In 2004, an unfortunate night in basketball known as the “Malice at the Palace” became a sports media spectacle. The event can be described as a televised altercation during a game between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons at The Palace of Auburn Hills in Michigan. The infamous brawl erupted during the final minutes of the game, involving the players and audience members. For anyone who recalls the headlines after the event, the media seized every opportunity to depict the Black basketball players as the perpetrators.

What's interesting to consider though, is how early 2000s rap and hip hop culture underpinned the media's ability to drive this narrative forward. Since the early 2000s, and largely thanks to Allen Iverson's signature style—fitted caps, durags, and chains—many Black NBA players embraced aesthetics similar to those of prominent Black rappers of the time, who often rapped about growing up in tough neighborhoods, the drug trade, and systemic oppression. This was the backdrop to which the media layered a criminal persona on the Black NBA players involved in the “Malice at the Palace”, conveniently leveraging the sports media apparatus to do so. Through their use of language, ideological manipulation, and propagandistic techniques, the media portrayed the Black players on the court that night as “uncivilized thugs,” consequently, painting the rest of the NBA with the same strokes. Not long after this event, the NBA commissioner at the time, David Stern, enacted a formal dress code in attempt to distance the league from the tainted media depictions, a coded method to police the appearance of the players. Simply put, AI's signature style was off limits, and the league was to be aesthetically "professionalized". I reflect on the “Malice at the Palace” event as I engage with scholarship by James Lull, Noam Chomsky, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Reece Peck to explore the power of media in perpetuating hegemonic ideologies.

James Lull: “Hegemony”

Lull’s discussion of the hegemony is a great starting point in which to review the “Malice at the Palace” event. Understanding the hegemony as “a method for gaining and maintaining power” is pivotal in being able to critically analyze the role of sports media as a tool for disseminating hegemonic messages (Lull 33). Through this event, I can breakdown how the hegemony, as Lull describes, is put to work. Firstly, I see how hegemony is evident in both the media’s ability to change the positioning of Black NBA players from “thugs” to “professionals”. Both are separate class categories that Black NBA players aligned with (before and after the dress code) depending on how they appeared to the public. I reflect on the ability to manipulate social beliefs and gain power through visual means and reproducing ideas through aesthetics. I believe using visuality can have a more memorable effect in pushing narratives because visuals provide a mental picture to illustrate a perspective, one that often can be very difficult to negate. Therefore, I find the League targeting NBA players’ demeanors and forcing them to alter their appearance (which I believe to be inherently racist) became something tangible for the media to fixate on as they shifted their portrayal of NBA players.

Secondly, I interpreted this event as a symptom of the racial and class distinctions prevalent in American society, and it was clear to me who would be sensationalized as the victim and the perpetrator within the altercation. What this divide did, between the NBA players against fans, was further perpetuate that white men are the dominant class and Black men are the subordinate class. In line with my first reflection on the visual aesthetics of media storytelling, I believe what aids the hegemonic messaging within this event is that the so-called perpetrators, or the NBA players, are already subject to a sort of racial profiling when they enter the literal and figurative sports arena that is a media phenomenon. Before 2005, when players entered stadiums dressed in chains, headgear, and baggy shirts, with paparazzi waiting for their arrival, the media could associate them with “hip-hop/rap” culture before they begin the game. I find it interesting how the media, through propagandistic production of culture, has taught us to assess race and class through visual cues.

Moreover, Lull explores the gaps missing in Marxist theory and claims that “social class differences are not determined solely by economic factors. Ideological influence is crucial now in the exercise of power” (Lull 33). What I find interesting today regarding this event, is how the NBA tunnel has drastically shifted because of the dress code. NBA players are now dressed in the most luxurious designer pieces and the pre-game has transformed into a subtle competition of both money and style. What players have become known for is the very “image” that they were penalized for. Today, players are recognized for their off-court style just as much as their on-court skills. I am inclined to question whether the reason the NBA has sustained itself is not just through the entertainment of the game, but because they were able to infiltrate the league with a dominant, capitalistic ideology: Black men are not professionals, but Black men in the NBA are.

I believe Gayatri C. Spivak would find this interesting and point out this does not actually separate NBA players from the “thug” persona into a “professional” persona as much as it does reproduce the notions created by white privileged men in the Global North, regarding professionalism and elitism.

