched on TV nearly all their away games; listened to countless pre- and post-game interviews and call-in shows on the radio; spoke or tried to speak to players, coaches, agents, journalists, fans, his wife; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the internet; read innumerable articles.

＂Although I’m a passionate basketball fan and Sonics fan,＂ Shields wrote in the author’s note to the original publication of Black Planet, ＂I wasn’t interested in the game per se--who won, who lost, the minutiae of strategy. I was interested in how the game gets talked about. By the end of the season I’d accumulated hundreds of pages of often utterly illegible notes, the roughest of rough drafts. Over the next three years I transformed those notes into this book--a daily journal that runs the length of one team’s long-forgotten season and that is now focused, to the point of obsession, on how white people (including especially myself) think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies.＂

Black Planet changed sports journalism and remains a prophetic book on America and race. This edition features a new foreword by Bryan Curtis.

David Shields is the author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (named by Lit Hub in 2020 as one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), and Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN/Revson Award). Bryan Curtis is the editor-at-large of The Ringer and cohost of The Press Box podcast.