Forty Million Ways To Be Black Analysis

Every Tuesday and Thursday, my first class of the day is Politics of Black Identity, taught by Professor Cokley, and each day I get increasingly excited about the topics we will discuss in class. Every topic we have discussed in class has been very real and open minded subjects that have all had my brain working in new ways in order to determine my opinion on questions and topics I have never been asked or discussed before. Two issues we have conversed about in class that have stuck out to me were the comments Jalen Rose made about Duke and the short reading “Forty Million Ways to be Black”. The first day of class Professor Cokley showed us a video of Jalen Rose voicing his opinion about Duke University and basketball players that choose to play basketball there. He began his interview by sharing some information about his background and eventually led to say “I hated Duke, and I hated everything I felt Duke stood for.” His reason for hating Duke was that they didn’t recruit black men like himself, instead they recruited black men that he referred to as Uncle Toms. He went on to say that Grant Hill was an Uncle Tom because his mother went to college, his dad was an NFL football player, and he lived a better life than he did growing up. Jalen Rose resented Grant Hill and black other players and men that were raised in similar conditions to Grant Hill because they did not experience the same stereotypical lifestyle of a black child growing …show more content…
In this writing, the author wrote about an experience he had with some black men as he told them he was about to go skydiving. The men responded “Brother, Black people don’t do that. The author goes on to tell his skydiving experience. This experience helped the author get closer to god, and the reader felt that if he let being black hold him back from any opportunity, then he would have cheated himself out of growing as a