This post originally appeared on the blog Very Smart Brothas. It’s reprinted with the author’s permission.

When news first broke a few years ago that Zoe Saldana would be cast in Nina—the yet-to-be-released biopic about the iconic artist and activist—I wasn’t as put off about the aesthetic dissimilarity between Saldana and Simone as many of us seemed to be. Mainly because I generally don’t believe an actor needs to be a person’s doppelganger to convincingly portray that person.

But, this is where that pesky-ass irritant called context matters. Because much of Simone’s work was specifically centered in her specific experience as a dark-skinned black woman who existed outside of America’s—white America’s and, sadly, black America’s—general standard of what’s considered beautiful. Zoe Saldana, on the other hand, doesn’t just exist within the standard. For many, she is the standard. This, for the record, doesn’t make her any less black than Nina Simone was. But it does bring up questions about erasure. Namely, why a biopic about Nina Simone, perhaps the least “Hollywood” celebrity America has even seen, would be given the Hollywood treatment? And while Zoe Saldana has a bankable name and known acting chops, when telling the Nina Simone story, it is actually vital to cast someone who favors her more. (Or, rather, favors her naturally without the aid of prosthetics.) In this specific instance, a doppelganger would be more appropriate. So, why not do exactly that?

Now, the first paragraph and the second paragraph of this might seem a bit incongruent. And that’s because they are. I began with an explanation of why I didn’t think Saldana being cast as Simone was a big deal. And then, in the second paragraph, I shifted gears and explained why it is, effectively contradicting myself. What you read is the result of what happened to me between the time I first heard the news and now. The idea that Saldana’s casting was inappropriate didn’t immediately come to me. Because I wasn’t as familiar with Nina Simone’s work and also I wasn’t immediately sensitive to the race and colorism-related concerns of an actress like Saldana being cast as her. But then I listened to what some of my friends—specifically black women more naturally sensitive to it—had to say. And I read pieces about it, followed Facebook threads concerning it, and clicked on tweets explaining it. And then, after I sought out and received more information about a subject I wasn’t as well-versed in, my opinion about that subject changed.

The concept of diversity is often thought of in aesthetic and largely superficial terms. Quotas are filled so the “urban” accounts have a pointperson and your company’s cookout group photo will look less Abercrombie and more Benetton. But what diversity, true diversity, actually does is fill blind spots. It surrounds you with people with different experiences and different knowledge bases who you can lean on and learn from when necessary. And the decision to cast Zoe Saldana—and be unprepared for the blowback/criticism—is an unfortunate but predictable by-product of the lack of it. With it, however, perhaps you have someone in the room who lets the producers and the director (Cynthia Mort) know the negative response to this news wouldn’t be worth the boost having Saldana’s name attached to it would provide it. Maybe you’d have someone who’d provide a list of actresses who’d be great and less controversial choices. And maybe someone would communicate to them that they’d risk offending the very demographic who’d be the movie’s most fervent supporters.

This post originally appeared on the blog Very Smart Brothas. It’s reprinted with the author’s permission.

We first met Beyoncé as Teenaged Beyoncé — a member of the preternaturally talented and peculiarly attired Destiny’s Child. And now, she’s firmly ensconced into Grown-Ass Beyoncé. Or, if you prefer, Capricorn Cabaret Beyoncé. Or perhaps even “Who’s The Thick Aunt In The Stands With The Shades And The Cooler At Soccer Practice? She’s Fine As Hell. Oh Shit, That’s Beyoncé?” Beyoncé.

But inbetween there have been many Beyoncés. So many that they deserve a ranking.

10. Deep Beyoncé

Perhaps, in real life, Beyoncé is deeper than how I imagine pitchers of mimosas at brunches in Heaven to be. (And, considering how shrewd she must be to be as successful as she is, this is probably true.)

But when Beyoncé attempts to get deep, publicly, it always has the same reaction: I wish Beyoncé would not attempt to get deep, publicly, again.

9. Actress Beyoncé

I actually don’t mind Beyoncé in movies very much. Because, if the movie is particularly intense or heart-wrenching, seeing her on screen reminds you it’s just a movie. Whew, I think to myself, that scene had my heart racing, until I saw Beyoncé. And remembered it’s just a movie. Because Beyoncé is on screen playing Beyoncé.

