Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racial discrimination.

In his memoir, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reveals how he drew on myriad influences to understand his racial identity and embrace his individuality. As he grew into his own unique identity, he developed a sense of pride in his heritage, converted to Islam, and adopted a Muslim name.

Through his personal story, Abdul-Jabbar illuminates the challenges of navigating racial identity as well as his journey toward proudly embracing his identity as a Black American. Growing up in a diverse neighborhood in New York, he was exposed to the richness of his heritage as well as to the harsh realities of racial discrimination. As a young boy, his former best friend (who was white) turned on him and publicly mocked Abdul-Jabbar’s race, which scarred Abdul-Jabbar and made him mistrustful of white people. As a high schooler, Abdul-Jabbar was very invested in the civil rights movement, but he saw that his white classmates and teachers were openly hostile to the movement or nonchalant about it at best. These experiences frustrated him and planted the seeds for his activism, since he wanted to do his part to change these racist attitudes.

Participating in the Youth Action Project at the Harlem YMCA was a turning point in Abdul-Jabbar’s life. For the first time, he was able to connect openly with Black mentors about Black history and culture. As he learned about the history of Black intellectualism, literature, and art, he felt immensely proud of his identity as a Black American and committed himself to Black activism. At university, he expressed his identity through his clothes and hairstyle: He grew a short Afro and wore a dashiki, a traditional West African tunic. This was his way of participating in “the black pride movement” which celebrated “black people taking pride in their natural looks, African heritage, and fellowship with other black cultures” (179).

One of the most important steps Abdul-Jabbar took to assert his individuality was through embracing the faith of Islam. When he was growing up as a boy named Lew Alcindor, Abdul-Jabbar felt pressured to conform to the Catholic religion that his parents and teachers impressed upon him. However, he questioned the Catholic Church’s ability to instruct its followers, since he knew many Catholics who did not live out the values the Church formally taught at his schools and church. He recalls being bullied by racist Catholic white kids and, as a result, questioning the Church’s teachings. He thinks, “What was the point in attending church if you weren’t going to follow the teachings? […] There seemed to be something broken in the church if this is how its followers behaved” (34). He connects this observation to his own family history, noting that “the slave owner named Alcindor who owned [his] ancestors was Christian” (261). Christianity as a religion began to seem hollow to him since he associated it with racism and enslavement; he was dissatisfied with the Church’s history because the church had not used “its might and influence to stop slavery” (261). He acknowledges that many individual Christians did live out Christian values of kindness and generosity, but he felt that he could not support the Church as a “cultural institution” (261).

Rejecting Catholicism and embracing Islam was one of the biggest decisions of Abdul-Jabbar’s life, and one of the strongest reflections of his inner desire to distinguish himself from some of his childhood influences and create his own identity. His choice of faith was rooted in his interest in Islamic theology, as well as in his intention of embracing his African roots since “between 15 and 30 percent of African slaves had been Muslim” (214). He explains that this is why Islam “felt more comfortable and authentic than Christianity, a religion that had historically devalued [his] ancestors” (214). In embracing his new faith, Abdul-Jabbar also took on a new name, which is a powerful symbol of how he chose to reinvent himself and follow a new faith as a part of his unique path in life. He explains that he legally and publicly changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar so that he could proudly “stand on [his] own and say, ‘I named myself. This is the man I choose to be, not the man the world expects me to be’” (286). In this way, his religion and his new name express his pride in his racial identity and his individuality.