Last week's LeBron James' HBO TV program, The Shop, may have pleased the NBA superstar's progressive "choir," but it drew rock-bottom ratings from Jason Whitlock on the Fox Sports 1 Speak for Yourself show. Whitlock criticized "King" James for being out of touch with the black community and called him the "black Trump."
Along with Maverick Carter, business partner and high school basketball teammate of James in Akron, Ohio, and Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central from 1999-2015, and others, James appeared in a black barbershop set discussing race in America. The premise of the program is that James travels to different barbershops to discuss current issues with guest celebrities. HBO sells it as an authentic black barbershop setting.
Whitlock is having none of it, and he delivered a scathing,four-minute criticism of The Shop. The video is posted below.
"LeBron James made a complete, utter fool of himself last night, with his new TV show, HBO's The Shop," Whitlock said. "A year ago while guest hosting The Herd I upset LeBron fans by analogizing the basketball star to Donald Trump. I explained how athletic privilege works just as well as wealth privilege. Last night, during the debut of The Shop, LeBron proved me prophetic with a profane, primitive and privileged look inside his fantasy shop, which is best described as the black billionaire barber shop. LeBron's shop is what Donald Trump must imagine a black barbershop is like."
What's LeBron's barbershop like? Lots of cursing and n-words. There were 75 instances of profanity and the n-word was spoken 11 times in 30 minutes. Whitlock on the profanity:
"Look, I'm as verbally raw as they come, depending on the setting. But I've never experienced that level of profanity and ignorance inside a barber shop. There's always an old head who shuts it all down. ... Twitter absolutely loves seeing LeBron this wretched in ghetto. But I can't just blame Twitter. Timothy Bella of The Washington Post wrote a fawning review of LeBron, Maverick Carter, Jon Stewart and company channeling their inner Donald Trump."
Exuding wealth and elitism, LeBron's version of a black barbershop is totally unrealistic, in the experiences of Whitlock:
"Here's what Twitter, The Washington Post and even LeBron James all missed. .. The Shop is fake news. My dad owned a barber shop in an all-black community in Indianapolis. It was called The Knothole. When my dad went into the bar business he took us to Mr. Leon's barber shop in the all-black community right down the street from his bar. When I moved to Kansas City I got my hair cut weekly at The Artisan Bar/Barbershop in an all-black neighborhood. When I moved here to Los Angeles I used to get my hair cut in an all-black shop called Legends. In all my years of frequenting black barber shops, I've never seen black men sipping goblets of red wine. With the Lord as my witness, they were holding goblets filled with Cabernet."
What's worse, Whitlock says, is that he's never seen a "token white dude, especially one who didn't grow up in the neighborhood, dominating and driving the conversation inside a black barbershop. Jon Stewart, from the old Daily Show, was the star of this show. Was Trevor Noah unavailable? Arsenio?"
The James barbershop was unrecognizable to Whitlock because it was "a collection of elite black millionaires who are so far removed from reality that they think a black barbershop is a minstrel show with a white choreographer."
Stewart brought up the social justice warriors' comparison of James to Muhammad Ali, which really set off Whitlock:
"In the middle of this minstrel show Jon Stewart had the audacity to compare LeBron James to Muhammad Ali. Are you kidding me? Ali stood on religious principle. LeBron James is standing on Twitter. I had very high aspirations for LeBron James. But he has been completely turned out by fame and pop culture. He's 34 years old and allegedly wants to be a social activist, educator and a role model. This is how you portray yourself? You start a TV show, and you instantly become black Trump? LeBron, you're lost, you're confused, you're hypocritical, you're fired."
