"It's racism."
"He told the truth."
Those two comments bookend a spectrum of reaction to the announcement that Hawks co-owner Bruce Levenson will leave the team over a racially charged email.
Some people blasted Levenson’s remarks on the Hawks struggle to attract more white fans to games as offensive, inappropriate and divisive.
Others said they were merely true.
“Everything he tried to say highlights the reasons I don’t go to Atlanta for any reason if I can help it,” Wil Johnson of Sandy Springs said in an email to the AJC. “He told the truth about Atlanta’s elephant in the room.”
Some took issue with anyone who saw no harm in the email, which was sent two years ago but surfaced with the owner’s announcement Sunday.
Demario Antowaun Lightsey said Levenson shouldn’t be in the NBA. “If you’re a racist billionaire, that’s okay,” he wrote. “Just don’t own an NBA team. That’s the wrong business to get into if you don’t like black people.”
Levenson’s departure follows the ouster of former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was exposed for making demeaning remarks about African-Americans.
Many of Atlanta’s black leaders quickly condemned Levenson’s email. Mayor Kasim Reed called them “reprehensible and offensive.”
But in the court of public opinion, sentiment was divided as to whether Levenson’s email was an expression of bigotry or a market analysis.
Levenson noted that the Hawks draw more heavily among African-Americans than other NBA teams and speculated that, for that reason, white people no longer felt comfortable attending. “My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base,” he wrote.
Former basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said that although the comments “make me cringe a little,” the issues Levenson raised about attracting more white fans are reasonable.
“Levenson is a businessman asking reasonable questions about how to put customers in seats,” Jabbar said in Time. If anything, Jabbar criticized the owner for relinquishing ownership so soon.
To capture the conversation sparked by Levenson’s comments, the AJC put out a request for readers to comment on Facebook and Twitter.
Some people argued that acknowledging that racism exists is not the same as being racist.
Janette Prewett said Levenson’s email lacked tact but that his comments made some sense. She thought the incident, coming on the heels of the Sterling debacle, was getting “blown out of proportion.”
Joel Solow disagreed. “It should be clear by the lengths to which white folks have gone to avoid black folks,” he wrote, pointing to white flight into the suburbs and the resistance there to rail service. “It’s racism, stop infantilizing and sanitizing his remarks.”
Susan O’Kelley said Levenson was right on target.
“Why would we bring our basketball-playing grandson to a Hawks game where we would be in the vast minority?” O’Kelley wrote. “Pro basketball is a black sport these days and the Hawks cater to black fans, so they shouldn’t expect white basketball fans to come to downtown Atlanta to support them.”
But some writers, including Sharnette Mitchell, saw the dust-up as an opportunity to learn lessons of tolerance.
“I think that people fail to realize that crime, bad behavior, etc. is no respecter of gender, nationality, income bracket, age bracket,” she wrote.
Social scientists talk about a racial “tipping point” when discussing the changing composition of neighborhoods. Research has found that in many cities, neighborhoods begin changing quickly when the percentage of blacks exceeds 10 to 25 percent, said Jesse Rothstein, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of California Berkeley.
In recent years, the percentage has been rising as the level of racism has decreased, said Rothstein, who has studied the issue.
He said he could easily see a similar “tipping point” occurring in large social settings, such as sports venues and concert halls.
But that would hold true only if Levenson’s analysis was correct: that racial dynamics play a major role in who attends games. And some people thought he was simply wrong.
Some white people wrote to say they feel comfortable at games. Other writers blamed poor attendance on on what happens on the court itself.
Wrote Mason Harris: “Nobody goes to Hawks games because the Hawks are garbage.”
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