High Fly­ing Bird and America’s mod­ern-day auc­tion block

“I love the Lord and all His black peo­ple.” The first per­son to utter this phrase in Steven Soderbergh’s High Fly­ing Bird is sports agent Ray Burke (André Hol­land). It’s his self-direct­ed rebuke to an ill-advised jape about crack­ing whips, his shame writ­ten all over his face as his friend and men­tor, Spencer (Bill Duke), stares at him in expec­tant judg­ment, wait­ing to hear the words. Spencer is the author of the phrase, meant as a show of con­tri­tion for any­one fool­ish enough to make even scant ref­er­ence to slav­ery in his pres­ence. Fail­ure to repeat it on the spot means ban­ish­ment from his court – and wher­ev­er he goes, his court comes with him.

Oth­ers repeat Ray’s blun­der through­out the film with and with­out Spencer in earshot. But it’s his ini­tial exchange with Ray that estab­lish­es High Fly­ing Bird’s dri­ving metaphor: The sports indus­tri­al com­plex as the mod­ern evo­lu­tion of the slave trade. ​“They invent­ed a game on top of a game,” Spencer rue­ful­ly tells Ray before obliv­i­ous­ly com­mit­ting the same dread­ed faux pa, com­par­ing the NBA play­er-man­ag­er dynam­ic to the auc­tion block. He low­ers his head. ​“I love the Lord and all His black people.”

High Fly­ing Bird, direct­ed by Soder­bergh but equal­ly shaped by screen­writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, arrives a week after Super Bowl LIII pref­aced fes­tiv­i­ties with a trib­ute to Dr Mar­tin Luther King Jr and invit­ed John Lewis and Ber­nice King, the late civ­il rights leader’s youngest child, to attend the com­menc­ing coin toss. The ges­ture reads as sym­bol­ic acknowl­edge­ment of the NFL’s crime against Col­in Kaeper­nick, long side­lined sim­ply for tak­ing a knee dur­ing ​‘The Star Span­gled Ban­ner’ as a silent protest against sys­temic racism and social injus­tice. But images of King can’t off­set the NFL’s trans­gres­sions. Kaeper­nick is young and tal­ent­ed, and if the league upholds its vendet­ta, he may nev­er play foot­ball again.

Soderbergh’s and McCraney’s work focus­es on bas­ket­ball rather than foot­ball; bas­ket­ball, accord­ing to Ray, is com­mer­cial­ly and cul­tur­al­ly rel­e­vant in ways that sell mer­chan­dise and earn ref­er­ence in rap lyrics. But the rela­tion­ship between the film’s themes and the NFL’s treat­ment of Kaeper­nick remains, the con­nec­tive tis­sue being the rela­tion­ship between play­ers and own­ers, the peo­ple con­trol­ling the game on the court/​field and those con­trol­ling it behind the scenes: slaves in the fields and the over­lords who mon­i­tor them.

If the anal­o­gy feels exces­sive, con­sid­er that the own­ers are actu­al­ly called own­ers. That’s a loaded word, and more so when couched in a sports world set­ting. (On the ​‘We Take a Knee’ episode of the Still Pro­cess­ing pod­cast, Wes­ley Mor­ris and Jen­na Wortham take the anal­o­gy even fur­ther, find­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty between the afore­men­tioned auc­tion block and the prac­tice of trad­ing play­ers between teams.)

The few white char­ac­ters that appear in High Fly­ing Bird func­tion as antag­o­nists. Zach Quin­to plays Ray’s unc­tu­ous supe­ri­or, and Kyle Mach­Lach­lan plays the NBA own­ers’ smug rep, lit­i­gat­ing on their behalf in the midst of a pro­tract­ed lock­out. Quinto’s screen time is restrict­ed to a high rise office that looks down on the city and its inhab­i­tants; MacLach­lan shows up in sim­i­lar­ly lofty digs but deigns on occa­sion to walk the earth with mor­tals. They’re white­ness frames them as god­like, wield­ing grim pow­er over black ath­letes’ livelihoods.

Ray – like Spencer, like Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), Ray’s star prospect, like Sam (Zazie Beetz), Ray’s erst­while assis­tant, and like Myra (Son­ja Sohn), the steely, deter­mined play­ers’ rep – refers only to his white coun­ter­parts as ​“they”. ​“They” built the game on top of the game. ​“They” want con­trol. ​“They” want to wrest the game that black Amer­i­cans mas­tered away from them. Rare as white char­ac­ters are in the film, the word ​“white” itself is com­par­a­tive­ly rar­er, replaced with lan­guage McCraney’s char­ac­ters have invent­ed to talk about white­ness as the unwant­ed nucle­us of their world. It’s unsur­pris­ing that the per­son rep­re­sent­ing the own­ers is white, and that the per­son rep­re­sent­ing the play­ers is a black. He wants juris­dic­tion over bas­ket­ball to stay in white men’s hands. She wants to return it to the NBA’s pre­dom­i­nant­ly black playerbase.

But the pow­er imbal­ance they’re strug­gling over is tilt­ed in favour of ​“they”. ​“They”, after all, dic­tate where the play­ers play. ​“They” com­mod­i­fy black bod­ies in the prac­tice of trad­ing. That pri­ma­cy extends to foot­ball, too, couched in the tra­jec­to­ry of Kaepernick’s career, influ­enced sole­ly by the whims of the NFL’s white exec­u­tives, who insist they’re not black­balling him despite all evi­dence to the con­trary. And in High Fly­ing Bird, ​“they” are right­ly called to the floor for their com­plic­i­ty in the sub­tle, insid­i­ous prop­a­ga­tion of America’s orig­i­nal sin.