Living Through the Hoop

Living Through the Hoop: High School Basketball, Race, and the American Dream. Reuben A. Buford May. New York: New York University Press, 2008. For some time now, Americans have been fascinated with the culture of basketball among African-American boys and young men. Think of Hollywood blockbusters such as They Got Game or Above the Rim, Rick Telander’s recently rereleased underground classic Heaven Is a Playground, or Hoop Dreams, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed independent documentaries of all time. Although sociologists of sport have made numerous contributions to our understandings of basketball and race in the past two decades, they have tended to focus more on elite, collegiate, and professional venues, media coverage and commentary, and resulting popular perceptions and ideologies. All this work is from a critical perspective that believes sport contributes to the perpetuation of racial stereotypes and that young black men are overinvested in their athletic dreams. Thus, Living Through the Hoop, Reuben May’s grounded, grass-roots ethnography of an AfricanAmerican high school basketball team, is a welcome addition to the literature. Although he has spent much of his life in and around basketball, May’s previous scholarship has not dealt explicitly with sports. This is, for the most part, a virtue. A seasoned observer of race, black culture, and everyday American life (his first book, also published by NYU, was on conversations about race in an African-American bar), May writes in clear and straightforward prose, has an eye for the revealing detail, as well as the knack for weaving stories and anecdotes into compelling insight and analysis. Chapters on topics ranging from drugs, drinking, and delinquency to masculinity to sportsmanship and competition take us into the world of young African-American basketball players, helping us to better understand the social milieu in which they and their basketball passions are embedded as well as what it all means to them. As a sociological analyst working from the inside, May avoids the one-sided critiques so typical of the field and produces a uniquely balanced, nuanced understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of sports participation for African Americans, reminding us that the drawbacks have more to do with racism and limited opportunities in society at large than with the sports world itself. Certain aspects of the book would look different in the hands of other scholars. May has a tendency to indulge personal experiences and case idiosyncrasies that do not appear central to the analytical core of the project (e.g., his head coach’s ‘‘no-cut policy’’), and there are places (such as the section on