Kyrie Irving Thrives on Silence
The Brooklyn Nets star has been suspended... how did we get here?
Dear readers,
The Houston Astros last night defeated the Philadelphia Phillies to win the World Series. We’re happy for Astros manager Dusty Baker, who, at 74-years old, is getting his first championship ring after a lifetime in baseball. We still think the owner shouldn’t be the first person who gets to touch the trophy, though.
As for our main piece this week, our apologies, but we have to do it. We have to write about Kyrie Irving. We hope that we have been able to provide a somewhat original take on of all of this nonsense, but if you are tired of our drivel, we recommend that you at least check out these really strong pieces about the situation in The Nation or The Washington Post.
Enjoy our take.
-Calder and Ian
At a shootaround the day after the Brooklyn Nets suspended Nets Kyrie Irving for promoting an antisemitic film and then refusing to apologize for it, his teammate Kevin Durant said the following: “I’m not here to judge nobody or talk down on nobody for how they feel, their views or anything. I just didn't like anything that went on. I felt like it was all unnecessary. I felt like we could have just kept playing basketball and kept quiet as an organization.”
Durant’s comments (which he later clarified, sort of) served as a salient reminder that the power of collective action can be matched only by the power of collective inaction. Kyrie Irving has now, after the Nets forced his hand, apologized on Instagram for his post and condemned the movie’s antisemitic tropes. But he is still, and has always been, a sneering know-it-all. Even before this latest snafu, Irving has said that the earth is flat, and he missed much of the last NBA season because he refused to get the Covid vaccine. This is the sort of galaxy-brained, conspiracy-laden nonsense that might lead one to click on a documentary on Amazon called “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America” — a film that, no doubt, is laden with antisemitic tropes, but whose real appeal to Irving likely comes from its argument that powerful people are lying to you.
In Kyrie’s mind (and also in Kanye’s, by the way), those powerful people are Jews. This is as ridiculous as it is hateful, but it’s also based on a deep misunderstanding of Irving’s actual position in the world. Kyrie is, by almost every metric, a member of the elite. He is extremely rich. He is incredibly famous. By dint of these two facts, he actually does have the power to influence how other people think — and he bears a significant amount of responsibility for using his sizable public platform to spew demonstrable bullshit.
The rest of the NBA also bears some responsibility for letting the situation devolve to this point. Up until now, the league has treated Kyrie’s casual relationship with reality as a marketable opportunity rather than as a serious political and ethical liability. His flirtation with flat-earth conspiracy theories was funny; his dalliances with New Age mysticism were charming; his vaccine denialism drove conversations and eyeballs. Hardly anyone even noticed when Irving posted a clip of right-wing nutjob Alex Jones ranting about the New World Order on his Instagram story back in September. That’s just Kyrie being Kyrie.
But from the beginning, Irving's latest comments have been an embarrassment for everyone involved — or, at least almost everyone involved. At first, the NBA actually tried, like Durant suggested, to “keep quiet.” The timeline is important to keep in mind here: Kyrie’s original post appeared last Thursday, and over the course of the last week, he turned down multiple opportunities to set the record straight. The league didn’t take action until this past Thursday — a full week later— when Commissioner Adam Silver released a statement calling for Irving to apologize. When Kyrie doubled down even further, the Nets finally suspended him, once it had become abundantly clear that the team and the league were staring down the barrel of a PR nightmare.
So for now, at least, the NBA has pulled itself out of Irving’s death spiral, leaving him to face the deeper circles of the abyss alone. Other players, including LeBron James and CJ McCollum, have now criticized his comments to varying degrees. But the problem — as always — runs deeper, with a league whose moral compass only starts working when it detects a threat to its bottom line. Will Kyrie return to the court after his suspension? Probably. Will he say something even more ridiculous and offensive in the future? We’d put money on it.
Will the NBA learn to stand for social justice beyond when it suits them? Absolutely not.
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