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HEAT’s Deng Explains Overcoming Early Racisim
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All posts by Basketball InsidersUpdated4 hours ago on April 28, 2024
On good days, the worst hurled at Luol Deng in grade school were the racist slurs a Sudanese refugee child was far too young to comprehend yet never quite able to forget.
Samara, meaning black.
Hunga bunga, mockery for ape.
Shakshuka, epithet from a cheap north African meal.
On bad days, those classroom slurs escalated to slinging fists in the schoolyard.
“It was just constant,” Deng, a Miami HEAT forward, says 25 years later. “I had this one teacher, and as I got older and translated things he used to say, it was racist and hatred stuff he was saying toward me and my brother. A lot of times, we fought because of that stuff.”
Yet this was the better life.