8. Silly Based God Beyoncé

I like Silly Beyoncé — which she reveals from time-to-time in videos, unedited footage, and the actual titles of her actual songs. I also like Based God Beyoncé, which appears when she tweets things like “Hi, everyone!” and “Oranges are orange” and shuts down the entire internet.

And, with “7/11”—a track which features lines like “Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap it” and “Spinnin’, I’m spinnin’, I’m spinnin’ while my hands up” but still somehow managed to be one of the biggest songs of the year—Silly Beyoncé and Based God Beyoncé combined to create Silly Based God Beyoncé.

7. Sexy Thundergoat Beyoncé

The “Thundergoat” is a term I first heard over a decade ago on Havoc, my cousin’s seminal message board. It was coined to describe how Beyoncé was whirling and twisting and twirling around in the “Baby Boy” video. Basically, like a Sexy Thundergoat.

And this tends to happen when Beyoncé, who’s already stocked to the brim with sex appeal, tries to go extra hard on the sexy. It’s like chasing Hennessy with Jack Daniels. It’s already brown enough, man.

6. Corporate With Cameras Around Beyoncé

Also known as I’m worth 500 million dollars, bitch Beyoncé and My husband and sister were just fighting in the elevator but I’m going to act like we were just exchanging quinoa recipes Beyoncé.

5. Hood Beyoncé

Although Third World Trill is desperately in need of more people, I’m always amused when Beyoncé does and says some hood-ass shit. Like rock a grill. Or marry a rapper from Brooklyn. Or name her child a color.

4. “Welp!” Beyoncé

One of the more interesting—and, if you’re a hip-hop fan, kinda depressing—developments over the last decade or so is that singers, and not rappers, have had the most transcendent and memorable quotables. At the top of this list is Beyoncé, who every once in a while will include a line in a song that’s so hilariously, shit-talkingly, and awesomely petty that the only rationale response to it is “Welp!” Because of course— of course!—some shit's gonna go down when there’s a billion dollars in an elevator.

This is Beyoncé’s way of letting us know she’s paying attention to all you haters with that Illuminati mess. Basically, it’s her way of knowing she can be a Beyoncé fan.

3. Feminist Beyoncé

Because I enjoy reading the thinkpieces debating Feminist Beyoncé’s merits. And because somewhere out there a PhD student is preparing to defend her thesis connecting Beyoncé to The Bluest Eye in front of a panel full of 78-year-old white people, and the thought of that tickles me.

2. Ratchet Beyoncé

Yes, creating an entire song around the surfborting you do in your car while other people happen to be in it is some ratchet-ass shit. I don’t care if it’s a million dollar car and there’s a shower curtain between the seats obscuring the view, it’s still ratchet. Awesome, but ratchet. That said, I appreciate it when Beyoncéshows us that Donald Trump isn’t the only billionaire with a predilection towards ratchetivity.

1. Black Beyoncé

Although she still gets a side eye for “You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bama” (because, um, aren’t Creoles Negroes, too? That’s like saying “you mix that lobster and that catfish and you get some seafood”), I really appreciate this Vantablack stage of Beyoncé’s career. I’m all in on “hot sauce in my bag”/make white people anxious Beyoncé.

This time last year, Ayesha Curry was the third-most-popular member of the Curry household, behind husband and NBA MVP Stephen and their 3-year-old press-conference scene-stealer daughter Riley. Ayesha was quite likely the sixth-most-popular member of the Curry family—behind father-in-law Dell (a 16-year NBA veteran), brother-in-law Seth (now a guard for the Sacramento Kings), and mother-in-law Sonya (whose winsome mugging has made her a favorite of sports TV producers).

She was inconspicuous in part because she seemed so ... normal. Strikingly and refreshingly normal and cool. And not an Ace Hotel, “are-my-jeans-even-tapered-enough-to-order-bitters-in-my-drink?” cool, but a self-aware corny cool. The beginning of her relationship with her husband involved a series of meet-cutes. They met at church camp as teens, and Steph courted her through Facebook messages. It was all something out of a Vacation Bible School coloring book. Everything about her gave off a low-key kind of cute. She posted videos to her YouTube channel with titles like “Little Recipe of Mine: Sun Dried Tomato Caprese Panini” and “Husband TAG (Part Two).” Her daughters were given alliterative first names. If her life were any cuter, it’d be a panda GIF.

