Editor's note: as you may have already heard, I am having an incredibly long week and that's why this essay about a story from early Friday morning is only coming to you now. Hopefully life is out of curve balls to throw at me this month, but I've learned to not to promise anything in these situations.
Last Thursday night, the 2019 NBA Finals came to a bizarre if fitting conclusion with the Toronto Raptors' nail-biting 114-110 win over the then-defending champion Golden State Warriors in Oakland, California. It was a majestically theatrical moment for basketball; the fall of a dynasty, the crowning of a new best player in the NBA and the close out contest for one of the high-churches of basketball in Oracle Arena. Triumph and tragedy were on full display as the Warriors finally succumbed to a brutal run of league-altering injuries, the Raptors role-players helped Toronto finally learn to stop shooting itself in the foot and the National Basketball League finally went truly global - Toronto, now the favored sons of an entire country, is the first team from outside of the United States to win an NBA championship.
Inextricably joined to both the rise of the Toronto Raptors and the league's realization of its global ambitions stood team president Masai Ujiri - the Nigerian born world-famous NBA executive, global basketball philanthropist and superstar Camp Director of the league's Basketball Without Borders operation in Johannesburg, South Africa. A close personal friend of former U.S. President Barack Obama and widely considered among the five smartest men in the NBA, Ujiri was watching his team on screen in the tunnels under the Oracle Arena stands when the final seconds ticked down and six excruciating years of high-stakes gambles finally paid off for the Raptors team president and his long-suffering franchise. After hugging a bystander, Ujiri shouted in jubilation before striding triumphantly towards the court and the Raptors victory celebration.
It was in short, a beautiful and emotional moment shared by millions of people around the globe - that is until some fascist cracker pigs from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office decided to shit all over it:
U.S. authorities push ahead with battery charge on Raptors president Masai Ujiri following Game 6
Well, this whole story is almost certainly some happy horsesh*t but let's try to unpack it anyway. According to Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly, literally moments after watching his team win the NBA title, Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri assaulted a police officer working security at Oracle Arena who had merely stopped Ujiri because he didn't recognize him and needed to see the Raptors President's on court NBA Finals credentials - credentials which Kelly initially claimed, Ujiri did not have on him (keep this in mind, it will be important in a moment.)
"A spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office said Ujiri was making his way to the court when he was stopped by a sheriff's deputy and asked for his credentials.
"This deputy had no idea who [Ujiri] was," Sgt. Ray Kelly said in a phone interview.
Ujiri didn't have the credentials on him, Kelly said, adding that the former NBA executive of the year then allegedly pushed the deputy out of the way in an effort to get on the court.
"Our deputy pushed the man back and told him he couldn't go onto the court," Kelly alleged. "At that point, the gentleman pushed our deputy again, and during that push his arm struck our deputy in the jaw."
Before we go any further here, let's start with something sharp-eyed observers who looked at the header image of this article are undoubtedly already aware of; namely that the Alameda County Sheriff's Office is openly lying about at least one aspect of this story already. As you can see, Ujiri is quite clearly holding his on court credentials in his hand during recordings made both before and immediately after the alleged "battery" incident. Undeterred by mere photographic evidence, police apologists in sports media have since altered the accusation to suggest that Ujiri merely refused to show his credentials (more on this later) or simply lacked the proper credential for the post-championship celebration - specifically an NBA-mandated gold arm band; a detail the ACSO spokesman was quick to emphasize in our lead story above:
"Asked about the appearance of a well-known executive being held back from celebrating a historic win with the team he built, Kelly said optics were of no concern.
"There is a credentialling policy that the NBA has in place. Everybody from the top executives all the way down ... know that you must wear credentials to get on the court," he said. "We would expect more from a team president."
Kelly told CBC News they get a "tremendous amount" of celebrities and VIPs who go to Warriors games and it would "almost impossible" to know every team executive."
Woah boy, this is starting to smell like five day old cod.
