“The Hustle, with its meticulous and thorough reportage, appears at a time when many have pointed to the White House and declared the nation “beyond race.” Mindful of the lessons of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, Doug Merlino shatters post-race fantasies and bears witness to immigrant and African-American struggles, past and present, and weaves them into a captivating, unsentimental and sometimes tragic story of dreams realized, deferred and/or destroyed.”
The experiment was dreamed up by two fathers, one white, one black. What would happen, they wondered, if they mixed white players from an elite Seattle private school – famous for alums such as Microsoft's Bill Gates – and black kids from the inner city on a basketball team? Wouldn't exposure to privilege give the black kids a chance at better opportunities. Wouldn't it open the eyes of the white kids to a different side of life?
