Like the Venetian aristocrats in The Merchant of Venice, the National Basketball Association is remaining quiet on the issue of slavery.
Venice was the pre-eminent European city during Shakespeare’s time, its industry producing ironworks, cannon, and glassware at a time when even window glass was a relative novelty in England. And Venice was a maritime power that controlled trade across the Mediterranean, the only Christian power that traded with the Muslim world.
Shakespeare recognized the potential Venice had to serve as a model for England’s future as it extended the rise it began under Queen Elizabeth, and he looked carefully at Venice twice – in Merchant, and in Othello. One of the things he saw – that the Venetians themselves passed over in silence – was that Venice was both a slaveholding and a slave trading city state. In fact, the only person to comment on this disgraceful state of affairs was Shylock himself:
Shylock: “You have among you many a purchased slave,
Which—like your asses and your dogs and mules—
You use in abject and in slavish parts
Because you bought them…”
Meanwhile, China has expanded the labor camps it has built to housing Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, in the west of China. It’s a cotton-growing area, like the American South, and the region experienced a huge industrial expansion after the labor camps were constructed. More than 570,000 laborers are now picking cotton in Xinjiang. It’s essentially slave labor, and a massive human rights violation. The NBA has declined to comment.
Shylock: “…Shall I say to you,
‘Let them be free! Marry them to your heirs!
Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds
Be made as soft as yours and let their palates
Be seasoned with such viands’? You will answer,
‘The slaves are ours.'”
Well, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, had better not say such a thing. He was harshly criticized by the league in 2019 for supported human rights activists in Hong Kong. Meanwhile LeBron James and other prominent Black players, themselves the descendants of slaves who were forced to pick cotton at the point of a whip, have, like Portia, Antonio, and the other merchants in The Merchant of Venice, continued to turn a blind eye and collect their profits.
I write this blog in the hope that the classics, and Shakespeare chief among them, can keep us connected to the highest and best in Western culture. Modern life reveals richer meanings when it’s refracted through a Shakespearean prism.
