The longer you watch the sport of basketball, the more life finds a way to complicate the ultimate utopia that is pure hoops. This week saw Brandon Miller have one of the most dominant games from this college season, but only after the release of a story that is essentially unprecedented for an NBA draft prospect.
It is difficult to find a topic more sensitive and charged with emotion than gun violence. A potential top five pick having any role in an active murder investigation is a shocking thing on its face that can trigger a bevy of emotional responses.
Emotions are a difficult thing to describe, their experience is entirely subjective. Deciphering one from another is even more difficult, attempting distinguishing two amorphous things from one another.
The difference between sympathy and empathy is a particularly tricky one, a fact I was reminded of in the wake of the recent news surrounding Darius Miles and the Alabama basketball team. Both are emotions you feel for someone as they encounter hardship, but the end result is ultimately different.
Sympathy is something we are told to have since birth, and it is an easy thing to give. Sympathy is simply to feel sadness for someone’s misfortune, feeling sorrow for someone’s struggle. It can be comforting in hardship, but it is far from a remedy. A proclaimed morality does little to improve the actual situation at hand. Sympathy can help someone, but the true benefit of the emotion lies elsewhere; it soothes the angst you feel at the sight of that person’s struggle.
Empathy is similar in its beginning, acknowledging someone else’s struggle. Where it differs is rather than feeling sadness for them you are feeling with them. Empathy requires a level of acceptance and understanding that can be uncomfortable. It is a subtle distinction, but an incredibly important one.
It is easy to have sympathy for the family of Jamea Jonae Harris. Having someone taken from you is an unimaginable tragedy, an act of evil that will affect their family for generations. Feeling empathy and changing how you handle the situation, that has proven to be a much more difficult task.
Rather than uplift those in need of support, discourse has centered around pointless hypotheticals and uneducated debates. Not only has the focus shifted away from those that were truly harmed, it has gone down a path that is both dangerous and irresponsible.
Life and the trauma that exists within it is an incredibly lonely experience, unique to the vessel it inhabits.
My grandmother passed away last week. She was an uncommonly patient woman with a gentle nature that was easy to underestimate. She loved to knit, and all her grandchildren can attest to that fact with the gifts they have received over the years. When my son was born, she was already years into her battle with Parkinson’s and knitting was all but impossible.
As I type this, there is a beautiful blue blanket draped over the side of his crib as he sleeps. You would never know it was knitted by ever-shaking hands, a product of quiet strength and deafening love.
It’s easy to feel sympathy in these moments, nobody wants someone to lose their grandmother. It’s easier to feel empathy because everyone has gone through something similar, you know how it feels. That equation becomes more complicated when the circumstance is unfamiliar.
The current situation surrounding Brandon Miller is one most people within the public NBA Draft space have very little familiarity with. It can be difficult to relating to or understanding a situation you have never been in, but in order to do right by the people involved that empathy is required.
In the immediate aftermath of (very limited) details being provided to the public there was a rush of opinion. Everyone was shocked and rushed to speculate what this could possibly mean for Brandon Miller’s draft stock.
That felt uncomfortable for a few different reasons.
Jumping to conclusions or rushing to judgment is an extreme end of the spectrum, and while we did see some of that I think any rational person viewed that as a gross overstep.
What concerned me was the immediate need to turn a life-changing traumatic event into a talking point for a hypothetical debate.
We don’t know anywhere close to the necessary information needed to understand the situation and we never will. The same is true for how it will alter views around the league. Every team will discover and use their own private information to make their own decision.
We have no way of actually predicting those results, and the most reliable sources we have for information are anonymous team employees with highly questionable motives.
What is the value of publicly speculating on a situation we cannot fully understand? Why are we treating another human’s life like a science experiment? Engagement?
Once again we are left debating something we do not understand and failing to provide any kind of empathy to the victims. Comments like these from figures of power do little to help. If we as a collective cannot treat victims with empathy I do not know what the path is towards human decency.
The police investigation into this case has classified Brandon Miller as a “cooperative witness” and Miller’s lawyers have released a statement denying any wrongdoing or knowledge of the weapon. I struggle to see what value can be added through speculating on his involvement, at this point it is perpetuating harm.
Everyone using Twitter (or any social media) is given a platform for their voice and regardless of their follower count, the opportunity to reach the consciousness of thousands of strangers with a single post. A world changing phenomena with an enormous impact.
The people within this space, the NBA Draft internet, are predominantly white men.
The athletes being discussed are predominantly black men.
I feel that is an important fact to remember. Acknowledging the dynamics of race when deciding how you use your platform should be a vital part of the process, but the uncomfortability of that reality makes it easy to brush aside.
There is something unsettling about a group consisting of predominantly white men rushing to commodify the conversation surrounding the tragedy of multiple black families. Everyone involved in that incident had their lives changed that day, yet it has been treated like a new data point to be analyzed.
That is a lack of understanding, a failure of empathy rooted in ignorance.
Many of the people covering the sport have little experience with gun violence, and it can be difficult to comprehend the situations that proceed it. Too often people think that is the result of their own moral fortitude when everything we know about the human condition says it is almost entirely dependent on circumstance.
White men speculating over the potential ramifications of gun violence in the life of a black man like a horse race is unnerving, but at this point that is the norm. People are quick to spout their opinion on matters they don’t understand with no respect for the impact of what they are saying.
That is not engaging in meaningful conversation or trying to find humor in a difficult situation. That is using your platform to perpetuate negative racial stereotypes for the sake of engagement.
The problem is, for most people, that wasn’t the intent. A wild story came out and they wanted to share their reaction like they do for everything else.
But I will ask this question again.
In this circumstance, what exactly is the value of your opinion? Sometimes it’s better for you to simply hear someone rather than be heard yourself.
Brandon Miller’s life and the lives of countless others were immeasurably changed that night. At what point is that “real” enough to treat people like human beings instead of commodities?
More importantly, what is the cost of your empathy? Your righteousness?