First, let's set aside the fact that I have no idea why a Sheriff's Deputy is checking the credentials of court-side visitors while half a dozen members of arena security (who would normally handle this task) are standing within a seven foot radius. Then, let's ignore the reality that it's a little hard to believe the pig in question had no idea who Ujiri is; Kelly's excuse that the ACSO deals with too many important people to remember them all doesn't hold much water given that there were literally only two NBA team Presidents in this Finals and Masai Ujiri had already been inside Oracle Arena with the Raptors during games three and four of this very series. As Sports Illustrated's Michael McCann notes:
"It’s not clear why the deputy didn’t recognize Ujiri, who stands 6’4", was wearing a full suit and was probably being called by players, coaches and staff to join them on the court. At least in NBA circles, Ujiri is a highly-recognizable figure. He has also gained significant media attention during the finals. The deputy works in Oakland and might not be an NBA fan or at least not one who is familiar with the Raptors. Still, it stands to reason that security at games would familiarize themselves with the appearances of high-ranking persons from each team in order to avoid these kinds of situations."
The real problem here however is that a cursory examination of the film reveals that there are an awful lot of people wandering around the court during that post-game celebration, who are absolutely not wearing gold armbands or ribbons - only the media appears to be complying with this "rule." This brings up the fairly obvious question, why was Ujiri targeted for carding in the first place? We'll get back to that in a moment, let's keep moving forward with our original story.
Although it's not mentioned in the above article, it has further been reported that the deputy who attempted to stop Ujiri was taken to a local hospital for evaluation after complaining of a "sore jaw" before being released. Of course, one might be inclined to question why the Deputy did so after reading the testimony of sixty-one year old Warriors season ticket holder Greg Wiener - from Olga Rodriguez and Rob Gillies of the Associated Press, emphasis mine:
"Greg Wiener, a 61-year-old Warriors’ season ticket holder, said Friday he was standing next to the deputy during the encounter and didn’t see Ujiri strike him in the face.
Wiener said the encounter began when the deputy put his hand on Ujiri’s chest and pushed him. Ujiri shoved him back before bystanders intervened, Wiener said.
“The thing about the cops saying the policeman asked for his credentials, that didn’t happen. There was no conversation at all,” Wiener said. “This part about striking him in the face, yeah that didn’t happen.”
Wiener said he hadn’t been interviewed by authorities.
“This looks like somebody trying to embellish what happened to protect what they did, what the policeman did,” Wiener said."
On several fundamental levels Weiner's testimony directly contradicts the story provided by Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Kelly; obviously someone here is lying and from where I'm sitting, it's hard to see how that someone is Greg Wiener. After all, the ACSO is the one with an obvious motive here given the high profile nature of the incident, we've already caught the Sheriff's Office lying about this encounter and while the video evidence remains inconclusive, the aftermath of the incident sure does fit Weiner's description of events more closely than it fits Kelly's - clearly, the Deputy is the one who has to be restrained while Ujiri looks like he's in absolute shock at what has just occurred.
Additionally there are other reasons besides simple self preservation to question the motives of the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and by extension, the Sheriff's Deputy. Keeping in mind that Masai Ujiri is black, an internationally famous U.S. migrant, a known friend of former President Barack Obama and has quite publicly repudiated President Trump's racist comments about "sh*thole countries" - would it surprise you to learn that lead by Sheriff Gregory Ahern, the ACSO has a long history of racial profiling, expressing sympathy with white supremacists and supporting hard line anti-immigration policies? Let's dive a little further down that rabbit hole for a moment:
Was Masai Ujiri Falsely Accused? Alameda Cops Have A History Of Racism
Nothing to see here right? Just a fine example of typical police activities like working to promote armed reactionary anti-government militias, harassing Public Defenders for the crime of "driving while black" and following the exploits of known white nationalists on Twitter. Not openly fascist enough for you yet? Then check out the bottom of the article for a brief glimpse of the ACSO's shockingly familiar (and statistically unsupportable) bias in its approach to countering "terrorism":
"And while that might seem like a long time ago, just last year the department was accused of using an anti-terrorism grant from the Trump administration to “focus on Black, Muslim inmates returning to society,” according to the East Bay Express. Specifically, the wording of the proposed use for the grant came into question.
“The Express found that the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘violent’ appeared 31 times each in the sheriff’s proposal; ‘extremism’ appeared 26 times; and ‘radicalization,’ 12 times,” the local news outlet wrote in October. “‘White supremacists,’ by contrast, is mentioned only once. The application does not mention civil liberties.”
At this point I think we can safely say that the Alameda County Sheriff's Office is a haven for racists and liars, but they're still cops and that means they respect the rule of law, doesn't it? Not so fast my friend:
Opinion: Audit actions of Alameda County Sheriff’s Office
So now on top of the fascist sympathizing, open racism and delusional Isamophobia we can also add excessive use of force, routine violation of civil liberties and objectively inhumane, at times even deadly neglect of prisoners. Disturbingly, none of this really appears to be any sort of secret:
"Since 2015, 41 lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office have cost $15.5 million for civil rights violations that include a string of in-custody deaths and abuse of prisoners.
