People are free to buy a Patagonia jacket and sew their company logo to it. Patagonia, on the other hand, is free to protect their brand which - if the comments in this thread are any indication - is a big part of their competitive advantage.
Ok, I'll bite. Have you looked at who actually owns NBA teams? It's mostly a bunch of white dudes[1]. So discriminating against the NBA as an organization would be discriminating against a bunch of white guys. Nobody is boycotting the individual employees here.
https://careers.nba.com/employees/ this list might be cherry-picked, but this looks like a pretty (at least racially/phenotypically) diverse list of people. I assume you are actually thinking about NBA teams, but I wanted to bring this up to make the point that the NBA organization is not necessarily controlled by by a group of people representative of the players that you would rightly associate with it.
> Discriminating against the NBA is going end up being pretty racially focused.
To address your example, let's pretend that the NBA announces they no longer recycle. Then my business that sells cardboard boxes to the NBA announces in response that we will no longer sell boxes to the NBA. If you think that has anything to do with racism - I'm open to hearing it.
I think a trouble is that, in this day and age it seems that the outcome is what determines racism, sexism, ageism, etc. We're obsessed with the statistics.
If someone examined your company and found that you now only sold boxes to sports teams that are predominantly white - that would look quite racist would it not? I don't think the details or your intentions would matter much.
I don't think anyone would think that, because my policy is only to sell to teams that recycle. The details and intentions do matter. At a stretch, I can imagine a scenario where recycling companies were for some reason not giving people of color fair access, and that as a result they were being hurt down the chain by my business not supporting them now. Those are the kinds of systems we need to work to identify and change and they do exist.
