by: Jordan Marks
Words cannot begin to describe my feelings toward Rob Parker’s comments on Robert Griffin III. As a college educated black man who is highly considering getting advanced degrees, and product of two parents and a grandfather who all have a bachelor’s are higher, I’m PISSED. Much blood was sacrificed for the right of young men and women like myself and many of you to attend a university of higher education. Even more was shed to make space for us at predominantly white institutions.
What Parker has done has created the situation in which young black men and women have a choice to make in this society, to be black or to be educated. As an educator he has fostered a barrier to mind of my pupils in which I must attempt to nullify his statements that are backed up in the facts of celebrity individuals who have yet to graduate college.
What fueled this article is that Parker believed that black men across the country in black barbershops would side with his views on Griffin’s lifestyle. In the barbershops I grew up, each and every person there encouraged my growth and educational values as a means to escape the city that I am from. Not once did someone hold me back from the goals I had set forth in front of me. I am also certain that there were men in the barbershops that Parker grew up in that did not discourage him from attending Southern Connecticut State University before going on the receive his Master’s at Columbia University. Certainly he would not refer to himself as a “fake black.”
Then again, for a black man to go on national TV and question the racial legitimacy of a vastly growing icon in black culture is on the outliers of what it means to be black. This comment is much deeper than the “crab in a bucket theory” that plagues the black community.
ESPN as suspended Parker so that they can further investigate. Also, First Take is a deliberately controversial show. However, at the point you attack one’s race, you have, in my opinion, cross the boundaries of the point of the show, and created a scenario in which your lead black anchor is even “uncomfortable” with. Furthermore, I believe that Parker should be forced to resign from ESPN, and seek employment in the blogosphere.