Today, however, Ayesha Curry is a brand. She is the star of an upcoming show on the Food Network (tentatively and cutely titled At Home With Ayesha), the author of an upcoming cookbook (The Seasoned Life: Food, Family, Faith, and the Joy of Eating Well), and the subject of thinkpieces, podcasts, and profiles everywhere from the Root and Essenceto New York mag and the Wall Street Journal. When she tweets passive-aggressively about the NBA Finals, it’s news. She is still normal, but she is conspicuously normal now. How she got to this point, however, was anything but normal. She first had to become a kind of digital demarcation, a constant point of contention in certain corners of the internet. It is not uncommon to jump on Twitter and find Ayesha Curry’s name trending for reasons completelyunrelated to Ayesha Curry. As a result, she is quite possibly the world’s most controversial couscous-recipe-and-yoga-tip-tweeting demi-celebrity.

How did this sweet, unassuming cook and mom and woman of faith become so polarizing? To understand this, we have to jump back to a series of tweets she published in December 2015.

At first, Curry’s seemingly innocuous tweets led to a relatively sane internet conversation where both the intent of and message behind her tweets—or, rather, the presumed intent of and message behind her tweets—were unpacked and deconstructed. What exactly is there to unpack and deconstruct? Because there’s no there there, you might ask. Plenty, actually. There’s the rich and privileged housewife directing a stealth dig at women who’ve chosen a different lifestyle from hers. Which ultimately could be interpreted as a sweet and subtle slut-shame. There’s the implicit suggestion that dressing differently is a sign that a woman has chosen an alternative lifestyle, as if the only way to housewife is while ensconced in the Banana Republic spring collection. There’s the hint that since Curry chooses to bare more skin for her husband, her husband is the one whose feelings dictate how she chooses to dress. There’s the idea that Curry’s tweets were a bit of a straw man. Because who is this mysterious “everyone” she referred to? Other NBA wives? Women in line at H&M? Elle Varner?

Also, there’s a particular type of person who masks her ambition to be considered extraordinary by highlighting and reiterating her ordinariness. We see this quite frequently with national politicians campaigning on a platform of being a Washington outsider. Ayesha Curry seems to have embraced the anti-celebrity path to actual celebrity. It’s quite shrewd, actually, to place yourself above the fray by feigning disinterest in it. And it’s proven to be greatly effective for her. Pretending that this isn’t exactly what she’s doing is more than a little disingenuous.

Either way, the reaction to her tweets didn’t seem to have any legs. It looked as if it would stay confined to certain pockets of progressive and pedantic black people who happen to have the Twitter app downloaded on their phones, a demographic known as “Black Twitter.” The majority of Black Twitter seemed to wish nothing but the best for Ayesha Curry and wish merely that she were more aware of the messages her tweets conveyed.

But then another subsection of Black Twitter caught wind of this conversation: a less progressive, nuance-averse demographic comprising faux-Afrocentrics and misogynists (male and female) and often derisively referred to as “Hotep Twitter.” They scoffed at the notion that a woman (or man) would dare have anything negative to say about what the presumably virtuous Curry tweeted. And they proceeded to make her the most prominent proxy for their ongoing spiritual and existential battle against all things feminist. Ayesha became their Madonna, the fuckboy Virgin Mary. And all of the women who didn’t fit their ideals of how a woman should be were the whores.

Also, it cannot be overlooked that Curry—a relatively petite and light-skinned black woman with long hair—possesses certain aesthetic qualities that made her, in their minds, the perfect contrast to the type of black woman they assumed would be a feminist. According to Hotep Twitter, these women hated her because they were hating on her. They wanted to be her, to “get chose” the way she did, but they couldn’t, and so they railed against her.

Of course, this belief is patently wrong. The point of the initial conversation wasn’t to paint women like Curry—family-minded women who dress conservatively—in a negative light; it was to reinforce that dressing conservatively doesn’t make a woman inherently better (or worse) than women who choose not to. #AllWomenMatter, essentially. While Hotep Twitter interpreted it as exclusionary, it was actually inclusive.

(Also, conveniently left out of this conversation is Stephen Curry. While the dues-paying rank and file of Hotep Twitter seem to be preternaturally obsessed with insulting women who’ve chosen paths other than Ayesha’s, there’s not much of a rush among the male membership to be as virtuous as Steph seems to be. Because women must adhere to some arbitrary standards of perfection. And men, well—men will just be men.)

