February 23- Charles Barkley and Michael Wilbon co-wrote the book "Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man?"
in 2005. In 2008 I found it in the bin at the local Dollar Tree and bought it for a buck. This may be the best dollar I’ve ever spent. After Barkley’s recent run in with the law and his subsequent suspension from TNT, I think most people would write him off as a blowhard who never seems to be able to take what he dishes out. In the past Barkley has bristled at criticism and taken stances on issues that could only be considered hypocritical at best. Yet when it comes to race, Barkley has always had a few consistent stances from which I’ve never seen him yield since retiring from basketball.
*Black athletes (or ath-a-letes as Barkley phonetically says it) should be held to a higher standard of behavior. (high-pitched voice: IRON-NEEEEE!)
* Racial issues are mostly about class in today’s society.
Now let’s get past the blatant hypocrisy of his current predicament and focus on this book and why you need to read it. This book really isn’t about Charles Barkley. Had I known this when it was first printed, I may have bought it then and not waited three years and a twenty-four dollar discount later. This book is really just a collection of interviews with influential people and the subject of the interviews is my favorite taboo subject: RACE in America. This book infinitely more valuable now than it was when it came out because the passage of time has revealed many of these interviews to be truthful and many of it’s participants to be relevant today.
In the book, Barkley/Wilbon interviews a young Barack Obama. At the end of the interview they speculate that Obama might one day make a good presidential candidate in 2012 or 2016. They interview Bill Clinton and he talks openly about race and how racial relations have changed in the past few decades. This was all before Bill’s comments about Jesse Jackson winning South Carolina in the democratic primaries, a comment that was clearly made to belittle what Obama had accomplished while running against Bill’s wife. They interview Jesse Jackson and get his views of how racism is always conquered in sports way before it is tackled in the arena of general society. Tiger Woods has an interview where he’s actually openly discussing race and one of the most prejudiced arenas in sports… the golf course. How could this not intrigue any sports fan?
They talk with Ice Cube, George Lopez, Samuel Jackson and Morgan Freeman and get four very different perspectives on race in the movie industry. Morgan Freeman’s nonchalant avoidance of letting race define him is highly in contrast to Samuel L Jackson’s confrontation of racial subjects. Just their stances on the ‘N-word” alone make their chapters worth reading. There are other lesser known people in the book who also have a lot to say about race and they are all worth reading.
I understand why this book made it to the dollar bin. The subject is too taboo and the idea of Charles Barkley giving his opinion can be a turn-off. I found that the book is actually a better read if you sort of skip the bolded passages that represent Barkley’s actual thoughts on the subject at hand. That’s ultimately where the book falls on deaf ears. If this book was written exclusively by Wilbon I think more people would respect the content, but throwing Barkley on the cover really lowers the expectation of the reader.
Do yourself a favor and pick this book up in the bargain bin of your local dollar store. Skip Barkley’s commentary because it isn’t nearly as insightful, witty or funny as he probably thinks it is. With so many people in this book now poised to shape our future or enter the spot light again, I think that there is a lot of interesting tidbits inside these pages.
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