Giant Steps

4 ideas

1. The 1973 Hanafi murders in Washington

   Abdul-Jabbar had bought a house in Washington, D.C. for his teacher Hamaas Abdul-Khaalis and the small Hanafi Muslim community. In January 1973, after Khaalis publicly denounced the Nation of Islam's leadership, gunmen linked to that movement entered the house and killed seven people, including Khaalis's children, several of them drowned in a bathtub. The killings showed him that his religious choice had put people he loved in lethal danger, and he responded with deeper guardedness and physical vigilance rather than retreat from the faith.

2. A trusted coach's racial slur

   At Power Memorial High School in New York, his coach Jack Donohue, a white mentor he admired, tried to shake him out of a lackluster first half by telling him he was 'acting just like a n——'. The coach apparently meant it as motivation. Alcindor took it as proof that even a sympathetic white authority held the category in reserve, and he stopped extending easy trust to white institutions.

3. Black athletes pay an affability tax

   The public and press expected a Black star to repay his fame with visible cheerfulness and gratitude, so reticence was read as sullenness, arrogance, or hostility, while the same reserve in a white player would pass as dignity. Abdul-Jabbar argues his aloofness was self-protection against people who wanted access to him without accepting him on his own terms. The penalty for declining to perform warmth was a lasting reputation for being difficult.

4. Renaming as refusing an inherited identity

   Dropping 'Lew Alcindor', a name he saw as traceable to a slaveholder, and publicly taking 'Kareem Abdul-Jabbar' made the change of name a claim of authorship over his own identity rather than a religious formality. Much of the public treated it as rejection or ingratitude, which revealed that they had treated his old name as their property. When a public figure changes a name, the backlash shows how much ownership the audience assumed it had.

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