In the film which aired Sunday, Rose called former Duke star Grant Hill and every black man who became a Dukie “Uncle Toms.” He also made the point that Coach K recruited those black men only because they came from well-to-do or upper-crust families rather than broken homes in black neighborhoods.
Rose wasn’t the only one of the Fab Five with that assessment. Jimmy King is now infamously quoted in the documentary as saying, “I thought Grant Hill was a ‘*****.’ ”
Talk of the documentary has gone viral on ESPN, sports-talk radio and newspaper front pages everywhere. And, of course, at the forefront of the discussion is the racial undercurrent of Rose’s words.
But that discussion misses the point. While the knee-jerking press and pundits see Rose pulling back the curtain on what already is a well-chronicled American racial divide, they fail to see Rose’s disgust was indeed not about racism but about classism.
It wasn’t about black and white. It was about have and have not.
Rose wasn’t angry with Hill because the latter was white. Hill, in fact, is black. Rose was angry with Hill because Hill had money in his pocket and Rose’s pockets were empty. He was angry because Hill grew up in a nice home while Rose’s family sometimes had no electricity.
Race wasn’t the reason an 18-year-old Rose seethed when he saw Hill in a Duke uniform. Rose seethed because Hill had a father and a mother, and Rose didn’t know his father and rarely saw his working mother.
“I hated Duke, and I hated everything Duke stood for,” Rose said in the film. “Schools like Duke don’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”
Those last two words have captured all the attention because they bleed vitriol. Those are the words one black man can best use to cause most damage to another black man.
