a bird turd

some local jack off has written a book called "rebound." it's about the 1981 celtic team that won the nba title, and how their success supposedly helped a racially divided city come together seven years after the fall out from the 1974 busing crisis. to be frank, or dave, for that matter, this is complete nonsense. that 81 team didn't bring blacks and whites together; it brought whites together. go back and look at the footage from the parade after that team won the title, and search for a nonwhite face. you won't find one. that team was a white team, regardless of how integrated they may have been. bird was a white hope, pure and simple. a great player, no doubt, but not one who was very popular with blacks. dana barros, former nba player and native of mattapan, a local black area in boston, admitted to rooting for the 76ers. black high schools students whom my dad drove to school once berated him when he said that he couldn't really root for the lakers to beat boston: that's how strong their hatred of the celtics was. at my elementary school, i remember no celtic fans in the mid 80's.

let's go back to that 81 season. the celtics rallied from 3 to 1 down to beat philly in the eastern conference finals. before game 7, several fans wore sheets over their heads and called themselves "the ghosts of celtics past." later, dr j would say that "it felt like the klan was there." the sixers had one white player to boston's six. philly was tremendously popular with blacks. erving was a huge star, and his style of play made for a perfect contrast with bird. the celtic victory in this series by no means was looked upon with joy by many black bostonians.

from there, boston went on to play the houston rockets in the finals. before the series, moses malone remarked that "he and four guys off the street could beat the celtics." sadly, this was not the case, as boston won in 6 games. later, at the victory parade, bird exclaimed "moses, eat shit!" perhaps this was his way of helping to bring the city together, but it seems unlikely that a white man telling a black man to eat shit would do much for racial harmony.

the book claims that the celtic title of 81 helped to make up for the ill will left over from the busing crisis. how? the author speaks of the busing crisis as some kind of unfortunate occurrence brought on by invasive liberals. there is a bit of truth in that, but it was largely the result of an entrenched, simple minded, ignorant, white supremacy on the part of a majority of boston's white community. no ruling from a judge forced grown men and women to throw stones and rocks and bottles at buses taking innocent black and latino children to school. no desegregation ruling forced white students at charlestown high to murder a black student from jamaica plain high at half time of a football game in 1979. the author of the text goes so far as to blame busing on the murder, as he points out that the black student's first choice of madison park high was denied due to the policy of busing students out of neighborhood schools. so? did this force the white students to become cold blooded, racist murderers? if this is the case, why don't we apply the same analysis to the brutality practiced by southern whites against blacks in georgia, alabama, and mississippi? didn't they blame "outside agitators" and the supreme court for all their racial troubles? if this is nonsense in the south, isn't it also nonsense when white bostonians recycle the same tired excuses for their own racist brutality?

and why were the neighborhoods and schools so segregated in the first place? might that have something to do with the institutionalized racism that has long made boston a dirty word to blacks throughout the country? such thoughts are silenced in our current educational structures, as we excitedly assign "all souls" to our students.

why did the white parents pull their kids out of the schools? why did the whites who remained make life hell for their new black and latino classmates? in short, the problem with busing was white people. it was their ignorance, their racism, their small mindedness, their violence against innocent children, and their inability to accept diversity. the celtics winning a title did nothing to alter that paradigm. just take a walk through any boston public school today, with the exception of a couple of exam schools, and you will see the segregation of poor black and latino students, even within majority white areas of boston. that is a legacy of white racism. all busing did was bring that to the surface.

the problem is the racism itself.

and that existed in 74, in 81, and it exists in 2009, bird and obama to the contrary.