“The Fabulous and The Fabricated”
March 19, 2011
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to view “The Fab Five” documentary on ESPN. I thought it was a well done work, and brought back many memories of watching a group of young athletes who were genuinely fun to watch. The improbability of a group of five freshman playing so well that they would advance to the championship game of the NCAA tournament was lost on many when it happened, and remained lost after the airing of the documentary. The talent of those players was further highlighted by the fact that the team again made it to the championship game the very next year as sophomores. The reason this remarkable achievement will forever go without achieving its due respect is two-fold: they lost both championship games and the comments of a precocious, garrulous and angry 18 year-old freshman named Jalen Rose had been brought to light 20 years after the fact and overshadow everything mentioned in the documentary.
What Rose said was that, as a 18 year-old youth, “For me, Duke was personal. I hated Duke. And I hated everything I felt Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.” Subsequent to this statement, Rose reiterated that this was his feeling 20 years ago. He further stated that He no longer feels this way. He still thinks Duke recruits players who fit a certain profile, but that is to be expected and he understands why they do so…that most colleges follow the same recruiting technique. “Well, certain schools recruit a typical kind of player whether the world admits it or not. And Duke is one of those schools,” he said. “They recruit black players from polished families, accomplished families. And that’s fine. That’s okay. But when you’re an inner-city kid playing in a public school league, you know that certain schools aren’t going to recruit you. That’s one. And I’m okay with it. That’s how I felt as an 18-year-old kid.” I knew that there would be a multitude who would only see the “Uncle Tom” comment and vilify Rose without any acknowledgment that the comments were those of a brash and at times unthinking 18 year-old, not those of a 38 year-old adult. One person I thought had a good grasp on the facts was Miami Herald columnist Armando Salguero. Salguero’s op-ed piece posted in the March 18, 2011 edition of the Miami Herald cogently discerned that the comments by Rose were the unfortunate and misguided statements of a young man who might not have been motivated entirely by race, but by class. While Salguero’s discernment of the youthful Rose’s misplaced anger proved artful, his recognition of the possible cause seemed to disintegrate to me because he latched onto a belief held by many outside of the African-American community trying to peer in with lenses tinted with self-righteousness. Salguero states:
“I know what you’re thinking: You’re not black. You don’t know. And that’s true, I cannot identify completely with the black race. But I completely embrace the human race, and its history is replete with black success and education and wealth.
Unfortunately that’s not the message that rings loudest in the black community today. There seems to be a segment of American black culture that measures its blackness based on how much street credibility it has. And that credibility apparently is gained by how hard a man’s circumstances were growing up.
The harder, more blighted and more violent the neighborhood, the more credibility it offers. The more distant the father, the more credibility goes to the son. The more jobs mom had to work to make ends meet, the more credibility the latchkey kid gets.
This stinkin’ thinkin’ embraces unfortunate circumstances and uses them as some misguided measure of social supremacy — with the man who survived the most crap being the winner.
And, in turning a situation that already is askew completely upside down, the logic further dictates that black men from more educated, middle class and complete homes must obviously be less black.
The sad thing about this approach is it celebrates poverty and hardship and frowns upon prosperity and blessing.“
I believe Salguero was on point in his observation that Jalen Rose’s negative comments about Duke and the Black players in the Duke program were essentially borne out of a resentment based mainly on class differences and less on racial stratification. Where we digress in convergence of thought is where Salguero opines that “there seems to be a segment of American Black culture that measures its Blackness based on how much street credibility it has.” Without actually saying it, this comment alludes that the segment of “American Black culture that measures its Blackness based on how much street credibility it has” is somehow a majority segment of the Black population. I have seen firsthand that this is not the case. The majority of the “Black culture” may laud the transition from pejorative circumstances to superlative life situations, but the portion that will erroneously assert that the “real Black people” come from meager conditions and elevated themselves by “rough and tumble” means is not as large as many will think. The notion of “street credibility” didn’t really exist until recording industry executives changed the nature of hip-hop music by extolling the ‘virtues’ of ‘Gangsta Rap’. The imagery of Black middle class life subsequently dissolved from mainstream media, replaced by a romanticized ‘gangster’s rags-to-riches’ theme that excluded hard work and education as its base principles. Within the larger Black community those All-American values continued to be espoused despite the increasingly shrinking opportunities availed to pursue them.
©2010 Ronald B. Cason, all rights reserved.
