Onaje Woodbine on basketball as 'lived religion'
Onaje X.O. Woodbine quit a promising career in basketball to study philosophy, but the court — a space he says is sacred for many young black men — was never far from his mind.
Today the author, philosopher and former Yale basketball player joins Shad to talk about his book, Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball, why he left the ivy league team, and how he dealt with academic resistance to his thesis.
Woodbine argues that basketball can be understood as a kind of lived religion, with basketball courts as a stand-in for places of worship.
"Most religions tell stories. And most religions dramatize those stories through what we call ritual," says Woodbine, who says the courts have hosted everything from symbolic bible studies to rituals of grief.
"What I realized is that the basketball court itself is a kind of text, in which, young men tell the stories of the streets. We can call it a living scripture."
WEB EXTRA | In one of the interviews most interesting moments, Woodbine says he was discouraged from writing about basketball in favour of something with better optics. (Put bluntly by a colleague, "write white.")
Read how he handled it in the excerpt below.
Shad: What made you want to write this book?
Onaje: One of my favourite scholars and thinkers, Howard Thurman — who was Martin Luther King's mentor during the civil rights movement — he says that we all carry around with us our life's "working paper".
What he means by that is that all scholarship is in some way personal. I think that this story came out of my personal journey, and I made the decision to look within first to discover what I was going to write about.
The interesting thing that I found is that if you go deep enough within yourself, you come out on the other side in society. The personal is social. The social world lives within us.
It was amazing to discover that if I looked within, I could discover some very profound themes in the world.
Shad: And when you looked within, even though you stepped away from the game, you saw basketball?
Onaje: Yeah. I saw basketball. I had some advisors and some professors say "Why write a book about basketball? You're going to be perceived as another black man who loves basketball." One of my teachers said, "You need to write white in order to make it in the academy." What they didn't understand is that I couldn't be a disembodied professor. Anything that I was going to write had to make sense to people who have to live the reality of race every day. I made a decision regardless of the risks. If I didn't get a job, I didn't care. I decided I'm going to write something that means something to those people with their backs against the wall.