Jumpman: The Making and Meaning of Michael Jordan

Smith (The Sons of Westwood), a history professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, justifies yet another book about Jordan by offering a smart appraisal of the superstar’s relationship with race. Jordan avoided discussing racism and politics during his NBA career in a bid to “appear more likable to people living under the illusion that the nation had solved its racial dilemmas,” Smith argues, noting that in 1990 Jordan, who had his own sneaker line with Nike, justified not endorsing Black Democratic senatorial candidate Harvey Gantt against racist incumbent Jesse Helms with the comment, “Republicans buy shoes, too.” Smith argues that Jordan downplayed to the press the ways in which racism shaped his life; he writes that Jordan has omitted in accounts of his youth that he was enraged by the prejudice he faced attending a newly desegregated high school in Wilmington, N.C., in the late 1970s and took to the court as a means of “disproving any notion of weakness or inferiority.” Smith places Jordan’s apoliticism in context, describing how O.J. Simpson and Julius Erving sought to present themselves as “colorless” to better appeal to white America. Jordan remains something of an enigma throughout, but readers will come away with a better sense of how that mystery was a product of the Hall of Famer’s aspirations for universal admiration. It’s a fascinating account of how Jordan navigated America’s fraught racial politics during his rise to the top. (Nov.)