A "Whites Only" Basketball League: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Don "Moose" Lewis's announcement that he plans to kick off a "whites only" basketball league has generated a lot of controversy this week. Lewis said he hopes to establish teams in a dozen southeastern cities for his all-white All-American Basketball Alliance.

Although no one is taking Lewis's proposal seriously, there likely is demand for a family-friendly alternative to the NBA.

In his essay Psychology and White Ethnocentrism, Kevin MacDonald suggested the reason NBA viewership has fallen among non-urban whites in recent years is because basketball is now widely perceived as a black sport. MacDonald also noted that the NBA has taken steps to bridge the racial divide between its black players and its largely white audience.

For example, in 2005 NBA Commissioner David Stern imposed a league-wide dress code, which mandates "Business Casual attire" and prohibits "Chains, pendants, or medallions" for all players whenever they are engaged in team or league business. As sports writer Gary Peterson noted, Stern might as well have told his players, "Quit dressing like typical young, urban African-Americans. You're scaring the fans."

Despite the dress code and the large penalties that have been imposed for fighting among players, black athletes continue to set the standards of behavior in the NBA. As J.B. Cash recently wrote of black sports in The Occidental Quarterly,

In the game, there is trash talking, preening and showboating, and poor sportsmanship. Outside the game, there is profligacy, degeneracy, misogyny, and crime. Many black athletes are also openly disdainful of white culture and values, and of whites themselves. White boys now have “role models” who hate the kind of men their fathers are, the kind of men they will grow up to be.

Lewis echoes Cash's concerns when he asks, "Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?"

The recent incident in which two Washington Wizards players drew guns on each other in the team's locker room demonstrates that the league has been unsuccessful in regulating the conduct of its black players. It's time white people had a family-friendly alternative to the NBA.