William Joyce
Chemotherapy for PC
Essay forwarded...
The Racial Biases of Duke Hating
First, a disclosure: I'm a Duke Blue Devils fan. I didn't attend the university, and I've been told by someone from the South that I would have fit in better with the student body on the rival Chapel Hill campus than I would have with the one in Durham. (I think she meant that as a compliment, and as a lifelong state-school guy, I take it as such.) But I can't help it; I simply enjoy watching Mike Krzyzewski's team win year after year by playing disciplined, fundamentally strong basketball while avoiding the showboating and individual-over-team play, not to mention the NCAA violations, that often mar the college game.
And as a Duke fan, I've become quite familiar with Duke Hating, a favorite pastime of fans of pretty much every other college team in the country. I've heard all the reasons why we should hate Duke: Duke is to be hated for its success -- though, for some reason, we need not hate other winning programs like UCLA or North Carolina. Duke is to be hated because it's a private school -- though, for some reason, not other private schools like Syracuse or Wake Forest. Or the four-time national champions are to be hated because they're perpetually "overrated" and "get all the calls" -- something that has yet to be quantified, but which seems to stem from a fuzzy conspiracy involving the referees, the Selection Committee, Dick Vitale, and, I think, Oswald's ghost. (For a good piece on the history of Duke hating, see Mike Kline's column for Bleacher Report.)
Duke has been this generation's most successful men's college team, so haters come with the territory. But what's increasingly disconcerting is the racial element that often seems to be at the heart of antipathy toward Duke. Over the past two decades of Duke dominance, the haters have had one thing conspicuously in common: The slick-dishing Bobby Hurley? Hustling overachiever Steve Wojciechowski? Sharp shooter J.J. Reddick? Duke haters especially hated these guys. Yet you almost never heard the haters go after a Grant Hill or a Chris Carrawell or a Nolan Smith. It's been the white players at Duke who've usually drawn the most venom... especially from white fans.
White-on-white fan crime in college hoops is not without precedent. I remember fans at Rutgers would taunt the point guard of the opposing team with chants of "Dork!" -- if and only if he was white. (One television color commentator, so to speak, misunderstood or perhaps intentionally misunderstood this practice and told viewers the home fans were jeering the opposing player because he was a freshman.) This was in the days when hip-hop culture spread into the suburbs and white kids began fronting as ghetto "gangstas." (Straight outta Middletown, yo.) In this climate, Duke's white players would make politically correct targets.
Read more @ HuffPo
We even enforce the copyright of authors at Huffy-Puffy, dude.
~Oddball
The Racial Biases of Duke Hating
First, a disclosure: I'm a Duke Blue Devils fan. I didn't attend the university, and I've been told by someone from the South that I would have fit in better with the student body on the rival Chapel Hill campus than I would have with the one in Durham. (I think she meant that as a compliment, and as a lifelong state-school guy, I take it as such.) But I can't help it; I simply enjoy watching Mike Krzyzewski's team win year after year by playing disciplined, fundamentally strong basketball while avoiding the showboating and individual-over-team play, not to mention the NCAA violations, that often mar the college game.
And as a Duke fan, I've become quite familiar with Duke Hating, a favorite pastime of fans of pretty much every other college team in the country. I've heard all the reasons why we should hate Duke: Duke is to be hated for its success -- though, for some reason, we need not hate other winning programs like UCLA or North Carolina. Duke is to be hated because it's a private school -- though, for some reason, not other private schools like Syracuse or Wake Forest. Or the four-time national champions are to be hated because they're perpetually "overrated" and "get all the calls" -- something that has yet to be quantified, but which seems to stem from a fuzzy conspiracy involving the referees, the Selection Committee, Dick Vitale, and, I think, Oswald's ghost. (For a good piece on the history of Duke hating, see Mike Kline's column for Bleacher Report.)
Duke has been this generation's most successful men's college team, so haters come with the territory. But what's increasingly disconcerting is the racial element that often seems to be at the heart of antipathy toward Duke. Over the past two decades of Duke dominance, the haters have had one thing conspicuously in common: The slick-dishing Bobby Hurley? Hustling overachiever Steve Wojciechowski? Sharp shooter J.J. Reddick? Duke haters especially hated these guys. Yet you almost never heard the haters go after a Grant Hill or a Chris Carrawell or a Nolan Smith. It's been the white players at Duke who've usually drawn the most venom... especially from white fans.
White-on-white fan crime in college hoops is not without precedent. I remember fans at Rutgers would taunt the point guard of the opposing team with chants of "Dork!" -- if and only if he was white. (One television color commentator, so to speak, misunderstood or perhaps intentionally misunderstood this practice and told viewers the home fans were jeering the opposing player because he was a freshman.) This was in the days when hip-hop culture spread into the suburbs and white kids began fronting as ghetto "gangstas." (Straight outta Middletown, yo.) In this climate, Duke's white players would make politically correct targets.
Read more @ HuffPo
We even enforce the copyright of authors at Huffy-Puffy, dude.
~Oddball
