Over the course of three seasons, Kyrie Irving has been at the forefront of a Brooklyn Nets franchise that seems to find drama and turmoil around every corner and along every straightaway.
During the 2020-2021 campaign, pre Harden-acquisition, the Nets found themselves devoid of their star combo guard. He was not injured, he was not COVID-stricken, he was taking a personal leave, within which he attended meetings with lawmakers as well as his sister’s birthday party. It was as if he did not have a full-time job. This caused the Nets to leverage their future to find a more reliable complement to Kevin Durant, trading away Caris LeVert, Jarrett Allen, Taurean Prince, Rodions Kurucs, three picks and three swaps for James Harden.
Health plagued the Nets that season, and KD willed his way to a Game 7 overtime in the Eastern Conference Semifinals versus Milwaukee, coming mere inches away from victory. The Nets lost that game.
The next year, Kyrie refused vaccination, which after a certain point in time, seemingly anyone who was not a professional athlete could do without significant consequence. Harden asked out, and Durant had to bear a significant load that season. This ultimately led to Kyrie Irving becoming the league’s first ever part-time player. The NBA never has been intended as a part-time job, but there Kyrie was, accepting pay only for games in which he played. That is just how it was.
In return for Harden, the Nets decided to add another unpredictable mind to their heap of wasted talent. This would be Ben Simmons, whom the Nets acquired in addition to Seth Curry and Andre Drummond. Curry has been largely hobbled in his time in Brooklyn, and Drummond, although he played fairly well, barely finished his cup of coffee.
The Nets went into the postseason in disarray, getting swept by the Celtics. Durant asked out in the offseason, and the Nets wisely kept their asking price just out of reach for suitors. Durant would later rescind his request. Kyrie would opt-in to the last year of his deal. The Nets seemed ready to run it back with a “healthy” Ben Simmons this season.
Eight games into this season, Simmons is sidelined again, Head Coach Steve Nash has been fired, and Kyrie Irving was issued a team suspension regarding his promotion of a 2018 documentary entitled “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America.”
The movie is packed with antisemitic rhetoric. Kyrie, once again, became a divisive figure, adding to the list of people who cannot stand him, and a percentage of said people grew among Nets fans.
I do not believe that Kyrie is antisemitic, but I believe he has a different definition of the term than most, and that education of Jewish history is what is necessary to cure his ignorance.
There are, however, many more angles to this than just antisemitism. Many people believe that Kyrie is being silenced by the suspension and the tasks he must complete before reinstatement is considered, and that African-American people of influence have been persuaded by higher powers to condemn another black man for speaking his truth and his history.
In my opinion, these are not mutually exclusive.
According to Tariq Nasheed of Foundational Black Americans, via his Twitter, there is a group of black males working in corporate media that have fallen into a pattern designed to tear down other black men. He believes individuals such as James Brown of NFL Today, whom he references in the tweet, are being persuaded to silence free-thinkers such as Kyrie.
While black people are marginalized in this country, it is not okay to fight hatred with more hatred. The purpose of Irving’s sharing the documentary was not to project hate onto white American Jewish people, but to share with others a piece of African-American history that he sees as being silenced and erased from historical texts. The documentary however, is undeniably antisemitic.
The antisemitism present in the film is something for which Kyrie should be condemned. As I said previously, these two angles on reality can both be true.
“If Kyrie Irving needs to apologize for sharing a documentary, how many television/newspaper/media executives, producers, etc. need to apologize for the false, racist, stereotypical, depictions of Black people across all media outlets that have led to violence and marginalization?” Bishop Talbert Swan said on his Twitter account.
The problem with Swan’s perspective is that a game seems to have begun: “Who can be the most marginalized?” When, in reality, America has many problems it needs to fix in terms of its treatment of a multitude of communities, including the black community and those of the Jewish faith.
In Kyrie’s sharing of the documentary, he tried to appease and educate one marginalized community, that of his own, while being ignorant of the collateral, antisemitic damage done. Kyrie Irving is not antisemitic, I don’t think, but actions have consequences, and his suspension is thus justified. It is not the intent, in this case, but the effect.
We, as a nation, need not try to avoid hatred by creating hatred. What is needed is an understanding of history and an acceptance of the United States’ many instances of disgusting treatment of marginalized groups as a reality. Kyrie hurt a community, and deserves to pay the price. This was not his intention, but placed him at the center of unnecessary division.