Parents' Guide to Stand

This captivating biography should be a lesson of tolerance and redemption for everyone. In Stand, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf's life and career are conveyed with compassion, grit, and integrity. As a child and young man he experienced great poverty, often having to hunt squirrels and birds for food. But he did find love for basketball. To complicate matters, he was also diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome, but says that his condition is a big part of what made him such a great player. Abdul-Rauf went on to become a high school basketball sensation and a star player at LSU. By his second year at LSU, Shaquille O'Neal joined him and got a first-hand glimpse of Abdul-Rauf's abilities as a point guard, shooter, and playmaker. Abdul-Rauf was "Steph Curry before Steph Curry" and once made 283 free throws in a row. Other NBA stars past and present, like Steph Curry himself, Jalen Rose, and Steve Kerr, continue to praise Abdul-Rauf and lament how his career was unfairly cut short.

Abdul-Rauf's NBA career ended after he decided to no longer stand for the national anthem. Even though he was only silently protesting the historically violent, racist, and often-at-war nation of the United States, Americans, fans, and the public lashed out (similar to what happened to Colin Kaepernick) and demanded that Abdul-Rauf no longer play in the NBA. The film points out that we often forget about the never sung 3rd verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and how it's explicitly racist and wishes ill and death on all "slaves." Further, Abdul-Rauf's house was burned down by the KKK, thousands of hateful letters and racist and Islamophobic abuse went his way, often threatening his life. Within a short period, no NBA team wanted to sign him (even though when the Denver Nuggets traded him, he was their top scorer). And despite Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Malcom X similarly converting to Islam before him, Abdul-Rauf faced great misunderstanding and was unfairly treated. But his legacy remains today as a lesson of how ignorant and small-minded people can be, and how now, with the help of social media and the power of the internet, many Americans see the error of their ways and continue to come up to him to apologize for their past behavior, beliefs, and intolerance.