Quote:
Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/201...se/?ref=sports
I thought it was a bit of an empty, bullshit, defensive response. And that's understandable. Grant Hill is a good person. But he's missing the fucking point. Jalen Rose is no genius. And I think he placed too much of the focus on the black players who have played for Duke. What he should have said is, Duke looks at white players first. Then, they look at elite black players who fit Coach K's mold. And that mold sure as hell is not urban, street, ghetto-type players (no matter what their grades). It's the same with most firms. Are you an Uncle Tom if you accept an offer at Wachtell* and you're the only black guy there? Of course not. But Wachtell isn't looking for black associates who aren't the absolute cream of the crop at the top of their Ivy league classes. They have the defense of saying, "We only recruit those types of associates," but we all know what that means. That means they know exactly what type of mix they're going to get and it's lilly white.
If Grant Hill had any fucking balls at all, he would question the number and type of black players that Coach K recruits. He could do that and still confirm the character of his teammates (whether we agree with him or not). But there is no way Grant Hill does that because it's easier to write a fluff piece that ignores Rose's underlying point. It's well-written, talks about family and his teammates, but avoids any criticism of self or school. And I hate to say it, but it's just the kind of piece that makes white people happy. He's one of the good ones, that Grant Hill.
TM
*And I'm using Wachtell as the generic SuperEliteBigLaw firm.
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As a non-carer I am still curious: what role (if any) does it play that these are students, not just basketball players, and Duke is a private school of 6,500 and Michigan is a public university four times the size? Would we be horrified that Dartmouth recruits "gentrified" African-American
students at the theoretical expense of ghetto (ick) kids, so long as it draws a respectable number of those gentrified kids to its school whether they play basketball or not? Why can't Duke choose to be a Dartmouth in its admissions -- because it plays basketball and owes it to people to put Blue Devil uniforms on the best players it can find? If it's not wrong for the admissions office to do it's not wrong for Coach K to do, right?
In other words, take "players" and change it to "students" and a lot of the air goes out of your complaints. I'm sure most people care about Duke as a basketball-entertainment-creation-device but neither Coach K nor the Duke admissions department is required to agree with that and reach out to students to whom admission would not otherwise be offered. So it comes down to whether Duke has a demographically appropriate black student population, not whether it has a basketball team that has only one "type" of player. I went to an ACC school and while I know there are complaints about the diversity profile of the Duke team I never heard they were grossly out of line with the diversity profile of the schools with which they compete for admissions. And trust me, if I could have found a way to call Duke a bunch of racist assholes I would have jumped at the chance.
I just don't see it as a valid complaint against Duke basketball that it recruits a certain type of player, when that type of player also happens to fit perfectly with an elitist admissions philosophy of the school, for good or for ill -- unless you believe a basketball coach is duty-bound to give a college dorm room to a kid who can play basketball, and the rest of the admissions process is irrelevant to those kids.
All of this is hinged on a belief that Duke's admissions are racially representative. If they're not, Duke can go fuck itself. But "Duke selects for a type of {black} {student} {athlete}" falls apart if it's possible to remove any one of the words in brackets without falsifying the statement.
