Moral clarity

The Milwaukee Bucks players and why you can't wait for the "right time" to take a necessary stand.

At some point in the last year, amid a pandemic that accelerated the end of the only professional life I knew, a personal roller coaster that swung from the sorrow of my best friend’s death to the joy of my second child’s impending arrival (soon!), and a historical reckoning of racial injustice that swept me in a maelstrom of anger, guilt, sadness, helplessness, and resolve that is but a tiny fraction of the intensity of every black person’s in this country, I realized something about a subject I love.

I realized that Ahsoka Tano is the most important person in the Star Wars Universe.

Torn from her family to harness her supernatural gifts, Ahsoka Tano pledges herself to an institution whose job — its calling, really — is to protect the galaxy. She matures from bratty know-it-all to fierce warrior, undergoing harsh trials that strengthen her resolve to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. She becomes the avatar for the Jedi Order’s morality and a symbol of the organization’s inherent goodness.

But when that same institution bows to public pressure and casts her aside for a crime she didn’t commit, she realizes an important lesson. Organizations can have good intentions and include many allies to your causes, but they are not substitutes for your own moral compass. If you really want to be true to your own values, there comes a time when you need to take a stand, even if it will upset your peers and even if you don’t know what will happen next.

So Ahsoka Tano does what so many of us wish we could — what her master admits he wishes he could do — if we could only find the strength to follow through. She turns away from the Jedi Order to follow a path she can’t see.

As she walks away, the mentor who always believed in her innocence tells her she’s making a huge mistake to give up her platform. That in acting during her lowest moment, when her judgement is clouded by dark feelings, she is failing to comprehend the consequences of her decision. She responds not with a sense of certainty or a sign that she’s weighed all the pros and cons of taking her stand. She responds with one word.

“Maybe.”

And then she moves toward the great unknown, guided only by her principles and a sense of a larger purpose she cannot yet understand.

Those Milwaukee Bucks players did not know how the world would respond to their refusal to take the court for Game 5 of their first-round NBA Playoffs series. In the hours since taking that stand, they’ve had many well-meaning Anakin Skywalkers dissecting their decision. What is your plan for turning this into action? Why not tell your other well-meaning peers so we could act collectively? What even is this: a boycott, a strike, or something else? Why walk away from the platform the NBA’s resumption provides? Why withhold your labor to a league that publicly supports your stances. What more can the people associated with this league do? What makes you think refusing to play a basketball game will stop centuries of institutional racism? Why act without thinking about all of this? Why put people who believe in your cause in this position before we could analyze the ramifications of our stand? You are making a huge mistake putting yourselves — and, by proxy, us — on the line.

I don’t know what happens next. As I write this, the players have reportedly decided to resume the playoffs. I don’t know what that means, when the resumption happens, and what concessions the players extracted from owners, if any. We’ll soon learn the answers to those questions. We might already know some by the time you read this. And if games do continue, this newsletter will go back to chronicling them through the same lens as before: by helping you understand the complexity of the sport’s Xs and Os and appreciate the difficulty players and coaches overcome to carry them out.

But I’ve also come to realize something about another subject I love. I’ve I realized that the Milwaukee Bucks players are the most important people in the NBA universe.