No Offence, but Americans aren't Canadian
How Chris Broussard did nothing wrong
Here’s an odd topic I can’t stop thinking about: The Canadian media freakout directed at NBA analyst Chris Broussard. Maybe you missed it on account of being American or otherwise distracted, but it appears to have been a legitimate news story up north. Naturally, obviously, the whole stupid controversy reminds me of a trip I took to Israel back in 2007.
Back in college, I went on one of those free Birthright Israel trips because my friends were signing up. Of course, nothing in life is free and this wasn’t simply a blissful vacation. While the trip didn’t require payment, it involved a lot of doctrinal nudging in the direction of the host country. Our guides wanted us to make aliyah to the holy land, or at least feel enough kinship to support it from afar later in life.
One tactic they used was to gather us all together and announce a choice:
If you feel like you’re more Jewish than American, you should walk over to one side of the room. If you feel like you’re more American than Jewish, you should walk over to the other side of the room.
Tempting as it was to claim an identity more exotic than “White American tricked into the ideological version of a timeshare,” I was the only person who trudged over to the U.S. side. Why did this happen? For a lot of reasons, but mostly because that morning, I’d had a conversation about tackle football with an Israeli solider.
The soldier, who’d been commissioned to guard our group and/or marry one of the girls in it, had a lot of questions about American culture. Specifically, he wanted to know the rules for American football. As I started to answer, it quickly dawned on me that this seemingly simple task was actually impossible. It went something like this:
You, um, have four tries to move the ball ten yards, except usually you strategically give up after three tries. …
It starts with a kickoff, where one’s team runs the ball back. But then you don’t kick it again, except for an additional point after scoring a 6-pointer. Or like, um, for three points because you’re not gonna use your fourth try to get 10 yards. Or for no points, when you drop kick it to the other team. …
There’s a guy who passes the ball between his legs to the quarterback and until it happens, nobody can move. Except, some people can move and we call it ‘going in motion.’ …
You can pass the ball forward but only if you’re behind where the ball started on the play, but not if you move past where the ball started. Then you can pass the ball backwards. …
Holding is bad, but tackling can be good. …
I think my Israeli interlocutor somehow ended up knowing less about the sport than when I started talking, and yet I had learned something from the seemingly fruitless exchange. Apparently, though no effort on our own, I and every other American halfwit claimed masterful knowledge of an impossibly complicated game. We hadn’t sought this knowledge out. It was just part of the air we breathed from our first sentient moments.
Such information was differentiating, a marker of origin. Not every American understands football, but almost every American has their football. While you might fancy yourself some infinitely transcendent citizen of the world, you are, in part, grounded in the specific. You are from a place, and speak its language in the literal and metaphorical ways. You share something with others and the sharing comes so easily that you lose any sense that it’s utterly opaque to those from beyond your borders. Perhaps the others on this trip felt more Jewish than American for their own spiritual or cultural reasons, but that Israeli soldier didn’t know what position Tom Brady played. This was too big a cultural chasm, in my estimation. It was enough to keep me on the U.S. side.
But we’re talking about Chris Broussard offending Canadians, a people who do indeed watch some tackle football. What was Broussard’s offense? Well, when asked about the prospects of Kevin Durant signing in Toronto, Broussard, who happens to be a Black American, said:
Great city, but it's not America. And you feel it when you're there, I'm telling you. Especially as an African American. It's a different situation than African Americans are used to being in.
Seems like a broadly correct statement, whatever Durant’s specific situation yields. It’s intuitively true, and even if it wasn’t intuitively true, we have so many examples of American basketball players fleeing the Great White North (Tracy McGrady, Vince Carter, Chris Bosh and Kawhi Leonard to name some high profile examples).
Broussard did not insult Canada. He even started off his statement by calling Toronto a “great city.” And yet, the response from Canadian and even some American media outlets was unhinged and, I would argue, revealing.
The Toronto Sun uncharitably framed the incident as such:
Fox Sports personality-turned-demographer Chris Broussard doesn’t think NBA superstar Kevin Durant will want to play for the Toronto Raptors because of his race. While Broussard says he likes Toronto — frequently proclaimed the most multicultural city in the world, the talking head appears to believe Canada’s largest city is a field of lily white.
The Toronto Star lapped up the Canadian fan backlash with a more dryly written summary, saying:
Canadian fans as well as other sports industry personalities quickly took to social media to share their confusion and outrage over Broussard’s comments, many pointing out that Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in the world.
Canadian sports talk host Chris Walder called Broussard’s comments “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard on a sports talk show.” Awful Announcing scolded, “Chris Broussard steps out of bounds with his Toronto Raptors take.” The overriding, and I would add, condescending assumption offered by critics was that Broussard simply didn’t know about Toronto’s diversity.
Doesn’t Broussard know that Toronto is DIVERSE! It’s like he didn’t even read the yearly worldatlas.com diversity rankings.
Of course, this is a straw man argument that has nothing to do with what Broussard actually said. Instead of doing some throat-clearing on being White while commenting on this subject I’ll just say that anyone of any background can understand his words, provided they clearly hear them. Quite plainly, Broussard is saying that many players struggle with a dearth of AMERICAN Black culture in Toronto. He’s referring to a robust, historic U.S. diaspora that comprises more people than Canada’s entire population. It’s a community that is hundreds of years old and happens to be the majority demo in a number of American cities, including Atlanta, the hub of the American South. And Canadian, it isn’t.
