Dominique Wilkins, Michael Jordan, and the Cadillac Called Racism

A personal reflection on discovering the NBA in the 1980s, Dominique Wilkins' greatness, and what a recent restaurant controversy reveals about the changing face of racism.

The VCP Years

Dominique Wilkins.

The year was 1988.

I had just bought a VCP.

That's right, a VCP.

It was about ₦600 cheaper than a VCR, which at the time might as well have been $80, and I simply couldn't spare the difference. So I bought a Toshiba Video Cassette Player instead.

That was how I got introduced to the NBA, through grainy, bootlegged video cassettes supplied by my friend, Gerald Michael Eigbobo (RIP).

We were fascinated by this guy.

His name was Dominique Wilkins.

He was so good. So athletic. And, as far as we could tell, he was making a young upstart named Michael Jordan look ordinary.

At work, we talked endlessly about Dominique. How he would go up for a dunk, switch hands in mid-air at the very last moment, and hammer it home.

It took us nearly two years to realize that the player we thought was Dominique Wilkins was actually Michael Jordan, and the player we thought was Michael Jordan was Dominique Wilkins.

You can laugh.

These were the days before the internet, before satellite television, before YouTube highlights and social media clips.

Back then, information travelled slowly, and sometimes not at all.

Not a Footnote

But the point is this:

Dominique Wilkins was a superstar.

Not a good player.

Not a very good player.

A superstar.

In my mind, he remains Jordan's twin, even if history has largely been rewritten around Michael's greatness.

Jordan became Jordan.

Dominique became the footnote.

The Atlanta Incident

So imagine my surprise when I learned that Dominique Wilkins had been turned away from a restaurant in Atlanta, the very city where he became a legend.

The restaurant later explained that the issue was not race, but a dress code.

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

The trouble with racism is that it rarely announces itself these days.

It seldom arrives wearing a white hood.

It comes disguised as procedure.

Policy.

Dress code.

Company culture.

"We were simply following the rules."

Maybe they were.

But history has taught many people of colour to be suspicious whenever rules seem to bend for some and harden for others.

As others later pointed out, the controversy was not merely about the existence of a dress code.

It was about whether the dress code was being applied consistently.

And that question has echoed through generations.

The Cadillac Called Racism

As someone once said in a documentary:

"Racism is like a Cadillac. There's a new model every year."

I have never forgotten that line.

Because prejudice adapts.

It evolves.

It learns new language.

It finds new disguises.

The Real Challenge

The challenge for people of colour is not merely identifying it.

The challenge is deciding how to respond to it without allowing it to poison the soul.

How do you defeat a people determined to minimize you at every turn?

That is a question each person must answer for themselves.

The Answer

As for me, I think the answer begins with excellence.

The kind of excellence that produced Dominique Wilkins.

The kind that produced Michael Jordan.

The kind that refuses to be diminished, even when others try.

Because excellence has a way of outliving prejudice.

And greatness has a way of surviving every attempt to deny it.

I rest my case.

Don Kenobi
#BigAgendaAfrica
#CultureNotStructure