NBA veteran and basketball analyst Jalen Rose committed one of our biggest sports no-nos during his March 13 documentary “The Fab Five.” No, he didn’t commit a flagrant two, a three-in-the-key violation or take five steps without dribbling; rather, he dared to bring up the inherent racial issues in sports by calling out one of college basketball’s most prestigious schools on their recruitment trends.
Bad Jalen Rose; how dare you bring up race in sports?
In the documentary, Rose expressed how he felt as a 17-year-old inner-city black male, who, even though he was an honor roll student, never was recruited to go to Duke: “I hated everything I felt Duke stood for,” he said. “Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms,” He continued on about recruited players like Grant Hill — upper-class black males with both parents and private school educations.
Since then, Mr. Rose has been a punching bag on weekly columns, chat forums, Facebook statuses and everywhere else wandering web browsers go to rant and ramble.
People were up in arms for his unrestricted use of Uncle Tom, taking it as though he was calling middle-class black men sell-outs (which of course, wouldn’t make any sense given that he is now a multi-millionaire). Rose was very clear in his documentary that this was him speaking as a boy, and he also admitted his anger came out of the jealously of not having a father; but of course, the context and the explanation meant nothing because they had enough fuel to set Rose on fire.
On March 16, Grant Hill wrote a blog for The New York Times responding to Jalen Rose’s comments, attacking his language choice, the implications the term Uncle Tom has on the black community, and calling his raising of such issues “pathetic.”
But while everyone is using this as their opportunity to jump on the soapbox and attack Rose for his expression of his old feelings, rarely did anyone use it as an opportunity to talk about the real issues: the lack of fathers within the African-American community leading to inner community hatred and jealously, the “good negro” tradition being carried on in sports, and the fact that Duke truly does have a history of only recruiting middle-class people who went to private schools.
The issues that really mattered — the issues that needed to be discussed — were drowned out by the media’s displacement of Rose’s quote. They didn’t care to bring up things that affected the impoverished black Americans, and they didn’t care to shed light on Duke’s recruitment process. They certainly didn’t care to understand why Jalen felt that way at that age.
They’d rather talk about one word than the mass of problems Jalen wished to address. If the media has an opportunity to condense black lives and issues to one word or one phrase, you can bet they will (Martin Luther King becomes “I have a dream” or Muhammad Ali: “Float like a butterfly sting like a bee”).
By doing this to Rose, amid all of the great things he spoke of during that documentary, they effectively disengaged the nation from attacking the issues at hand and drove it into a mindless drivel of Uncle Tom rants.
It’s funny how the world of sports, one that is so blatantly dominated by athletes of color, does everything it can to dodge the treatment and conditions of African-American athletes and communities.
It’s that unspoken sin: Don’t alienate the majority of the white sports audience by speaking of black issues. They don’t want to hear them unless they can attack a black person for making a questionable or unpopular argument.
People always talk about how important and beneficial sports are to society.
But if a majority of our professional athletes are of color, and we cannot use those sports as a springboard to promote cultural issues and the betterment of society, then they are as worthless as a grain of salt.
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