Anyway, as a result of Twitter World War 3,221, Ayesha Curry’s name began to get dropped whenever a famous young woman deemed sexually unscrupulous happened to be in the news. To them, she was the hummus-making rose emerging from the concrete thots.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon came on March 28. That day, I noticed that Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving was a trending topic on Twitter. This initially struck me as odd and somewhat unnerving. Odd because it was early afternoon, several hours before any NBA games would be played. And unnerving because, if an athlete’s name is trending while no games are being played, it’s usually because something bad has happened to them. An arrest or a drug-related suspension, perhaps. Considering Irving’s considerable injury history— which, in his short career, includes a broken right hand, a concussion, a fractured jaw, a nasal fracture, a broken toe, and a broken kneecap—I assumed he was diagnosed with degenerative shin gout or something. And this assumption was particularly unsettling for me because Irving is my favorite NBA player.

But that’s not why he was trending. He was trending because of an incident involving singer-songwriter Kehlani Parrish and musician Jahron Anthony Brathwaite, known as PartyNextDoor. After investigating, I learned that PartyNextDoor had recently shared a picture of himself and Kehlani in bed together. Which connected to Irving because Kehlani and Kyrie were assumed to be a couple. Which meant Kehlani was presumably cheating on Kyrie. Which resulted in a day’s worth of remarkably creative and cruel tweets and memes mined from Kyrie’s very public misfortune. (The story took a tragic turn the next day, as Kehlani apparently attempted suicide. It was also revealed by both Kehlani and Kyrie that no cheating had taken place. Although their relationship was public, they’d quietly broken up before any of this had happened.)

Now, if you’re reading this and you have no clue who any of these people are, you can be forgiven. Irving is an all-star with a signature shoe, but he doesn’t quite have the name recognition of LeBron James or even Russell Westbrook yet. Also, several digital and print publications actually pay me actual money to follow and deconstruct pop culture, and I still can’t name a Kehlani song without Wikipedia’s aid. And I’m not even sure what PartyNextDoor does or even looks like. Or why he calls himself PartyNextDoor when “my next-door neighbors are having a party tonight” is a sentence no one ever has been happy about saying.

Anyway, while this story remained a top trending topic for the rest of the day, something peculiar happened. Ayesha Curry also began to trend. Her name didn’t appear to be particularly newsworthy then, as nothing she had done recently would’ve warranted that type of attention. It was still a few days before news of her new Food Network show had begun to circulate. And while her “Little Lights of Mine” YouTube page had grown popular, she hadn’t released a new video in more than a month.

She began to trend, however, because of the Kyrie-Kehlani-PartyNextDoor love triangle. Because Kehlani’s acts proved she wasn’t an “Ayesha”—a woman worthy of protection, defense, praise, courting, dates, commitment, and unprotected sex. As Kehlani’s name got dragged through the Twitter mud, Ayesha’s name was invoked ad nauseam to shame her.

Which is both depressing and substantially unfair to each of these women, as well as to Amber Rose, Kim Kardashian, Ciara, and anyone else this has happened to. The process of being paired in an invidious comparison only dichotomizes their existences—making them vectors whose sole purpose is to be compared to and graded against another “type” of woman—instead of just allowing them to exist. It’s a unique and terribly problematic strain of contemporary celebrity, one in which status is determined by social-media–fueled juxtaposition. And it’s no accident that it’s usually women on the receiving end of these Goofus-and-Gallant discriminations. Even Michelle Obama’s name has been invoked by misogynists to draw comparisons between “good women” and “women only worthy of Netflix and chill.”

It’s been unfair perhaps most of all to Ayesha Curry. The news of her Food Network show and new book should be celebrated without having to risk starting another digital food fight.

But fuckboys will fuckboy, and they’ll continue to use Ayesha Curry as a proxy for their frustrations with women and an excuse to articulate them. Hopefully she’ll be able to somehow block this out and devise new recipes for her show. Because I actually tried her brown sugar bacon the other day, and it was amazing.

