#‘Emotional’ Nets talks sparked Joe Tsai’s $50M social justice fund

Despite the economic havoc brought on by the coronavirus, Nets owner Joe Tsai and his wife Clara have committed millions to social justice. Why? After talks with his players — intense, raw, emotional talks — he couldn’t not do it.

“The background is the Brooklyn Nets and the NBA. Since the killing of George Floyd, the country’s been thrown into kind of a turmoil. The teams and the team owners and players in the NBA have felt this very strongly,” Tsai said in a Zoom with students at Tsai CITY (Tsai Center for Innovational Thinking at Yale).

“The fact is [in] the NBA, we have a league where our elite players, our stars, 70 to 80 percent are black, and this is very, very personal to our players. And by extension, as we have our conversations with our players, I start to realize the issue of racial injustice is a deep-rooted problem with 400-plus years of history. Now, you can’t solve [it] overnight; but you have to face it directly. You have to face it now. You have to have that conversation. You can’t skirt it.”

So that’s what Tsai has done.

He and wife have vowed a $50 million Social Justice Fund for Brooklyn. The move was announced in August, but it was born out of some very emotional discussions with his Nets players over the past few months.

While Tsai wasn’t specific about exactly which Nets he spoke with, it’s clear that among the topics that hit home were racial profiling when it comes to policing.

With unarmed blacks three times likelier to be killed by police than whites, that reality hits home for Nets players. And they brought it home for Tsai, who called diversity the foundation of excellence, as important as the First Amendment.

“When I see a policeman on the streets, I don’t run away; there’s no fear. But as I have conversations with our players and also some friends — people that we know who are black — they start to pour out. … It’s a very, very emotional conversation,” said Tsai, emotional at times during the chat uploaded Friday.

“We’ve been in a lot of these emotional conversations about the kind of life that they lead that’s just different because certain people see other people by the color of their skin and not by what they do and what they accomplish.

“That’s why my wife and I started an initiative to say: We’re not only going to put money resources behind a social justice program but also look inward and look at our own organization. Are we diverse enough? Are we doing everything we can to promote the social justice cause, especially the issue facing the black community.”

Tsai also spoke about how becoming the Nets owner prompted him to join Twitter to communicate with fans, and how watching Yale lacrosse — for whom he played — win the 2018 NCAA title spurred him to take over the team in the first place. The Alibaba co-founder had bought a minority stake, but accelerated his takeover.

“The watershed moment was in 2018 when Yale lacrosse won the national championship. I went to the game and it was one of those moments where I thought to myself that a goal that nobody thought would be obtainable was actually achieved maybe a couple of years ahead of time,” said Tsai.

“So for me, I started to think how I want to structure my life, how to sort of re-plan my career or re-plan my life. I’d already gotten to a stage of relative success and comfort, and decided it was time for me to slow down a little bit at my work, my full-time job and start focusing on my family, start focusing on my passion which is I wanted to get into sports a little more. After that I bought the Brooklyn Nets.”