Grant Hill wants you to know he isn't a bitch

Grant Hill. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia 

Commons.

Phoenix Suns swingman Grant Hill is neither a “bitch”, nor an “Uncle Tom” and he wants to make sure that Jalen Rose, the rest of the Fab Five — and maybe even you and I— get the point.

“The Fab Five,” is an ESPN film about the college careers of the famous University of Michigan 1991 freshman recruiting class of Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Chris Webber, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson. In the film, which debuted on Sunday , King succinctly states his opinion of two Dukies in particular who he felt lacked cajones.

 “I thought Christian Laettner was soft, a bitch. And I thought Grant Hill was a bitch,” King said in the documentary, which documents the Fab Five’s experiences from 1991 to 1993.

To make matters worse, Rose, executive producer of the show, has said that he thought the black players recruited by Dukes were all “Uncle Toms,” a slur used to imply that a black man is meek and deferential to whites.

Hill, whose Duke Blue Devils defeated Michigan in the 1991 NCAA national title game,  wrote a blog for the New York Times today that said “It was a sad and somewhat pathetic turn of events,” for him to see the Fab Five’s remarks.

Now, I’m black, and while that doesn’t make me an expert on blackness, I can say this: Calling a black person an “Uncle Tom” is a surefire way to piss us off, and it’s often an unwarranted claim. I know firsthand. As early as kindergarten, I was picked on by some of my black classmates because I spoke very well — “like a white boy,” as they put it. The teasing didn’t stop there, in fact, it continued all the way up to high school. The ironic thing was that I’ve always considered myself to be very in tune with my roots — and very in love with my identity as a black person. It’s very painful to hear someone make derogatory remarks about your pride and identity, especially in light of all the adversity blacks have face in the U.S., just because you are different than them.

The Fab Five. From left to right, Jimmy King, Jalen Rose, 

Chris Webber, Ray Jackson, Juwan Howard.

“In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only “black players that were ‘Uncle Toms,’ ” 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,” Hill said in the blog. “He leaves us all guessing exactly what he believes today.”

If Rose thought that coming from a middle class, educated background and being black was betraying the race or being subservient to whites then that says a lot about his lack of maturity as a college student. But then again, maybe that’s the point in all this; Rose is expressing a point of view he held as a teenaged basketball star fresh out of high school. King has also said as much.

Whatever the case, I’m glad Hill gave Rose a piece of his mind and slipped in a few barbs while he was at it. Hopefully this doesn’t get blown out of proportion or explode into a bigger bickering war.

If Hill is as classy as I think he is, he’ll leave things at this: “I am proud of my family. I am proud of my Duke championships and all my Duke teammates. And, I am proud I never lost a game against the Fab Five.”