from Slam Magazine
We’re pleased to present Prof. James Braxton Peterson’s essay on ‘Uncle Tom – gate,’ which stemmed from ESPN’s Fab Five documentary. He is an Associate Professor of English at Bucknell University and a Duke alumnus. Prof. Peterson contacted us out of the blue and we thought his views were well worth running.
A New Spin on Duke: Debunking the ‘Uncle Tom’ myth.
by James Braxton Peterson / @JBP2
Now that the men’s college basketball season has come to an end I can address some issues/concerns regarding ‘Uncle Tom – gate,’ that have been festering with me a bit – my own consternation being stoked by numerous queries and solicitations of my opinion on these matters from various friends/classmates within the Black Duke alum community. I am a Black Duke alumnus, class of 1993.
In case you missed it, ‘Uncle Tom – gate’ commenced after the debut of the ESPN documentary, Fab Five. In the film, Jalen Rose states the following: “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 players who were Uncle Toms.” Note well here that Mr. Rose is narrating his mindset at the age of 17 or 18 years. He’s describing his mental approach and preparation for the Fab Five’s first encounter with the Duke basketball team and its much valorized programmatic presence in the NCAA’s and college athletics more broadly. For an 18-year-old Rose, the thought of battling Duke on the court was a daunting but welcome challenge.
But the off-court contests, of racial stereotypes, institutional history, recruitment preferences and of class and experiential diversity within the Black community proved to be weighty for his young mind. He was honest if not eloquent in his narrative and I have to say – much like Duke’s drubbing this year at the hands of Arizona, I was not upset by it. Instead I absorbed it with the kind of quiet, confident knowledge that being a part of the legacy of Black folk at Duke requires. When winning is the norm (in any competitive arena) the hate that winning breeds becomes a natural part of the public discourse. It is the grassroots response to the top down media love affair with Coach K, Duke’s elite institutional status, and those consistently copied Cameron Crazies.
Don’t get me wrong. I immediately grasped the anachronistic sense with which Rose deployed the ‘Uncle Tom’ epithet. For points of clarification please note that the conventional meaning of ‘Uncle Tom’ — a Black person (usually male) who is a sellout; someone who exhibits self-hate via subservience to white folk and white supremacy. Malcolm X coined the term in his excoriation of those Black folk, even Civil Rights leaders, who he felt chose conciliation over confrontation. This was not exactly the meaning that Rose was going for or achieved. Rose used the term as a means to express his frustration with the racialized and stratified nature of college basketball (then and now), our society (then and now). If we really wanted to ‘go there,’ we should acknowledge the literary figure of ‘Uncle Tom,’ that famous, cheek-turning, Christian man in bondage, who was actually quite popular before Malcolm and others transformed him into the signifier of Black anti-black identity.
I certainly understood Rose’s remarks as offensive from my perspective as a Black Duke alum, but I did not/do not distinguish the depiction of Duke from the perspective of the Fab Five from the depiction of Duke from the perspective of the early ’90s UNLV squad in HBO’s Runnin’ Rebels documentary from the steady vitriol directed at Duke during this time of year from some of my dearest friends. All paint Duke as a white institutional(ly) Evil Empire – kinda like the way all non-Yankee baseball fans see the Yankees. Say what you want about recruitment preferences, character vs stereotype, etc. – perennial excellence breeds perennial hate. So yes, the loss to Arizona this year still smarts a bit – maybe not as much as Fab Five’s losses in their appearances in the final rounds of NCAA tournament play – but there’s much consolation in the fact that we’ll be back next year and the next year, and the next year… In fact, we’ve been there so much since I graduated in 1993 (after winning back-to-back championships and being in the Final Four ALL FOUR years of my undergraduate experience) that I don’t even fill out brackets anymore – sorry Mr. POTUS. I just put Duke in the winner’s slot.
Read the Full Essay @ Slam
by James Braxton Peterson / @JBP2
Now that the men’s college basketball season has come to an end I can address some issues/concerns regarding ‘Uncle Tom – gate,’ that have been festering with me a bit – my own consternation being stoked by numerous queries and solicitations of my opinion on these matters from various friends/classmates within the Black Duke alum community. I am a Black Duke alumnus, class of 1993.
In case you missed it, ‘Uncle Tom – gate’ commenced after the debut of the ESPN documentary, Fab Five. In the film, Jalen Rose states the following: “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 players who were Uncle Toms.” Note well here that Mr. Rose is narrating his mindset at the age of 17 or 18 years. He’s describing his mental approach and preparation for the Fab Five’s first encounter with the Duke basketball team and its much valorized programmatic presence in the NCAA’s and college athletics more broadly. For an 18-year-old Rose, the thought of battling Duke on the court was a daunting but welcome challenge.
But the off-court contests, of racial stereotypes, institutional history, recruitment preferences and of class and experiential diversity within the Black community proved to be weighty for his young mind. He was honest if not eloquent in his narrative and I have to say – much like Duke’s drubbing this year at the hands of Arizona, I was not upset by it. Instead I absorbed it with the kind of quiet, confident knowledge that being a part of the legacy of Black folk at Duke requires. When winning is the norm (in any competitive arena) the hate that winning breeds becomes a natural part of the public discourse. It is the grassroots response to the top down media love affair with Coach K, Duke’s elite institutional status, and those consistently copied Cameron Crazies.
Don’t get me wrong. I immediately grasped the anachronistic sense with which Rose deployed the ‘Uncle Tom’ epithet. For points of clarification please note that the conventional meaning of ‘Uncle Tom’ — a Black person (usually male) who is a sellout; someone who exhibits self-hate via subservience to white folk and white supremacy. Malcolm X coined the term in his excoriation of those Black folk, even Civil Rights leaders, who he felt chose conciliation over confrontation. This was not exactly the meaning that Rose was going for or achieved. Rose used the term as a means to express his frustration with the racialized and stratified nature of college basketball (then and now), our society (then and now). If we really wanted to ‘go there,’ we should acknowledge the literary figure of ‘Uncle Tom,’ that famous, cheek-turning, Christian man in bondage, who was actually quite popular before Malcolm and others transformed him into the signifier of Black anti-black identity.
I certainly understood Rose’s remarks as offensive from my perspective as a Black Duke alum, but I did not/do not distinguish the depiction of Duke from the perspective of the Fab Five from the depiction of Duke from the perspective of the early ’90s UNLV squad in HBO’s Runnin’ Rebels documentary from the steady vitriol directed at Duke during this time of year from some of my dearest friends. All paint Duke as a white institutional(ly) Evil Empire – kinda like the way all non-Yankee baseball fans see the Yankees. Say what you want about recruitment preferences, character vs stereotype, etc. – perennial excellence breeds perennial hate. So yes, the loss to Arizona this year still smarts a bit – maybe not as much as Fab Five’s losses in their appearances in the final rounds of NCAA tournament play – but there’s much consolation in the fact that we’ll be back next year and the next year, and the next year… In fact, we’ve been there so much since I graduated in 1993 (after winning back-to-back championships and being in the Final Four ALL FOUR years of my undergraduate experience) that I don’t even fill out brackets anymore – sorry Mr. POTUS. I just put Duke in the winner’s slot.
Read the Full Essay @ Slam
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