Grant Hill: ‘Dr. King knew that progress is not sustainable unless it solves what is systemic’

When my dad was playing in the NFL, my mom and I would often wait for him outside the locker room at the old RFK Stadium in Washington.

As we walked down the tunnel, I heard people screaming after my dad, begging for his autograph. I remember being scared at all the yelling. I turned to him and asked, “Who were those people?”

He said, “They’re fans.”

I was three or four years old, and that was the first time I’d ever heard that word used that way: fans. I didn’t know it could mean something other than the machine that kept us cool in the summer. I remember that moment because I had never seen such intense passion before.

Remember: this was years before I’d walk into Cameron.

What is that passion? It’s something we often see in sports, but also in every walk of life. It’s a natural outlet for a most basic need: to belong. To connect. To find our people.

I’ve always loved sports — not just because I loved playing the game, but because they’re a mirror of our society. They help us find an identity and let us come together around something shared. Think of the way you talk about the Blue Devils. What word do you use? It’s probably not “They.” It’s probably “We.”

From the court, or on the sideline, or in the stands, I’ve looked around at big crowds and have seen time and again what binds us so powerfully: love for our own tribe. And yes, it can get intense. I mean, we call ourselves the Crazies for a reason.

This passion is a good thing. Tribalism isn’t always a bad word. It can bring out the best in us: our loyalty. Our sense of responsibility to one another. Our willingness to sacrifice for the common good. I felt it for the first time in that tunnel with my dad.

I felt it over four special years playing for Duke, where people from different colors and classes found common ground in their love for our team.

I’ve seen the same dynamic in every arena around the NBA, and as I’ve traveled around the world with USA Basketball.

These days, I feel it in my other full-time job: as a soccer dad. Just last week, my daughter was playing in a tournament in Florida. I found myself standing next to parents from different backgrounds and experiences, people I might never otherwise cross paths with. Each of us were pumping our fists at the same good shots and shaking our heads at the same bad calls, each of us knowing how much we’ll miss it when our kids move on.

At times, of course, we also know that this kind of tribalism — in sports and life — can bring out our worst.

Think about it this way: how many of you would feel differently about your afternoon if you knew you were spending it not in this chapel, but in Chapel Hill? That feeling you’re feeling right now, just hearing those words? That’s tribalism. And it’s human nature.

A few years ago, researchers found that people were more likely to help a stranger in need who was wearing their favorite team’s jersey than those wearing the shirt of their rivals. It’s the same instinct that drives us to choose our news or social circles, isolating ourselves among those who share our views, confirming what we already believe, and deepening our identity as members of a tribe.

We’ve all done it.

“With everything happening in the world, in America, in Durham, we have a responsibility to repair. On this day set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision, we confront a fierce urgency to fix what’s broken. But we cannot come together to do that work until we talk honestly about the divisions that push us apart.”

Grant Hill

Standing here in this church, I can confess that I regret the times I’ve so quickly defaulted to division. You might remember an ESPN documentary about the Fab Five, the University of Michigan’s basketball team. In the film, one of those players called out Duke for not recruiting people like him.

He said that Duke only recruited — these are his words — “Black players that were Uncle Toms.”

He was talking about me. I was furious. I was offended. And I punched back by writing a long public letter defending my parents’ work ethic, my education, and my pride in my identity as a Black man.

With more than a decade of hindsight, I can see that I soothed my bruised ego, but I didn’t do anything to heal a real problem, like the systemic inequalities at the heart of the point he was making. It turns out that ties might bind us, but tribes can blind us.

With everything happening in the world, in America, in Durham, we have a responsibility to repair. On this day set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision, we confront a fierce urgency to fix what’s broken. But we cannot come together to do that work until we talk honestly about the divisions that push us apart.

Everyone here knows that division is one of the main characters in the century-old story of Duke and Durham. Strong feelings about development, disparities, and diversity have festered for decades. And regardless of race, we’ve all felt uneasy just walking down these streets.

My roommate and teammate, Antonio Lane, went to an all-Black public high school in Mobile, Ala. Duke was a bit of a culture shock for him. So we spent a lot of time off-campus. One of the things Black basketball players heard the most in Durham was, “I hate Duke, but I like you guys.” The student body was — and still is — often resented as carpetbaggers. I was one of those out-of-towners. In the cafeteria on campus, the joke was that the person serving you your food was a Carolina fan. And towering far taller than its modest height, the wall on East Campus was a symbol of the divide between the students and the citizens of Durham.

That’s part of why the “Uncle Tom” insult struck a nerve — because it touched on a real tension that exists here.

It wasn’t always this way. Durham was once a Black Wall Street. North Carolina Mutual, the Black-owned insurance company, was born here more than a century ago. No less than W.E.B. DuBois marveled at the Black entrepreneurship in Durham, calling it “precisely the opposite spirit” of other, more segregated Southern cities. And he credited much of the tolerance and opportunity he saw to the presence of this school.

Today, credit is due all around for the housing initiatives Duke has led in Durham, as well as its economic development plans, community outreach programs, educational partnerships, and social-impact projects. I know the scars and skepticism are real. I concede that none of these efforts on their own are stronger than generations of mistrust, tension and tribalism, even as they are part of the long path to progress.

But if Durham’s renaissance is going to be real, it has to be about more than booming businesses or hot restaurants. Although I will say: As someone who ate a lot of meals downtown in the early nineties, the fact that the New York Times has profiled Durham’s culinary scene is all the evidence I’ll ever need that change is possible.

Dr. King knew that progress is not sustainable unless it solves what is systemic — that peace, as he wrote, is more than “merely the absence of tension.”

