When race isn't an issue

I'm talking about Barack Obama.

I'm talking about the Lakers and the Celtics and the resumption of their bitter feud.

I'm talking about how the battle for the White House and the battle for the NBA title combine to show our progress when it comes to the thorny issue of race.

All week long there has been much focus on the 1980s, when L.A. and Boston fought on a trio of occasions for the title, the final time in 1987.

Those dust-ups were famously hard fought and tense. Most of the tension sprang from the bitter on-court history shared by the league's most prominent two teams.

But a good chunk of the tension, we must admit, reflected that era's hardened racial divisions and ham-fisted stereotypes.

Remember when the Celtics were regarded as the "white" team? When, despite having a black coach and several prominent black players, in the national narrative the Celtics were a scrappy band of slow-footed white guys taking on all comers in a sport that had become overwhelmingly African American, the basketball equivalent of boxing's great white hope?

Leading the band was the great Larry Bird, as iconic for his play as for what he symbolized: a self-described "hick" who resembled a cardboard cutout of a disgruntled line-worker threatened by downsizing at an Indiana GM plant.

It was convenient that Bird played during a time when the first real waves of blue-collar downsizing were rippling across the nation's rust belt.

It was convenient too that Bird and his team played for the city of Boston, a place with a tortured history of bigotry. As Celtics great Bill Russell had put it when speaking of his playing days: Boston "was a flea market of racism. It had all varieties, old and new, and in their most virulent form."

And it was perfect for this plot that the Celtics' foil would be the fastbreak, pedal-to-metal Lakers squads led by James Worthy, Byron Scott, Kareem and Magic.

"The Lakers were Showtime," remembered Bil Banks, a retired, University of California African American Studies professor, when we spoke recently. "Showtime? That was the very embodiment of the black style."

And so it came to be that, throughout those years, large sections of the nation divvied up their racial and cultural allegiances by which team they rooted for, which star, Magic or Bird, they admired most.