"UP FROM LEEDS: The people, the place and the privilege that made Charles Barkley a role model"

"Barkley's message is devoid of any mention of white supremacy to overcome, racial progress to be made or playing fields in need of leveling. It lacks the self-awareness that might come from reflecting on throwing a man through a plate-glass window, punching an obnoxious fan in the nose, serving a weekend in jail for drunken driving or spitting on a small girl at a game.
Barkley's comments at this weighty moment seem to fit right in with a man who defended the Ferguson cop who killed Michael Brown, labeled looters "scumbags" and suggested Garner shouldn't have resisted arrest. They might even inspire another op-ed from his "Inside the NBA" partner Kenny Smith, who was so unnerved by Barkley's Ferguson comments he implied that Barkley was unqualified to be in the conversation.
But such assessments would be incomplete. Maybe flat wrong...

"Barkley's views, as far as I can see, a lot of black people think that way -- 'You got to get your thing together,'" Marbury shares.

Although many high-profile black activists justifiably focus on politics, police or correcting systemic issues, he declares, "In the South, many black people are still just trying to survive. They're not even at that level."

A 2014 Pew poll supports this view, stating that 43 percent of black respondents said racial discrimination is the main reason black people can't get ahead, whereas 48 percent said blacks who can't get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition...

The ultimate in privilege is the luxury of ignoring the past. When Barkley steps before a room full of kids today, as he often does, preaching the value of education, as Booker T. Washington continually did, he's not the bar brawler or the practice skipper or the drunk driver. He's a famous black man who rose from poverty and now makes millions by thinking quickly on live television. He is a role model and a leader, as surely as Alabama is hot in the summer.

But to accept that reality, Barkley would have to renounce his most famous declaration, the phrase from the 1993 Nike commercial that confirmed he was no ordinary jock, the quote engraved onto Barkley's public persona.

"I am not a role model."

In 30-plus years of Barkley sound bites, this remains his quintessential statement. It's defiant, laden with good intentions and bad connotations, and born of his deep desire to uplift society by the force of his personality.

Barkley made a valid point in the commercial: "Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids." But his effort to encourage stronger families ignored the social forces that destroy them...

Barkley's money furthers the careers of minority scientists and supports research into the environmental factors that cause poor minorities to make bad health choices.

He knows structural racism exists, but self-responsibility still reigns supreme as his solution.

When the significance of those Leeds train tracks outlasts the laws designed to end segregation, when privilege distorts the true difficulty of escaping poverty, self-responsibility can seem like the only sensible solution.

Behavior as savior."

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12289603/how-former-nba-star-charles-barkley-became-role-model

This is making me thing about this concept of 'the black voice'; who gets to have that label, and what does the label entitle them to? How is it a burden? And who gives it - is it black people, is it academia, is it mainstream media? 

Also, the always-present struggle between asking people and structures that are outsude of your control to change, and feeling a full sense of agency: "A century has passed, and the question remains the same: What should black folk do now? Slavery ended in Washington's lifetime; a black president was elected in Barkley's. Suffering and strife endured. Who must end it? Us or them?"

Also, this, on the necessarily different answers to that question based on personal context; it's so much - "Geography has traditionally influenced the tone and strategy of black leadership. W.E.B. Du Bois was born free, raised in an integrated community, based and educated at Harvard. Booker T. Washington was born in chains, educated at Hampton Institute and rooted in Alabama. Martin Luther King lived and died in the heart of Dixie's violent Jim Crow system. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad built the Nation of Islam and critiqued King from the relative safety of New York and Chicago. In the North, Marcus Garvey showcased defiant, back-to-Africa oratory, but in the South he thanked Southerners for "lynching race pride into Negroes" and insisted America was a "white man's country."

"We experience life and culture from a different perspective," says John Curtis, 28, a Tuskegee grad from Leeds. "People from up North may not come to grips with racism. We experience it.""

(credit to KM)