ANALYZING THE HISTORY OF JALEN ROSE'S DUKE COMMENTS

The hooping and hollering over Jalen Rose’s comments about Black Duke students has subsided, but the underlying issues remain.  As I’m sure you know, during the documentary on Rose’s college basketball team, the Fab Five, Rose commented that he hated Duke for not recruiting players like him, and that the Blacks who did go there were “Uncle Toms.”  It turned out that Rose was referring to kids from two parent homes, rather than those who believed themselves to be inferior to Whites, when he used the term “Uncle Toms.”   

Clearly, the most obvious issue here is jealousy.  Yet even the most universal of all human emotions takes on a different hue when viewed through the peculiar lens of the African American experience.  The economic divide between the Haves and the Have Nots goes all the way back to slavery with the house slaves and field slaves.  The house slaves generally wore better clothes, ate better food and lived in better quarters than the field slaves.  They also identified more with Massa.  So much so, that when Denmark Vesey, a free man, planned his slave uprising in South Carolina in 1822, one of the rules of the conspiracy was that no house slaves be involved.  Regrettably, a house slave found out about the revolt and promptly told his master. 

As wannabe revolutionaries in the sixties, we came to glorify the field slave and demonize the house slave.  Yet, there were house slaves who ground glass and fed it to Massa, as well as field slaves who would sell out their own mothers for an extra piece of cornbread.  None-the-less, the stereotype persisted, and becoming a Have became equated with identifying with the oppressor. 

Education came to be regarded as a means of becoming a Have.  Because education was such an incredibly scarce resource, only the brightest (along with the middle class) were afforded an education.  So now we have an equation that reads: Smart equals Educated equals Uncle Tom.  This is the point at which the logic becomes excruciatingly convoluted, and self hatred begins to dominate the equation: Acting smart (being articulate, having a vocabulary, doing well in school) now equals trying to be White! Proponents of the acting smart equals trying to be White ideology must always stop themselves halfway through their own equations.  For, if being smart means being White, then obviously being Black must mean …

I have had more than my fair share of the Smart equals White mentality.  Growing up as one who naturally gravitated toward words, it was not unusual for me to face a hostile encounter simply because an innocent, but multisyllabic utterance had carelessly escaped my lips.  I have been accused of thinking I was White or, even more telling, thinking that I was better than somebody because of my vocabulary more times than I care to remember.  Once again we see the self hatred equations mounting as white equals better than!

Of course there is a flip side to the smart equals White syndrome.     There is also the ongoing notion of denying selfhood (or identity or race) to appease Caucasians.  To be a race traitor is to deny one’s own cultural heritage.   When I was a kid, I think the most obvious example of black folks’ assimilation efforts could be found on those rare occasions when African American performers appeared on television.  Invariably, they would bleach the soul and feelings out of their songs to make them palatable to White audiences.  Even though African Americans felt betrayed by this treatment of our music, we were so elated at the very presence of people of color on television that we dared not express our disappointment.  (If we really wanted to trace the origins of our speech as assimilation, we would probably have to go back to Kunta Kinte being whipped until he repeated his name as “Toby.”)

The ongoing issue-one of the many legacies of slavery- remains a conundrum wrapped in an enigma:  how does a people maintain any sense of identity (existential autonomy?) within a context in which survival/success is predicated upon the denial of self?  Ironically, this tension does not exist for the descendants of the extreme house and field slaves.  For someone like Clarence Thomas, the assimilation is complete and there is no identity to protect.  Conversely, for many members of the now permanent underclass, no compromise is needed because they were defeated before the game even began.

For many members of my generation (like me,) the only response to the “assimilate or perish “ quandary was to become bilingual.  We had our slang and our own lexicon, which was part of our own private culture.  We also changed our speech patterns drastically, when we sent for job interviews.   Long before Don Corleone said it, we, “never let anyone outside of the family know what we were thinking.”

So, where does all of this leave us now?

We must continue to redefine ourselves as pursuers of excellence.  Our community has to nurture and honor our young scholars as much as it does our athletes.    Ultimately we are going to have to find ways to close the divide between the African American Haves and Have Nots.   But we must ultimately recognize that this divide may be more psychological than financial.

These are just a few of my thoughts.  What are yours?