Even now, two weeks after I first watched Jordan Peele’s sublime and inspired Get Out, pieces of it still catch and surprise me when reflecting on it, like some sort of cinematic autostereogram. Or, perhaps, a bite-sized Snickers discovered in a couch crevice after all the Halloween candy is assumed to have been completely consumed. There’s the connection between the Armitage family’s grandfather’s athletic history and the groundkeeper’s unnerving midnight workouts, which dawned on me during a conversation three hours after seeing it. And the reason for Rose’s indignance when a police officer asks for Chris’ identification, which became clear to me after writing about Get Out the morning after I saw it. And even the latent and disturbing logic behind the Armitage family’s collective push for Chris to stop smoking, which came an hour before I began to write this.

This has been the most enjoyable and surprising part of consuming this movie—the process of decoding and detecting the layers of subtext and interconnected tissue woven into it and excitedly divulging these revelations with others who share an affinity for unearthing nuggets within it. Also, as the discussion and dissection of Get Out persists, it’s natural to discover and draw connections to other films it calls to, a list that includes The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Rosemary’s Baby, A Clockwork Orange, Avatar, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and even Jeepers Creepers. The movie I keep coming back to when contextualizing Get Out, however, is actually Gone Girl—David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s biting and controversial best-seller. The similarities are obvious. Both are satiric, unsettling, indicting, and darkly humorous meditations on American culture. Both exist in a hyperbolized universe that’s realistic enough to be plausible. (And legitimately scary.) And both revolve around missing people. But what compels me to make this juxtaposition is what separates them and how that separation is grounded in a very real and very depressing fact.

In Gone Girl, the presumed kidnapping of the young and blond and pretty Amy Dunne captivates and paralyzes the nation. Which is what tends to happen when that happens to young and blond and pretty white women. The movie’s central plot and even Dunne’s staging of the crime and framing of her husband depend on the reliability of this truth. In Get Out, the Armitage family and their dozens of co-conspirators are able to do what they do—and are able to continue to do it for what seems to be at least a decade—because, well, no one gives a damn about missing black people.

Of course, the movie takes this stark difference in how black and white people are valued and exaggerates it to comedic and horrific effect. But this type of parody isn’t possible without an excavation of legitimate and verifiable certainties. Not only does Get Out exist within a racially tinged context that specifically draws from the microaggressions committed against black people, it could not exist if the races were flipped. A movie where a black family kidnaps, controls, and auctions off dozens of white people—mostly white women seduced and lured by the black family’s handsome son—could perhaps exist as some sort of bizarro-universe thriller. But the truth at the center of Get Out that makes it so resonant and terrifying would not translate. It just wouldn’t be realistic enough. No one would believe that this could be possible, even in a pretend movie universe, because we know that the National Guard, the FBI, the CIA, the Navy Seals, Nancy Grace, the United States Postal Service, Bruce Wayne, Mike Pence, Walker Texas Ranger, and even the exhumed skeleton of Charles Bronson would immediately be at the doorstep of any black family who attempted to do to white women what the Armitages did to black men.

The actual facts on the disparities in regard and attention between missing white people and missing black people are predictably disheartening. Although black people only comprise 13 percent of America’s population, we’re 34 percent of America’s missing—a reality that exists as the result of a mélange of racial and socioeconomic factors rendering black lives demonstratively less valuable than the lives our white counterparts. “The Invisible Damsel: Differences in How National Media Outlets Framed the Coverage of Missing Black and White Women in the Mid-2000s,” a study from Baylor University’s Dr. Mia Moody-Ramirez, addresses the media’s role in allowing this inequity to persist, as the study begins by contrasting the difference in news coverage of 24-year-old Tamika Huston—a Spartanburg, South Carolina, woman who went missing in 2004—with the around-the-clock attention given to white women such as Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, and Natalee Holloway. This particular type of media disparity is so well-known and so ubiquitous that it even has a name: The late Gwen Ifill called it “missing white woman syndrome.”

None of this should be particularly new information, as even a cursory glance at what and who dictates news coverage reinforces the idea that the lack of value attached to black lives gives them a specific disposability. It is just disproportionately easier for us to be snatched, plundered, discarded, and ultimately forgotten about. The pervasiveness of this truth comes to mind when thinking about a conversation that occurs during Get Out’s climax. Chris asks a vital character why the Armitages choose to prey on black people. He replies, “I don’t know. Because …” And, as his voice trails off, you’re tempted to complete his sentence:

“Because ... we can.”

A version of this piece originally appeared on the blog Very Smart Brothas. It’s reprinted with the author’s permission.