Toronto is “just 8% Black,” as Broussard puts it, and that population is of mostly Caribbean origin. Such origins inform a culture foreign enough from U.S. understanding that SNL had a lot of fun with Drake doing a rendition of it for confused Americans back in 2016.
So, everything Broussard said was entirely uncontroversial, from the perspective of reasonable people who know a thing or two about North America and the NBA. Though masterful Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri has done much to make his franchise transcend old barriers, Southern Californian superstar Kawhi Leonard still bailed in 2019, despite having just won a championship.
Many a Coping Canadian, and even some American media members piled on.
So what’s going on here? Why are these media types misunderstanding the obvious to the point of being angry about it?
There’s a subtle issue of semantic confusion. “Diversity” is this lauded universalist concept, but those who advocate for it in specific instances are often asking for the presence of specific groups. In conversations, NBA players sometimes cite a “lack of diversity” as a knock against playing in Utah. That complaint isn’t necessarily the same thing as wishing Utah had more Indonesians, Laotians and Kazakhs, whatever those groups might bring to SLC. It’s just a similar lament to the issue Broussard notes in Toronto.
There are more confounds in this fraught territory. “Diversity” is simultaneously a pervasive corporate euphemism for “nonwhite” and also a word that describes a setting where people hail from a wide range of different backgrounds. So is every nonwhite country diverse, even when they’re ethnically homogenous? The blurring of these definitions has apparently led to some puzzlement, enough to where Chris Broussard is getting lectured about Toronto’s storied diversity for no goddamned sensible reason.
There’s likely some conflation of wants here. “Diversity” is pretty popular as an idea for a multitude of reasons, but the concept also attracts a particular strain of status conscious fandom. Specifically, there are professional class people in both America and Canada who fetishize the idea of a cosmopolitan life, one where they’re not hemmed in by their own boring ethnic group. They crave “diversity,” so why don’t you? Isn’t it good enough that Toronto provided an adequate amount of nonwhite people? What more do Broussard and these NBA players need?? And hey, some of these Canadians are even Black! They look just like the Black people on American TV, so why are you complaining that their culture is different from yours? What matters is how people look, especially if you principally view them as a visually appealing mosaic of extras in the movie that is your life. It’s less than obvious to the aspirationally transcendent that many peoples’ tastes and comforts actually have borders.
There’s also the matter where many Canadians are more fluent in our ways than we are in theirs. Our nation is bigger and produces more media content for them than they produce for us. The great bulk of their population lives within easy driving distance of the U.S. border whereas our three most populous states (California, Texas, Florida) are quite far from theirs. In fairness to these Canadians, they might not fathom the depths of our detachment from them. They perhaps do not see how, though we do share significant cultural overlap, their metric-measured land can seem inscrutable. Canada can be quite charming, but also this uncanny valley where everything feels sort of American, but not quite. The TV channels are a bit like what we have here, but not really. The sports coverage is a lot like ours, except it mostly revolves around hockey, a sport I understand just a bit better than an Israeli soldier groks football. The cumulative effect of that repeated “almost” sensation can inspire homesickness in a U.S. citizen, Black or otherwise. How could it not, after awhile? You’re not home.
There’s a type of U.S. sports journalist who likes leaving home, in short bursts, and extravagantly praises Toronto. Its aforementioned diversity is routinely held up as though it’s a unique quality, as though New York City and Los Angeles have the demographic profile of Ames, Iowa. Obviously, Toronto’s diversity isn’t the big differentiating factor when compared to American cities. And no, neither is Canada’s relative dearth of gun violence or how it allocates health care. The big differentiating factor is, of course, that they’re Canadian and we’re American. The difference is so simple, so obvious and yet, somehow, it can all get lost in translation.
I’m Native American. Specifically, a Spokane Indian. An Interior Salish. There are Salish people across the Canadian border. There are many aspects of language and culture that are very similar. We’re talking at least 15,000 years of similarity. And, yet, that border, only a couple hundred years ago, has separated us in profound ways. Before this Strauss post, I reflexively reacted to Broussard’s statement—thought of it as being silly, so very American-provincial. But now I understand what he meant.
An underlying issue here (and Broussard's explanatory follow-up Tweet does a little of this, which doesn't help) may be the seemingly routine now(?) running together of the concepts "African-American" and "Black," as if African-American experience is Black experience and Black experience is African-American experience, and if such and such authority suggests that Black is the preferred usage, we should just use that term and we won't lose any crucial linguistic clarity in doing so.
But it's totally believable to me (and seemingly to Ethan, too) that there is a relevant difference between these concepts with regards to lots of issues, and with regards to this issue in particular -- that some with a distinctively African-American background and set of experiences might have a very different, and potentially less comfortable experience in Toronto than, say, a Black Jamaican immigrant. That's not a slam on Toronto's diversity -- I mean, as a Blazers fan, I remember the time Hedo Turkoglu spurned our offer to go play in Toronto, in part because (it was said) his wife wanted to live in a more "international" city than Portland.
But it just has always seemed to me like this linguistic tic might lead to a weird erasure of distinctively African-American cultural experience or at the very least a loss of ability to think clearly about it / frame it accurately, and this might be a case where we see that happening a little bit...?