There have been 33 in-custody deaths since 2013, and in June two prisoners died at the Santa Rita Jail in three days. That includes the death of Dujuan Armstrong, whose family still has not received an explanation from the Sheriff’s Office.
Moreover, recent reports have detailed how county prisoners are malnourished and provided inadequate healthcare. In one 2010 case, a man arrested for jaywalking and a prior warrant for DUI died in Santa Rita while suffering from alcohol withdrawal.
Sheriff Ahern has also been complicit in the Trump administration’s draconian and racist anti-immigrant policies, facilitating ICE detentions by publishing the release dates of undocumented prisoners and allowing ICE access to non-public areas of county jails."
Naturally, all of this might make a reasonable observer question why much of the mainstream media initially chose to treat a cyrpto-fascist nutjob racist Sheriff's Office's outrageously out of character claims about Masai Ujiri's as objectively true in a vacuum; especially since none of this is happening in said vacuum. We are after all talking about an NBA Finals series that just featured a wealthy white team owner literally laying his hands on African American Raptors guard Kyle Lowry while shouting belligerent obscenities; I don't recall the Alameda County Sheriff's Office recommending any charges after that incident, do you?
Stepping backward to look at the larger league context doesn't improve the picture either. Lead primarily by the players and in the wake of an ugly racist taunting incident in Utah, this past year has represented a watershed moment for the National Basketball League and conversations about targeted racism. Indeed, these very same topics of police racial profiling, white privilege and the inherently racist assumption that those brutalized by the police must have done something wrong formed the central core of a widely acclaimed and deeply moving April 2019 piece by NBA veteran Kyle Korver in the Players Tribune. I guess it only took "professionally white" America and the corporate media a couple of months to forget all those "important lessons" they'd learned from Korver?
Taken together, these stories and other high-profile reports of celebrity civil injustice highlight a growing climate of hostility, contempt and gleefully racist abuse of petty authority by bigoted, militarized American law enforcement agencies who routinely use lethal force without cause, are functionally above the law, and undoubtedly remain fully aware of that fact. How else can you explain the behavior of a Sheriff's Office that will transparently lie about harassing a black celebrity in front of 19,000 people, only to then crassly declare their attempts to criminalize Ujiri for the offense represent an act of magnanimous international diplomacy? From Patrick Redford at Deadspin, emphasis is again mine:
"Spokesperson Ray Kelly said they did not detain Ujiri on the court because they didn’t want to make a spectacle on national TV:
“We decided to take the high road in light of their victory but will submit a report for complaint,” Kelly said. “We’ve got two countries involved in this. It’s not something we wanted to have happen. It didn’t have to go this route.”
Look, let's cut the crap here for a second; I'm just one lone woman with a word professor and a black belt in "search engine-fu" - if I can punch holes you can drive a truck through in the line of bullshit the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is selling, there is simply no excuse when mainstream media outlets fail to report everything I just told you alongside critical analysis of spokesman Kelly's clearly fraudulent accusations.
This isn't a question of intelligence, resources or an honest mistake either. As traumatizing video after traumatizing video piles up, it has become virtually impossible for any credible observer to deny the staggering reality of overtly racist police harassment, targeting and brutality any longer; and that certainly includes folks who work in the media. In the age of the smartphone camera, everyone with a a Wi-Fi connection is now constantly inundated with reams of video evidence that fascist pig cops routinely lie under oath with impunity; in such an environment spreading police lies verbatim is not an act of nativity but rather an open embrace of cowardice and complicity.
Today I find myself still among the living nearly five years after Ferguson, four years after the murder of Sandra Bland and a mere two months after the NBA's "Kyle Korver" moment... "and still I see no changes."
We all deserved better than this media minion, cop-sucking clown show; not just the NBA and Masai Ujiri, but every single person who tuned in to get the straight dope and instead left with an ear full of reactionary Gestapo lies the (primarily white) talking heads were too afraid to challenge. For one brief but beautiful moment, the 2019 NBA Finals transcended traditions, borders and all of our wildest expectations; then almost as quickly as it came and amid a cacophony of moronic collaborating stenographers - the cracker fascist establishment snuffed it out with a barrel full of old-fashioned, racist American pigshit.
God damn you Amerikkka.
- nina illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.
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