I’m one of the few who doesn’t fill out a bracket at this time of the year nor pay much attention to the quest for the Final Four. But this year, college basketball is responsible for a very encouraging argument about “blackness”.
You can read the story at the links below; I hope you will at least take the time to read Grant Hill’s response to Jalen Rose – the link is at the bottom of this post. I wrote a summary of the story below, as usual, if you want to skip the articles here.
Let me warn some of you – you know who you are – that reading these articles will make you angry. Reading the Hill letter will give you hope.
Some of us just do not like swaggering, baggy pants, anti-education, anti-employment, tattooed, hedonistic, womanizing, gun toting, sometimes violent, talent-wasting, wealthy punks who encourage this unconstructive behavior in other young men while denying any responsibility to act otherwise. [Hey, who’re you calling judgmental?]
I see the story as positive because of Hill’s eloquent letter and heroic athletic career but also because of the very public position taken by Rose in his documentary and the usual supporters that have popped up for Rose.
I think we can not only see through this spit today but we are ready as a community to reject the excuses and demand better.
· Is there anybody that’s going to see Grant Hill or Barack Obama as flawed human beings, flawed citizens or poor representatives of their race?
· Black underclass attitudes and comportment are not a culture, they’re a pathology. Progressive support of this pathology is racist, cynical, self serving, destructive and disgusting.
· The director of Duke's Center for Black Culture claims that somebody – me, I guess – denigrates children from single-parent homes and damages the self-esteem of black boys. Is this helpful to wrong-headed black boys? Is this scholarship? As the only child of a single mom, I can tell you it doesn’t make any sense.
· If you read the story, you’ll find that Rose thinks it’s unfair that a kid who’s a great player can’t get into Duke because he reads at a fifth grade level and earned a GPA of minus 12 in high school. Kids who are great at both sports and academics are acting white and should make room for a few kids like Rose.
Progressives agree with that – they think great institutions should be brought down to the common level not the other way around.
· What exactly have Duke players done that the Fab Five didn’t do? The Fab Five all got rich playing professional ball. They are successful. I’m betting that none of them live in the ghetto today. I’m further betting that when they attend to their businesses they speak enough English to be understood – of course they have businesses, they have money. What’s left? Are the Duke blacks Uncle Toms because they’re not obnoxious?
At some point American white racists just stopped making any sense to anyone. Reverend King turned on a light. A few more incidents like this and we’ll dump the progressive nonsense about poverty in the same way.
The Story
The story involves Duke University where men’s basketball is a major and successful sport played by the crème de la crème. See, Duke athletes have to meet University Scholastic standards – no truly meet them. Even if you are the greatest athlete on the planet, you still have to have the grades to get into Duke, you have to pursue an education while there, neither you nor your parents will get a new car for enrolling and you will have to meet Duke’s standards of conduct while playing. No exceptions.
The other half of the drama involves the famous “Fab Five” who as Michigan freshmen rode their talent to the 1992 and 1993 championship games. In those years, Michigan – the Fab Five – was the hottest, most-talked-about, most hotly debated college team. With their baggy shorts, swagger and irreverence, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Chris Webber, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson were the balling troubadours of Generation X. The men went on to careers in the NBA and Jalen Rose, now a sports reporter and color commentator for ESPN, has produced a documentary about the Fab Five.
It’s the documentary that has produced the valuable argument. Two of the now adult Fab Five call black Duke players Uncle Toms in the documentary. Duke is labeled elitist and denigrated for discriminating against authentic black players in favor of Uncle Toms. For reasons I do not understand, they singled out Grant Hill for criticism by name. Hill played for Duke in the 1992 championship game against Michigan in which Michigan was crushed. Weber calls Hill a bitch. But Hill is the epitome of athletic heroism and American can-do, never-quitism. Perhaps that is his sin – you can read about him in the links.
Rose has turned to politics in his retirement from the NBA and is now an activist and writes for the Huffington Post. Perhaps he’s undergone the lobotomy required to join the progressive movement, who knows? In any case, it would seem that he chose the wrong guy to pick on as you can see here in Hill’s response in the New York Times. This open letter has gone email-viral.
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