It took roughly a month at Sterrett Classical Academy for me to be known as the best basketball player there, an admittedly considerable feat for a 10-year-old sixth-grader in a school with 14-year-old eighth-graders. It was a status I earned due to a combination of my reputation from playing with the Homewood YMCA and from my exploits during recess and gym class. Unfortunately, I submitted the mandatory physical and doctor’s waivers three days late. And Mr. Simons, Sterrett’s basketball coach, wasn’t going to allow me to try out for the team.

I went home and told my dad. He shook his head, said “OK,” and continued reading the Post-Gazette. The next day, he showed up to the school during lunch time, pulled me out of the cafeteria, and requested a meeting with Mr. Simons (who was also the seventh-grade social studies teacher). We met in the gym.

Calmly, my dad apologized for the lateness of the physical and requested that Simons allow me to try out. He appreciated the apology but said something about the rule being the rule and denied the request. My dad had another idea:

“How about this? You play my son one-on-one right now. If he beats you—and he will—he’s allowed to try out. If not, you’ll never hear from me again.”

Mr. Simons turned beet red and started to stammer.

“Sir, that’s not really necessary.”

My dad was steadfast.

“Oh, yes it is.”

Sensing that this was a no-win situation—and also likely intuiting that if my dad was this confident about my abilities, a bending of the rule would be worth it—he relented. By the end of the day, I was on the team. I didn’t even have to try out.

Several months later, while I was playing in a spring AAU tournament at Reizenstein Middle School, my dad noticed a team with preternaturally skilled and disciplined 11-year-olds running through a bevy of complex, college-level plays and zone presses. He learned that these kids were from St. Barts and that they played a diocese schedule during the season and an AAU schedule in the spring and summer that had them playing up to 100 meaningful games a year.

Later that week, he convinced my mom that they should a) take me out of Sterrett and enroll me in St. Barts the following school year and b) allow me to repeat sixth grade because I was young for my grade—since my birthday falls a day before New Year’s Eve, I was always the youngest person in every class I was in—and repeating the year would give me an advantage athletically and socially.

I have countless stories like this about my dad. The 200 shots a day we’d take on the courts behind Peabody High School the summer of ’89 to upgrade my shot from a slow-release, 10-year-old-appropriate set shot to a full jump shot released over my head and at the peak of my jump. The basketball magazines and almanacs he’d buy me when I professed an interest in devouring as much about the game and its history as I could. The mornings I’d watch him play in the Sunday Morning Warriors basketball league at the Y, where I’d sneak on the court at halftime to shoot foul shots.

Even today, his Facebook page is home to dozens of snapshots of those moments. Usually me receiving some award from some camp or league or game, and him behind the lens, making sure my trophy was facing the camera.

And, of course, sometimes it would just be us.

It is difficult not to see some of my dad in LaVar Ball, the polarizing father of basketball phenoms Lonzo Ball (a projected top-three NBA draft pick), LiAngelo Ball (a high school senior committed to play at UCLA), and LaMelo Ball (a 10^th-grader who might already be the most popular athlete in high school sports). And not just my dad, but the countless other black basketball dads found on bleachers at AAU tournaments and modeling perfect triple-threat stances on concrete blacktops in the hood. Shepherding their sons (and sometimes daughters) from court to court and neighborhood to neighborhood. And, if they’re good enough, from city to city, state to state, and school to school. Simultaneously serving as their kids’ drill masters, coaches, instructors, one-on-one opponents, hype men, financiers, advisers, protectors, bouncers, dietitians, jitneys, critics, vision boards, sponsors, and parents. Willing to challenge each and every entity, real or imagined, standing between them and their ultimate goal. Which could be a college scholarship. Or an NBA contract. Sometimes, they’re the only other black faces in the gym (or the league) besides their kids on the court, their presence ensuring that “these white people” don’t try any mess with their boys.

I know that if you sat Lonzo, LiAngelo, and LaMelo down, they’d each have stories about their dad that would mirror mine. And if you glanced through their social media accounts and family photo albums, they’d each have just as many pictures and videos either taken by their dad or with them posing next to him. And I have no doubt they treasure those pics and those memories and those moments as much as I do.