So to fulfill our responsibility to repair, we have to change the way we see each other — which means changing how we see ourselves, and the tribe to which we belong. Many of today’s DE&I efforts are trying to do just that, and I’m encouraged that they’re a part of so many schools, businesses, and communities. Long before my late mother served as a Duke trustee, she worked for Cliff Alexander – a warrior for diversity and inclusion, and the Secretary of the Army in the 1970s. That meant that he was the person responsible for appointing our generals.

One year, when they were given a pool of potential promotions, he and mom noticed something missing: there wasn’t a single candidate of color to be a general in an Army that was 40 percent African American. Secretary Alexander and mom pushed the Army to find more qualified candidates. As a result, several names were added to the list. One of those names was Colin Powell.

The heart of DE&I is simply to ensure that more people get a fair chance. I applaud President Price, who has been a consistent advocate for diversity and inclusion at Duke. But as soon as we start talking about DE&I, or affirmative action, or representation, we all know what’s coming next. Because every time someone opens the door of progress, others push back with force, trying to close it.

To a certain segment of the population, diversity and inclusion means settling for something inferior. That’s disheartening and it hurts. The backlash is troubling, and it’s based on a cynical, false premise. The truth is that no one is taking anyone’s seat at the table. We’re adding more chairs to it. At the end of the day, we’re bringing together different personalities, perspectives, and experiences. Any kind of diversity enhances our ability as a company, as a school, or as a team.

Coach K taught me early on: you don’t assemble a team of people who all do the same thing. He would compare it to a music recital, and say: to put on a good performance, you need a piano mover, a piano tuner, and a piano player. You need all three.

Yes, our basketball teams had a bunch of out-of-towners. But we won in part because Coach K didn’t put five piano players on the court. My teammates came from rural New York, the California coast, inner-city D.C., and suburban Texas. My teammates were Black and they were white. We saw each other in our full humanity. And together, we became champions.

“Our tribe doesn’t have be loyal to one party or another, but to the same country. Our tribe doesn’t have to be defined by our race, but by our shared values and goals: to provide for our families, educate our kids, enjoy health, and find fulfillment.”

Which leads me to the big question we should ask ourselves on this MLK Day: Does our tribalism define us — or do we define our tribe?

Dr. King didn’t ask us to resist our innate instincts.

When the Civil Rights movement inspired us to overcome, it didn’t pretend we could overcome our need for community. No, Dr. King touched the souls of so many people in such a profound way because he instead challenged everyone to change our definition of how big our tribe is and who belongs in it.

We don’t have to limit our tribe to only town or only gown. We belong to the same proud community. Our tribe doesn’t have be loyal to one party or another, but to the same country. Our tribe doesn’t have to be defined by our race, but by our shared values and goals: to provide for our families, educate our kids, enjoy health, and find fulfillment.

When Dr. King came to Durham in 1960, just days after the Greensboro sit-ins, he stood at a pulpit not far from here and encouraged more white people to join the movement against segregation. Why? Because, as he told them, “the tensions in race relations in the United States today are not tensions between white and Black people; they are tensions between justice and injustice, between light and darkness.”

Three years later, my dad was there on the Mall for the March on Washington, and he has told me often about the joy he felt that day.

When my dad went down to D.C. from his home in segregated Baltimore, he saw things he’d never seen before: white folks and Black folks from all over the country holding hands, linking arms – one tribe dreaming together. He says the experience was so profound that he truly thought discrimination would disappear the next day.

We know that it’s not that easy. But we’ve marched slowly forward, in no small part because Dr. King reminded us that repair begins with redefining. Being accepted into someone else’ circle can be hard. We can’t control what’s in another’s heart. But it is fully in our power to accept someone else into ours. That’s up to us.

“We’ve marched slowly forward, in no small part because Dr. King reminded us that repair begins with redefining. Being accepted into someone else’ circle can be hard. We can’t control what’s in another’s heart. But it is fully in our power to accept someone else into ours.”

Remember that research about the fans who would more quickly help the strangers wearing their favorite team’s jersey? Well, that study found something else, too: when people thought of themselves as sports fans, and not just fans of one team, they were eager to lend a hand to others, even supporters of their rivals. Enlarging our understanding of who we consider to be one of us changes the way we walk through the world.

Redrawing the boundaries around our chosen tribe might sound like a lot of work. We might wake up some mornings without the patience or energy to open our minds or arms. Centuries of systemic injustices have left real wounds. Decades of disconnect have made this school and this city feel far away from one another.

But the path to progress starts with choices we make every day. If I had another shot to respond to that “Uncle Tom” insult, I would do it so differently.

I hope I would see the person who made that comment and remember that he and I are far more alike than not. Two young Black men in America, both of us 6-foot-8 small forwards born just months apart, battling on the same courts to win titles for schools that mean the world to us.

If I could do it all over again, I would have responded in a way that made clear: it’s nothing but love. Or maybe I would have taken my own advice from the letter I ended up writing — “to think before we act, to pause before we speak” — and said nothing at all.

Today, each of us would do well to pause and think of someone who in our life, or in our community, we have assigned to a different tribe. And then we can ask ourselves: Are we sure we got it right?

At the start of this school’s second century, that is one small way Duke and Durham can continue the worthy work of repair and recapture the spirit that DuBois saw. And instead of making the space between us wider, we will widen the circle around us.

When we heed Scripture’s lesson to love our neighbors as ourselves …

when we heed Dr. King’s calls for compassion and conscience …

more of us will reap the rewards of loyalty and community …

that a shared identity inspires.

What better day to start than today?

Thank you.