Tweet
Rich Black Kids the New Uncle Toms?
Date: Thursday, April 07, 2011, 5:28 am
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com
The NCAA basketball final is over. The University of Connecticut men’s team won the championship. Butler University of Indianapolis is a bridesmaid for the second straight year.
And Virginia Commonwealth University messed up darn near everybody’s bracket sheet.
Virginia Commonwealth in the Final Four? Are you kidding me?
But that wasn’t the most controversial story that occurred during 2011’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. <span style="font-weight: bold">It took a Huffington Post blogger named Rob Kirkpatrick to provide the most controversial moment, with his piece called “The Racial Biases of Duke Hating.”</span>
The thrust of Kirkpatrick’s piece is that he likes Duke University basketball. Those who detest it do so unfairly, Kirkpatrick charges,<span style="font-weight: bold"> </span><span style="font-weight: bold">and some do it because they have an animus toward Duke’s white players.</span>
I get the feeling Kirkpatrick is more an aficionado of white-guy basketball more so than he’s a Duke fan, and I’m okay with that. I’m not one of those who believes basketball is a “black man’s sport,” as if every black male child in the country popped out of his mommy’s womb dribbling a rock.
Besides, America’s nearly all-black 2004 Olympic team got positively schooled in the finer points of the sport by white guys from places like Argentina and Lithuania, for heaven’s sake.
Lithuania? Are you kidding me?
Teams from Spain, Serbia and Argentina spanked America’s 2002 FIBA team – again, mostly black and comprised of NBA stars. Basketball a “black man’s game” indeed!
Kirkpatrick saved his most controversial comments for his criticism of Jalen Rose, who was one of the University of Michigan basketball team’s “Fab Five” during the 1991-1992 and 1992-1993 college hoops seasons.
In a documentary called “The Fab Five” that repeats periodically on ESPN, Rose had this to say about Duke University basketball: “Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I feel like they only recruited black players who were Uncle Toms.”
When I first heard this nonsense, my immediate gut reaction was, “Did I hear this Negro right?” But I watched the documentary several times, and it transpires I heard Rose exactly right. Later, he tried to justify this tortured logic by elaborating during an ESPN show. (Rose is a regular NBA commentator on ESPN; he was suspended from the network last week for failing to inform them of his March 11 DUI arrest in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.)
“As a 17-year-old recruit, that’s exactly how I felt,” Rose said. “I felt like I was an inner-city kid from the public school league that was waking up with kerosene heaters for heat in the house, boiling water to wash up, sleeping with hoodies and skullies, that at that time, I felt like I wasn’t good enough for certain stages ... I know they do recruit players from well-to-do, affluent families.”
So, single-handedly, Rose has refined and re-defined what an Uncle Tom is. It’s supposed to describe a black person who’s overly servile and obsequious toward whites. At least, that was the definition before black America’s Blacker Than Thou league tried to hijack the English language.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Rose is now part of this posse. For him, an Uncle Tom is anyone who comes from a black family that is well-to-do and affluent. For most of the BTT bunch, an Uncle Tom is anyone who comes up even a wee bit shy in the hatin’-white-folks department.</span>
Like most of his fellow BTT cohorts, Rose simply hasn’t done his reading. For the
umpteenth but probably not the last time, the character of Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” died resisting, not being subservient to, a white man. Black author John Oliver Killens pointed that out in his book “Black Man’s Burden.” Killens also advised those to misuse and overuse the term “Uncle Tom” of the proper literary analogy they should be using.
But don’t expect any of the BTT bunch to read Killens’ book to find that out. Reading’s not their strong suit.
Grant Hill, one of the so-called “Uncle Toms” Rose thought he was criticizing, sent a letter to the New York Times in which he attempted to school the former Fab Five member.
<span style="font-weight: bold">“In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only black players that were Uncle Toms, Jalen seems to change the meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families,” </span>Hill wrote.
That’s exactly what Rose has done. Uncle Tom no longer means what was once called a “white man’s Negro.” Today, it means whatever the person using it chooses it to mean.
