Kevin Durant on race: ‘If I wasn’t a basketball player, what kind of man would they look at me as?’

Kevin Durant says he lived in sort of a basketball bubble much of his life, not really experiencing what other African American people were going through in their day-to-day lives.The Golden State Warriors star told the San Jose Mercury News that everything changed after he moved to the Bay Area last year.

“So much ... goes on that I see now that I didn’t see before,” he said.

According to the article, Durant has done a lot of soul-searching in the last 18 months or so. He attributes his change in attitude to “finally waking up, to be honest. Just kind of seeing how rough it is for an average black man.”

“A black man makes one mistake … I see how far we get pushed down,” the 2017 NBA Finals MVP said. “For me, I kind of grew up in this basketball world, whereas my talent kind of overrides what I look like.

“I didn’t have it as rough when it comes to that, as far as social or systematic oppression or any social issues. They didn’t really apply to me because I could put a ball in a basket. Just me saying that kind of woke me up a little bit, like ‘Damn, that’s all I’m good for?’ Like, if I wasn’t a basketball player, what kind of man would they look at me as, you know what I’m saying?”

Not so coincidentally, Durant’s awakening came around the same time another high-profile figure in the Bay Area — then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick — started a national movement by refusing to stand during the national anthem as a protest against social injustice.

“It definitely put me in a different place because we just started talking about stuff that’s always been going on,” Durant said of Kaepernick’s protest. “You tend to just focus on what you know, or focus on what you do every day, and sometimes you can be so far removed from where you grew up or from home that you don’t realize what’s going on back there.

“That’s not because you’re not woke, or you’re not involved. You want to set that aside because you see a better life and you want to focus on that, but you also have to realize that you left home for a reason. So you kind of bring something back so you can help elevate where you come from.”

Durant added of Kaepernick: “He brought something out of people that they’d been hiding for a long, long time that needed to be revealed. I’d rather you tell me that you don’t like me because of my skin than hide that. … So he kind of touched a nerve and the outrage from it made me a fan of him just because he decided to take all that on, but also tell a message of, ‘Yo man. Just treat us fair, treat us equal, we’re people too. We’re not less than you because we don’t look like you.’’’

charles.schilken@latimes.com

Twitter: @chewkiii