Tag Archives: Sterling
Sterling / Silver
How can somebody so rich be such a fool? LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s bigoted habits were well known around the NBA, yet they never seemed to be a problem for him. He has more NAACP life-time achievement awards than Barack Obama has Nobel Peace prizes.
Well, it’s a problem now.
Sterling / Silver
Word got out that Sterling told his girlfriend not to bring black people to his basketball games. This embarrassed the NBA. New commissioner Adam Silver came down hard. Sterling was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from his own team, and told to find a buyer.
Sterling deserved what he got if you look at it as a life-time boorish behavior award. But he’s being punished for something he said in private, not for anything he actually did.
As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass says, “if you’re an American, you know the back story. It’s race in America. And it’s showtime.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar anticipated all this in a piece he wrote condemning Sterling before his penalty came down:
Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really?…
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?
