Jalen Rose grew up poor in Detroit, the son of a single mom and an NBA player he never met. He helped transform college basketball culture as a member of Michigan’s iconic Fab Five team, then earned more than $100 million as a pro athlete.
Grant Hill came up wealthy in the D.C. suburbs, the child of an NFL running back married to a corporate consultant. He helped establish Duke University as a paragon of success and virtue in college basketball, then overcame terrible injuries to enjoy a long NBA career.
So which one is the “authentic” Black man?
The question may seem irrelevant. But when Rose said that he considered Black Duke players like Hill “Uncle Toms” when he was a teenager, he exposed a sensitive and longstanding issue for many African-Americans: If Blacks succeed in a White man’s world, and do not conform to certain assumptions of how Blacks should act, are they less Black?
Rose’s comment — aired last Tuesday in an ESPN documentary Rose produced on the five Black Michigan freshmen who rode their wave of talent, hip-hop style and trash talk to the 1992 championship game — inspired a response from Hill on The New York Times Web site. Hill’s riposte spent several days atop the Times’ most-emailed list, and more than 96,000 people shared it on Facebook.
“I hated everything I felt Duke stood for,” Rose said in the documentary, describing his feelings as a 17-year-old high-schooler. “Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited Black players that were Uncle Toms.”
Hill responded that “Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., Blacks from two-parent, middle-class families. … To hint that those who grew up in a household with a mother and father are somehow less Black than those who did not is beyond ridiculous.”