This context both constructs and complicates my feelings about LaVar Ball. Like my dad and the countless other black basketball dads out there, he wants what’s best for his sons. This is undeniable. My dad’s goal was for me to receive a college basketball scholarship. And I did. Mission accomplished. LaVar Ball’s sons are each better basketball players than I was, and his athletic goals for them are understandably and appropriately greater.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit to the strain of schadenfreude I experience when a black person challenges and perhaps even upsets the status quo the way LaVar Ball currently is attempting to do. I’m compelled to root for him even if I don’t agree with his methods (I don’t) or even like him very much (I also don’t).

But, those years in those gyms and those courts and on those teams and in those leagues also taught me how to recognize a blowhard and a bully. Which is exactly what LaVar Ball is. And my distaste and disdain for men like him equals the affinity I have for the black basketball dad. I knew men like him, and they are the worst coaches to play for and the worst parents to sit in the stands with, and they very often produce the worst kids to play with and root for. You do not want to be a kid on the same team as the kid with that type of dad. Even if the team is good, he and his parent can be so insufferable and make the game so joyless that you’d rather quit it than win with it.

I look at his attempts to promote his family’s brand with similar ambivalence. He’s not actually wrong to attempt to get in front of the major shoe companies and pursue a lucrative partnership instead of a run-of-the-mill shoe contract. But his Big Baller Brand is GeoCities-level terrible; the only thing worse than the name is the logo, which looks like an actual belt buckle sold at Buckle. Also, while Lonzo is a phenom, he’s not the type of transcendent, LeBron-ish talent who could carry a brand by himself. He’s good but not that good.

Combined, this collection of conflicting feelings has left me not knowing how to feel about him. I appreciate what he’s done for his kids, and I get what he’s trying to do, but I don’t fuck with that dude at all. I want him to succeed, in theory, but I don’t want him to be him. And while it’s true that his diligence has helped each of his boys reach this level of prominence—and receive full athletic scholarships—his efforts and actions now are more than likely hurting them. Lonzo Ball has already been publicly rebuked by each of the major shoe companies, an act that, when considering the abject terribleness of the just-released Big Baller Brand shoes, might cost them tens of millions of dollars. And I’m certain De’Aaron Fox isn’t going to be the last guard to put a little extra effort into washing Lonzo on the court just because of his dad’s bombast.

A month or so ago, I asked my dad how he felt about LaVar Ball. Knowing that he shares my feelings for blowhards and bullies, his answer (“He needs to sit down and shut up”) was predictable. I then reminded him of parents like Earl Woods and Richard Williams, who each faced similar criticisms when they first become national figures but (obviously) were proven to be right. I also reminded him of that time he challenged Mr. Simons to play me.

“Yeah, but that was different.”

“How?”

“I challenged him to play you, not me.”

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In this week’s episode of Slate’s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis and Josh Levin are joined by the Root’s Damon Young to talk about Jalen Ramsey, Jarvis Landry, and trash talking in the NFL. They also discuss how a new set of rules will change college basketball. Finally, the Athletic’s Dana O’Neil joins to talk about what’s next for UMBC after its historic NCAA Tournament upset.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned on the show:

• Preorder Damon Young’s book, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker.
• Young played Division I basketball at Canisius College.
• In an interview with GQ, Jalen Ramsey gave his unfiltered opinions of NFL quarterbacks.
• In Slate, Nick Greene assessed Ramsey’s quarterback evaluations.
• Watch Jarvis Landry’s passionate speech to Cleveland Browns receivers on Hard Knocks.
• The NCAA made major college-basketball rule changes.
• These changes will hurt grassroots basketball.
• College-basketball players can now hire agents.
• Follow Dana O’Neil on Twitter.
• O’Neil wrote for the Athletic about life at UMBC after its historic NCAA Tournament upset.
• Before March, UMBC was known for its chess team.

Hang Up and Listen’s weekly K.J. Mauras:

Stefan’s K.J. Maura: The Baseball Hall of Fame has a serious case of plaque inflation.

Josh’s K.J. Maura: Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott used racial slurs, repeatedly praised Hitler, and has a college-baseball stadium named after her.

Damon’s K.J. Maura: “The Most Annoying People on the Internet Are Zion Williamson Highlight Truthers.”

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment, Stefan and Josh are joined by Damon Young to talk about what defines bad coaches.

Podcast production and edit by Patrick Fort. Our intern is Meredith Ellison.

You can email us at hangup@slate.com.