On the longstanding historical debates that provide some important contexts
for Rob Parker’s controversial recent critique of Robert Griffin III.
It’s easy, in our era of 24-hour news cycles and instant internet tempests
in tea pots and the like, to get over-excited about the latest shocking or
scandalous comments. But even in a quieter age, sports journalist
Rob Parker’s December 13th remarks about Washington Redskins rookie
quarterback Robert Griffin III would likely have raised quite a stir. Appearing
on ESPN’s “First Take” morning talk show, Parker called into question Griffin’s
authentic blackness, asking whether he’s “one of us” (Parker is also African
American) or instead a “cornball brother,” and pointing to (among other things)
his white fiance, his rumored affiliation
with the Republican Party, and his general attitude toward the idea of the “black
quarterback.” The comments were unsurprisingly greeted by an uproar, and have
led to Parker’s
30-day suspension from all ESPN programming. Just another silly ESPN
controversy over race and quarterbacking, right
Rush?
Certainly it is that; but Parker’s critique also relates to a long and
complex set of narratives and debates in the African American community. In his
1903 essay “The Talented Tenth,” W.E.B. Du Bois argued that a cadre of
impressive African American leaders would play a vital role in uplifting the
community and race as a whole; that, as his striking first sentence put it most
succinctly (in the gendered language of the day), “The Negro race, like all
races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” Du Bois was referring specifically
to the need for higher education, an idea he would further develop in the same
year in “Of
the Training of Black Men” (a chapter from the seminal The
Souls of Black Folk). But he was also making a broader and more complex
case: that a subset of highly successful, and highly visible, members of a particular
community can improve, if not the conditions for all others members of that
community (and certainly the ideal is that they will work to do so in one way
or another), at least the external society’s narratives and perceptions of that
group.
Each part of that case, or at least of my framing of it within that
sentence (as always with Du Bois, his dense and layered ideas deserve their own
reading), is fraught with potential controversy and debate. Do successful
members of a community in fact owe it to their community to work for its
general well-being? (This is what Parker was implying, for example, when he
said of Griffin that he might not be “down with the cause.”) Regardless, does
their success change society’s views of their community? Can it? Should it? If
it should and yet doesn’t, is that their fault, the society’s, nobody’s,
everybody’s? These questions, as applied specifically to African Americans,
were debated in Du Bois’s era, continued to be throughout the 20th
century (with Du Bois himself revising his
position in a 1948 speech), and are no less—and perhaps even more—significant
in the age of Obama. They are also relevant, if distinct and worth separate
analysis to be sure, to arguments over whether Asian
Americans are a “model minority,” what that status would entail, what
effects such narratives have on young Asian Americans, and so on. Which is to
say, Rob Parker might have created a tempest in a teapot, but there’s a lot of
historical and contemporary value to continuing to talk after the storm dies
down.
Next gridiron-inspired topic tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Thoughts on Parker, Griffin, or these other issues?
Other football and America stories or themes you’d highlight?
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