6"2 white G-league guy saves NBA dunk contest

Matt McClung's claim to fame is literally insane dunking ability from high school. Idk why people are shocked by this. 

Secondly, the best dunk contest outside of the old school ones ending w/ Vince Carter was the 2016 contest. This year's contest only had one good contestant: McClung. 2016 had 2 very capable winners that ended in controversy between Gordon and Lavine. 

Honestly the 3-point contest is taking over as the premier All-Star Event. Players like Dame and Tatum actually partake. Historically, you have Steph, Klay, KD partaking. The best dunkers in the NBA don't even enter the slam dunk contest anymore. It's a joke that Ja Morant didn't do it this year when he's been crushing it during games. LeBron never did it either, which probably led to its decline since Vince Carter. 

And since we're on the race topic: the last white guy to win the dunk contest was Brent Barry in 1996. There have been 8 total white guys who have participated since its inception. And lastly, Michael Jordan holds the record for worst 3 point contest with only 5 makes. 

Well, to be fair, it's not just that Luka is white. He doesn't have a particularly athletic looking physique compared to the majority of the all star athletes that he plays against. His peers tend to either be slim and lean or rippling with muscles. He is neither. There are plenty of white guys in the league that have body types that are more consistent with people's expectations of a pro basketball player.

This just in, they are remaking it to remind us that white dudes shouldn’t jump.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Men_Can%27t_Jump_(2023_film)

There are about 450 players in the NBA and 1700 players in the NFL. That ends the list of high earning black-dominated fields of employment.

Thanks for playing.

Being white didn’t protect  the Irish from having their land stolen and their culture destroyed by the Anglo-Normans, later rebranded as English. That’s because skin color was never the reason why Western Europeans did what they did. It was economic. Race was invented as a justification.

I don't always agree with you, but you are the voice of reason in an otherwise disastrous post. This is all too true. Racism comes into existence as the justification for theft of land, labor, and resources. Before that the English othered the Irish as sub-human to justify colonialism, and the Spanish subject conversos to the 'one-drop rule' to justify continued theft of the assets of Spain's Jewish population.

It's Moops!  

Only one problem with this somewhat potted thesis: Whiteness wasn't really much a thing at that stage. Europeans, insofar as they cast things in anything like racial terms, all looked on one another as different, and really didn't give them a scientific characterization--othered is more like what was happening. Africa, the French said, began at the Pyrenees; all these things were in flux, as they still are. In England the Irish were characterized (we almost always do these things for political and economic purposes) as monkeys, for example, and definitely as racially inferior, insofar as this was taking shape (very much in response to colonialization, where the conquerers needed to justify their exploitation of various peoples. The first plantations were in Ireland. That continued as they enslaved the Irish and sent them here, where they really weren't too cut out for the work, the story goes (all the stories want careful examination, which is what worries Ron DeSantis; the idea of his kids deciding for themselves worries f out of his ilk).

Race is an ongoing cultural and historic project--that's really the only 'theoretical' thing I see about CRT; the rest is history, digging into what actually happened, which worries these people lots more. Mostly 'whiteness' is a settler colony thing, retrospectively applied, new polities being created from the huge and scary differences people brought with them. Creating a national self so you could start Othering the rest and taking their stuff. The Nazis looked down on everyone as other races, and inferior.

Jews aren't 'white;' they're constructed historically; genetic markers for race constitute way less than 1 percent of what we are, but most people of lineal Jewish descent carry some of these markers, including my brown adopted daughter, who is also, apparently, of Nigerian and Irish descent. Salvatore Quattro doesn't get to decide that Jews are 'white'! 

One of my UM anthro profs used to be fond of saying that 97 percent of all human activity is the same everywhere; we just make a big deal out of difference when it proves. . . useful. I'd go a little lower, but I saw his point. 

EDIT: Was thinking after I wrote this about the holes in my knowledge about when race comes to be an idea. My wife tells me she's overseeing a dissertation by a young ethnomusicologist right now, about the suppression of Scottish culture, that includes a statement by a British medical official who talks about the Celts as an inferior race, and says that they need to be 'scientifically and systematically wiped out.' Undated, late 18 c. FWIW. 

How about this: scientifically, white, black, etc., don't exist.  We are one species as proven by any "race" being able to breed with any other.  Race is a political creation to justify lessening or fully removing the rights of another cultural group based on things like pigment production, forehead size, larger epicanthal folds. Almost categorically "race" has been used by one group to steal resources from another.  Thus, any current use of "race" only serves to perpetuate the possibility of perpetuating this faux division. Race should presently exist only in recognizing the repression it has historically been used to justify and the corollaries and vestiges of that repression in the modern world, and to compensate for this. Race, as a discussion of capability, even in a slam dunk contest, is unsound scientifically and unnecessarily divisive.  

Precisely. Genetic diversity makes humanity more robust and resistant to pandemics. Differing phenotypes are the result of random genetic mutations. All humans have about 99.9% similar DNA.

While there is a long history of ism in history, and in the US, many groups have been marginalized at various times, including but not limited to Italians, Irish chinese, Japanese, muslims, catholics and others, it seems to be hard to deny that from slavery to redlining, racism against blacks has been both particularly prolonged and persistent.   In the US, I think one would be hard pressed to suggest that blacks and native Americans have suffered more.  Since there are more than 6 times as many blacks in the US as native Americans, it should not be a huge surprise that when people in the US think about racism, blacks are the first group of people to come to mind.

Yeah a lot of my NBA buddies are acting like Mclung came out of nowhere. If you follow college basketball you’ve know about him since a high school recruit