All-Star Weekend in Charlotte was a wonderful celebration of North Carolina’s enthusiasm for basketball.
At center stage: The Curry family.
Dell Curry played for the Hornets. While in Charlotte, he and his wife Sonya Curry raised future NBA players in Stephen Curry and Seth Curry. Those four featured prominently throughout the weekend. Stephen played in the All-Star game. He and Seth competed in the 3-point contest. Dell headlined a shooting competition for charity. Sonya even made a halfcourt shot.
But not all their memories in Charlotte were happy.
Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated:When Dell Curry was drafted by the Charlotte Hornets in the 1988 NBA expansion draft, the Currys experienced more racism. The Hornets were owned at that time by George Shinn. Sonya Curry, who is a fair-skinned African-American woman, recalls Shinn erroneously thinking she was a white woman and not liking the fact that one of his black players was married to her.
“The owner called in another player, a white guy player who dated black women, and said, ‘We drafted you. We know who you like to date. But we just want to tell you to really be careful about letting people see because Dell Curry is married to a white woman and we don’t know how people are going to take them either,’ ” Sonya Curry said. “The player was like, ‘You are not going to believe what they just said.’ I was like, ‘What?’ Just the assumption of what I look like and all that.”
Shinn was loathed by Hornets fans even before he moved the franchise to New Orleans. This provides just another reason to dislike him.
Even if Shinn were merely cautioning his players that other people might object to interracial marriage/dating – the most charitable reading of this – it’s still awful. Put the burden of change on the people perpetuating racist standards, not the victims of that racism.
