I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [16]
But I’m not about to sit here and tell you I only experienced prejudice and racism in the south, although it did seem more in the open. I left Auburn after three years there and was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers in June of 1984. Trust me, I’ve had plenty of episodes as an adult in northern cities. I got pulled over when I was behind the wheel of a Porsche in Philly once for what we call DWB—Driving While Black. People ask me all the time about growing up in Alabama, and no question there was racial tension all the time, but in certain parts of Philly sometimes you feel like you’re being subjected to the Klan without the sheets. It’s prejudice that’s expressed in more subtle ways. You don’t get hit over the head with it in the same way. And you don’t find as many situations where people come right out and say what’s really on their minds. For example, I thought much of the news media in Philly exhibited characteristics of racism.
I would be asked a question after a loss or in the middle of a bad stretch about the 76ers’ chances of seriously contending that year or making a run in the playoffs. And I would say, “Our team isn’t good enough,” or “We’ve got to get better in certain areas if we’re going to compete at the championship level.” I guess I could have tiptoed around it and given some vanilla answer, but that’s not me. And besides, I was asked a question and I was assessing the situation as I saw it. The headlines the next day would say, “BARKLEY BLASTS TEAMMATES!” But I’d read similar comments from Lenny Dykstra or Darren Daulton when the Phillies were in a similar situation. Those guys might make observations about their team that were really similar to what I said about my team. But the stories would say that Dykstra or Daulton was right, the team had to go out and get better players to get in position to win a championship.
What we were saying wasn’t any different. In each case a leader on the team was making an assessment of what was necessary to win a championship. But I’d pick up the paper and say, “Damn, the spin on this makes it look totally different, when in reality we were pretty much saying the same thing about our teams.” And after a while I had to say to myself, “Damn, there’s going to be a double standard for me. This apparently is the way it’s going to be all the time, that two guys—one white and one black—can make pretty much the same observation, but it’s going to be perceived differently. They perceive that the white player is a team guy only concerned with team goals when he speaks up about what the team needs, but they perceive that the black player when he speaks up about the team’s needs is a malcontent.
It’s very subtle, and sometimes done in a very sophisticated way. I felt like, “Okay, I’m dealing with a much more sophisticated bigot here. No matter what I say, especially about complex issues, I’m going to be wrong, according to them.” You feel that you’re saying one thing, but they’re hearing another. It’s really frustrating, and it was a learning process, that’s for sure. At first I said, “Okay, I can’t say what I want to say because they’ll rip me apart.” I was going to deal with it that way. But, number one, that would have been taking the easy way out. And number two, once I realized most of the mainstream press was going to kill me either way, I adopted the philosophy that I’m just going to do it my way and they’ll like me or dislike me based on my doing it the way I want to do it. I wanted to please everybody in the beginning and I