Noam Chomsky: “Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda” excerpt

Looking at Chomsky’s piece, I am drawn to think about how actions that occur within sports are drenched in the notion of American patriotism, and as Chomsky would say, achieve a moral equivalence (Chomsky 78). The American sports realm provides an ideal space to push hegemonic narratives because of the mere social understanding that American actions are always perceived as good.  This strategy is reproduced in other spheres (i.e., sports) where racialized individuals and minorities exist because that is how the hegemony and American righteousness can prevail. What is important to extract from Chomsky’s piece is that there is no threat to society until the media convinces us that there is. What this does is create a legitimacy of American narrations and motives, that American policing is the right kind of policing, and distracts from the fact that the media is meant to inform us of objective facts, not state-sponsored opinions. How Chomsky illustrates this, introducing a Martian from Mars, helps explain that to exist as human as a part of society, is to hold subconscious prejudices that not just benefit the American state, but harm groups that threaten its control. What this explains is that media narratives are far from fact, and I wonder where we might be today with the violent policing and stereotyping of Black lives if the “Malice at the Palace” were presented by media in a different light.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception"

While Lull and Chomsky speak to how the media leverages propagandistic and hegemonic narratives that don’t belong in sports, I believe Horkheimer and Adorno depart from this conversation slightly to help us understand the truth behind the perpetuation of the hegemony within the NBA. In “The Culture Industry”, we are cautioned to engage in media through a lens that enables us to sift through the dangers of certain actions, and question what the media presents us. In this regard, I find the authors would both point to the fact that the dress code enacted in 2004, was simply another tactic in which to police Black bodies and criminalize an appearance and behaviour that would culturally be considered Black. It is a societal norm in America for companies to enforce a dress code, and as a corporation, the NBA implementing one can be seen as following the societal norm. Yet, I find this to be a deceptive political move that is harmful beyond simply producing content for capitalism. The authors would define this as a prime example of the reproducing the structures created by the elites. This dress code duplicated the cultural beliefs that are intrinsically linked to capitalism, thus enforcing a particular ideology. Through the sports media apparatus designated to push this narrative, the concept of capitalistic and consumerist culture as a means to achieve a dominant or white status in society, becomes engrained in human consciousness. I wonder if it is the Black NBA players, not the game of basketball that have become the mass-produced commodity in popular culture.

Reece Peck: "The Makers and the Takers'"

Reflecting on the Makers and Takers, I can dissect this event from an economic perspective, and view how language played a vital role. Reece Peck’s case study analysis of Fox News informs us that rhetoric is an American media platform’s superpower. I look particularly at the idea of Producerism that Peck explains – the concept that there are producers and parasites (Peck 157). There is this idea that the players are meant to follow rules and behave in a robotic way because the audience paid money to watch them produce or perform. In a capitalistic American society, we’re told we only reward those who produce, so on an economic level, the “Malice at the Palace” had a strong impact. The economic penalty that the players faced was a suspension, thereby a large loss in wages because there is the arbitrary understanding of producing as a measure of wage, and when players aren’t producing the way they should, there should be monetary consequences. When Black men must produce within this economic, capitalistic, Producerism framework there is no room for emotion to permeate and perhaps intervene from a mental health perspective and offer tools for healing. Disciplining through economic means is just another way of controlling the Black body, however it's less blatant because it rests on the capitalistic American belief system, and so it becomes easy to blame the Black man.

To add, it is a very striking statement that the white fans were not involved in the deliberation of accountability, when they were the group consuming alcohol. This reduces Black players to the role of performers for the often affluent, white spectators. There is a simultaneous commodification and criminalization that occurs here. The League will not part with these men as star players because of their economic value but will exercise their power and monitor and instruct their behaviour. There is a double standard when we see it in the realm of economics and how racism plays out, which links to Chomsky’s exploration of moral equivalence in America.

Reading Peck’s piece alerted me to how words can be one of the most influential ways the media pushes their ideology and the structures of race and class. Words like “thugs”, “violent”, and “sports-rage” were used to describe the players’ behaviours. Stern’s enactment of the dress code was referred to as “rescuing” the league’s tarnished image, and the altercation was not described as a racial attack but rather a “cultural clash” between the “hip-hop culture” and white fans. What this language communicated was that these men are individuals we should fear. Stern chose to discipline and police the players so that affluent, white, spectators felt safe entering the arena and would continue to spend money on games that for them, are simply entertainment. 

Conclusion

Overall, critical theories on ideology, media power, and producing culture helped me deconstruct this event as a racially charged and political attack on Black men. As Paul Pierce said in 2005, “When I saw the part about chains, hip-hop and throwback jerseys, I think that's part of our culture. The NBA is young Black males” (“Dress Code Targets Blacks, Players Claim”). This event truly gave one signal to Americans, that if the media catches a Black man presenting like a “thug” in a white-owned space, they will be disciplined.