National Basketball Association (NBA) players are 70-75% Black, so the game is commonly referred to as “a Black sport.” Now the United Arab Emirates are using it to whitewash a genocide in Africa.
The United Arab Emirates is a criminal monarchy of just over 1 million citizens and 9 million harshly oppressed migrant workers. Its royals use their vast oil wealth to further enrich themselves by destabilizing much of East Africa, fueling genocide in Sudan, and using the NBA to whitewash their crimes.
Emirates Airlines, a monarchy-owned enterprise, signed a multiyear global sponsorship deal with the National Basketball Association (NBA) in February 2024, becoming its official airline partner and title sponsor of the Emirates NBA Cup, formerly known as the In-Season Tournament, which is underway now. “Emirates” is emblazoned on the courts, the backboards, and referee jerseys, and Emirates logos and signage abound.
This partnership is not only burnishing the monarchy’s image, but also making it a cool place to travel and invest in luxury real estate. Luxury hotels and rentals line its pristine, subtropical desert beaches, and its cities offer both traditional sights and all the modern architecture that obscenely concentrated oil wealth can buy.
Players including LeBron James, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Jaylen Brown have vacationed or visited the Emirates for events like the NBA Abu Dhabi Games, preseason exhibition contests that have taken place every year since 2022.
Last year Boston Celtics guard Jaylen Brown took the mic at the game’s opener to greet the crowd with “Asalamalaykum, Abu Dhabi!” followed by a brief punchy mix of Arabic and English.
Players like Deuce McBride, Jalen Brunson, and Landry Shamet have been photographed engaging with local culture, and legends like James Worthy and Shaquille O'Neal have made visits related to their NBA partnerships and promotional activities.
Do any of these players know that the UAE severely curtails speech, imprisons dissidents, and ties a migrant worker’s legal residency and work permit directly to an employer in a system resembling slavery?
Do they know that the UAE criminalizes and severely punishes anyone who manifests as LGBTQ?
Do they know that the UAE funds the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a descendant of the janjaweed, in a proxy war for Sudan’s vast gold reserves and agricultural land?
Do they know that the RSF are responsible for war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and atrocities that many now label as genocide?
Do they know that the RSF are geographically African but Arab-speaking and Arab-identifying forces murdering Africans in Sudan’s Darfur Region?
Using a Black sport to whitewash an African genocide
The cruelest irony of the NBA/Emirates partnership is that they are using a Black sport to whitewash the criminal monarchy’s proxy genocide of Africans.
Sudanese journalist Ahmed Kaballo explains the far more complex history that has led to these stark essentials in a nearly hour long interview, The Untold Truth About the Sudan War. One could hope that a socially conscious sports journalist might bring it to their attention. Though the history is complex, the action Kaballo proposes is simple: the UAE must be pressured to stop funding the Rapid Support Forces.
In 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published “The NBA Risks ‘Sportswashing’ UAE Violations,” writing that “these games are part of the Emirati government’s efforts to distract from the many human rights violations it is committing at home and abroad, including its alleged supply of weapons to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan.” HRW has also called for investigations into whether acts of genocide were committed in El Geneina, Darfur.
Fox News then published “NBA risks taking part in UAE sportswashing with new partnerships,” a report on the Human Rights Watch report.
Also in 2024, Refugees International published “NBA: Suspend Your Partnerships with the UAE and #SpeakOutOnSudan,” calling for suspension of the partnership until the UAE stopped funding the RSF.
Yesterday Kwasi Akyeampong, editor of The BlackList, posted to X that “the Emirates NBA Cup is a Genocide Cup”:
The NBA has responded defensively, pointing to the benefits of increased basketball participation in the Middle East. No formal NBA statements have directly addressed the UAE’s human rights abuses or its proxy genocide against Africans.
Is there any chance of the players responding? The sport can’t go on without them, and in August 2020, they refused to play in playoff games to protest racial injustice and the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by Wisconsin police. The Milwaukee Bucks initiated the boycott of their August 26 playoff game, which led to the postponement of all three games scheduled for that day and was supported by other players and teams. The action was part of a larger movement within the NBA and other sports leagues to align with the principles of the Black Lives Matter movement.
There is vastly more money at stake in the NBA’s relationship with the Emirates, but would the Emirates pull their sponsorship in response to an NBA demand that they stop supporting a Black African genocide? The optics would be very bad, but so are the NBA’s optics so long as they don’t make the demand.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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