Parenting & Family Quote by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s line lands like a quiet indictment, not a slogan. He doesn’t lead with triumph or resilience; he starts with disbelief, the social reflex that turns any praise of Black people into something suspect. That choice matters. It frames racism less as open hostility and more as a default setting in everyday life: the way teachers, neighbors, media, and institutions silently train a kid to expect that “positive” is automatically “untrue” when attached to Blackness.

The phrase “when I was a kid” does double work. It’s intimate and disarming, but it also timestamps the mid-century America that shaped him - segregated schools, sanitized textbooks, TV and film that rarely offered Black humanity without caricature. Abdul-Jabbar is naming the atmosphere, not just incidents. The subtext is that racism isn’t only what’s said out loud; it’s the routine refusal to imagine Black competence, tenderness, intellect, or complexity as credible.

Calling it “a terrible burden” shifts the focus from the perpetrator’s ugliness to the target’s weight. He’s not describing hurt feelings; he’s describing cognitive and emotional labor: having to prove the most basic truths about your own people, having to carry an internal debate society forces on you. Coming from an athlete who became a public intellectual, it also reads as autobiography: fame can force admiration, but it doesn’t automatically dismantle the instinct to doubt. The line is simple on purpose - plain speech for a plain injustice that’s been made to feel normal.