Date: Thursday, April 07, 2011, 5:28 am
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com
The NCAA basketball final is over. The University of Connecticut men’s team won the championship. Butler University of Indianapolis is a bridesmaid for the second straight year.
And Virginia Commonwealth University messed up darn near everybody’s bracket sheet.
Virginia Commonwealth in the Final Four? Are you kidding me?
But that wasn’t the most controversial story that occurred during 2011’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. <span style="font-weight: bold">It took a Huffington Post blogger named Rob Kirkpatrick to provide the most controversial moment, with his piece called “The Racial Biases of Duke Hating.”</span>
The thrust of Kirkpatrick’s piece is that he likes Duke University basketball. Those who detest it do so unfairly, Kirkpatrick charges,<span style="font-weight: bold"> </span><span style="font-weight: bold">and some do it because they have an animus toward Duke’s white players.</span>
I get the feeling Kirkpatrick is more an aficionado of white-guy basketball more so than he’s a Duke fan, and I’m okay with that. I’m not one of those who believes basketball is a “black man’s sport,” as if every black male child in the country popped out of his mommy’s womb dribbling a rock.
Besides, America’s nearly all-black 2004 Olympic team got positively schooled in the finer points of the sport by white guys from places like Argentina and Lithuania, for heaven’s sake.
Lithuania? Are you kidding me?
Teams from Spain, Serbia and Argentina spanked America’s 2002 FIBA team – again, mostly black and comprised of NBA stars. Basketball a “black man’s game” indeed!
Kirkpatrick saved his most controversial comments for his criticism of Jalen Rose, who was one of the University of Michigan basketball team’s “Fab Five” during the 1991-1992 and 1992-1993 college hoops seasons.
In a documentary called “The Fab Five” that repeats periodically on ESPN, Rose had this to say about Duke University basketball: “Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I feel like they only recruited black players who were Uncle Toms.”
When I first heard this nonsense, my immediate gut reaction was, “Did I hear this Negro right?” But I watched the documentary several times, and it transpires I heard Rose exactly right. Later, he tried to justify this tortured logic by elaborating during an ESPN show. (Rose is a regular NBA commentator on ESPN; he was suspended from the network last week for failing to inform them of his March 11 DUI arrest in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.)
“As a 17-year-old recruit, that’s exactly how I felt,” Rose said. “I felt like I was an inner-city kid from the public school league that was waking up with kerosene heaters for heat in the house, boiling water to wash up, sleeping with hoodies and skullies, that at that time, I felt like I wasn’t good enough for certain stages ... I know they do recruit players from well-to-do, affluent families.”
So, single-handedly, Rose has refined and re-defined what an Uncle Tom is. It’s supposed to describe a black person who’s overly servile and obsequious toward whites. At least, that was the definition before black America’s Blacker Than Thou league tried to hijack the English language.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Rose is now part of this posse. For him, an Uncle Tom is anyone who comes from a black family that is well-to-do and affluent. For most of the BTT bunch, an Uncle Tom is anyone who comes up even a wee bit shy in the hatin’-white-folks department.</span>
Like most of his fellow BTT cohorts, Rose simply hasn’t done his reading. For the
umpteenth but probably not the last time, the character of Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” died resisting, not being subservient to, a white man. Black author John Oliver Killens pointed that out in his book “Black Man’s Burden.” Killens also advised those to misuse and overuse the term “Uncle Tom” of the proper literary analogy they should be using.
But don’t expect any of the BTT bunch to read Killens’ book to find that out. Reading’s not their strong suit.
Grant Hill, one of the so-called “Uncle Toms” Rose thought he was criticizing, sent a letter to the New York Times in which he attempted to school the former Fab Five member.
<span style="font-weight: bold">“In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only black players that were Uncle Toms, Jalen seems to change the meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families,” </span>Hill wrote.
That’s exactly what Rose has done. Uncle Tom no longer means what was once called a “white man’s Negro.” Today, it means whatever the person using it chooses it to mean.