The Ends & The Means & The Price Of Our Comfort
I am completely comfortable with the end result of today’s NBA actions against Donald Sterling.
I am not comfortable at all with how we got here.
The more I listen to talk radio and television analysis and written arguments, the more uncomfortable I get.
If the logic is that no matter how we got here, we know that Donald Sterling has had racist, ugly thoughts and therefore, he is no longer worthy of due process, the door opens wide to all kinds of things that people do not feel so comfortable cheering about.
Have any of the other 29 NBA owners said racist or otherwise unquestionably offensive things in private? Should we be seeking out all history of this kind of behavior? If it turns out that TMZ or some other organization that seeks out personal gossip can find audio of a private conversation in which a team owner calls a woman “a cunt” or a person of Spanish-speaking heritage “a spic” or a jew “a kike” or a god-fearing person of Christian faith “a Jesus freak” or some similar offense, will they also get the life ban and $2.5 million maximum-allowed fine?
Because I would be willing to bet a significant amount that Donald Sterling was not the only billionaire over 70 who has called black people “niggers” or suggested that they didn’t want someone close to them to be seen socializing with them. People over 70 were adults when there were still Jim Crow laws. Many of the most liberal people I know still talk about “shvatzahs” or “them” or whatever when a black person (even one they know and like) is just out of earshot. They still are often visibly uncomfortable in the presence of hispanics, most severely when tattoos are involved. They still make jokes about Asians that could have been in a black & white Charlie Chan movie.
Do all of these people need to go away? Am I serving evil by not turning them in to the authorities?
Just a week or two ago, a young woman in her 20s who works for a friend made a joke about him not paying for something because “he’s a Jew.” She was, of course, saying this to a jew. Should I be insisting she be fired? Am I a self-hating jew for not doing so?
It’s really easy to applaud the NBA commissioner for putting Donald Sterling, to the degree to which he can, in his place today. It feels right.
And I won’t even hold up the mirror of what may be the real motivation – money – and hold it against the decision. There are clearly tens of millions in hypocrisy dollars in play here. That’s not really the point either.
The court of public opinion is unavoidable. And some bimbo – and if you are a pretty young lady of mixed race having sex with or trying to have sex with a married, unattractive, coarse, racially-insensitive billionaire twice your age or more, you qualify, except in very, very rare exceptions, as a bimbo – releasing a private tape of you being an asshole is not really so shocking in 2014… anymore than Barack Obama using the phrase “clinging to religion and guns” or Mitt Romney talking about “the 47 percent.” Was a law broken? I don’t know. Someday we may know. But “Caveat asshole” and all that.
The difference here is, unlike the Obama and Romney tapes… these ugly words were not spoken in public. Not even in a presumably controlled, but still public environment. Donald Sterling’s words were, clearly, presumed by Donald Sterling to be private… every bit as much as if he had asked his mistress to strap on a dildo, put it in his ass, and pretend she was Samuel L. Jackson, screaming lines at Pulp Fiction at him.
Are YOU proud of everything you have ever said or did in private?
I do not recall of a case in which there was nothing illegal done in which private speech turned into a hangman’s noose of sorts virtually overnight. In sports, the comparisons have been to Marge Schott and Jimmy The Greek. But Jimmy made his comment to a reporter and Schott’s comments were made public because of legal depositions for lawsuits. In this site’s line-up of their 25 most racist comments in sports, every one of them was made publicly.
Personally, I am a bit afraid of a culture in which a truly private utterance, however heinous, can cause such severe action by an institution so quickly.
Would there have been a walkout on tonight’s NBA games? Possibly. Was that the real reason for the draconian sentence coming down this afternoon? Probably.
Regardless, the NBA played judge, jury, and executioner, avoiding the power of the marketplace altogether. The NBA didn’t empower players to make a choice about how they should react to this issue. The NBA did not allow the public to act out on their opinion of this issue. The NBA embarrassed Donald Sterling, but they didn’t really hurt Donald Sterling. They summarily disappeared Donald Sterling. They swept the whole thing under the rug.
“Tell Yao Ming, ‘Ching chong yang, wah, ah soh.'”
“I will fight every nigger here.”
“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”
“We don’t have any gay guys on the team. They gotta get up outta here if they do. Can’t be with that sweet stuff.”
What will happen the next time a Shaq or a Riley Cooper or a John Rocker or a Chris Culliver says these kinds of things? And these were all in public.
What about the next time there is a domestic battery charge against a player? (Again, a public event.)
I get it. The standard for Donald Sterling is based on him being The Man. Ya.
But now anything he has done for the benefit of people of color is all defined by this tape. He can’t possibly have been sincere in his donations to charitable organizations because he, as we have learned, doesn’t want his girl on the side to cuckold him at Clippers games with black men… especially Magic Johnson. So he must be the modern version of a slave owner, right?
I’m not saying he isn’t an asshole. We knew that from the wife and girlfriend combo platter. Personally, I think the most offensive element of the tape is that he spews out racial bias to his racially mixed “girlfriend.” What kind of man is that lacking in self-awareness or kindness, above and beyond the racism? I don’t know from this tape whether he sees black men as property, but he sure saw his “girlfriend” as such. But then again… she was probably bought and paid for, no?
Mark Cuban had it right. This is a slippery slope. And really, if it isn’t a slippery slope, the NBA and everyone rooting for its action should be ashamed of themselves. If this is the standard for the future, so be it. No one will shed tears for Donald Sterling here. He’s an ass. A really rich ass.
But if this is a one-off, simply meant to placate the players’ union and the media, it is an ugly and dangerous act.
Sadly, in today’s world of the temporary, I expect this to be a temporary act. And that’s the damned shame.
That’s just like the “it’s not about the artist, it’s about the art” argument. Because just in the same way that people don’t want to be reminded that Polanski is a bit of a creeper when they watch “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Pianist,” people don’t want to be reminded during their sports games that the vast majority of the teams’ owners are old, white, (and at least for the aged 70+ ones) racist billionaire assholes.
Who you are in private shouldn’t necessarily itself be private, and the public should always be keenly aware that a consciously cloistered racist is still a racist.
“Who you are in private shouldn’t necessarily itself be private, and the public should always be keenly aware that a consciously cloistered racist is still a racist.”
What. the. hell? How we gonna accomplish that? Fly audio-mike drones over the houses of anybody in power looking for a “gotcha”? Rummage through the personal calls and online correspondence of every living American and use it unprovoked as ammunition to cost them their livelihood? Shit, PC Chongor, maybe you had some road rage one day and flipped off another driver; How about we rustle up some traffic cam footage of that and use it to get your kids taken away from you?
This is one of the best and smartest things Poland’s written lately. It is an absolutely scary reverse-Nazi time in America, which last time checked, had something called freedom of speech. Maybe next we can Harry Caul the mansions of every NBA player, get some of them on morals clauses. How anyone can not be disturbed by this is beyond me.
On a semi-related note, I’m also kinda curious how a TV production can legally fire one of its stars for incidents wholly unrelated to and away from the workplace; If you cold-cock your nephew at a family barbecue, not many guys on this planet would be fired from their place of employment come Monday morning. So how is it LEGAL to fire the actor Columbus Short for domestic incidences? Not saying he’s probably not an asshole, but what’s next? We fire people for sexual harassment at their depressing accounting job because they had a one-night stand over the weekend?
would you be writing this if he had been recorded making holocaust denial comments? or talking about lust for 8 year olds?
don’t know the answer, but aren’t we really more tolerant of racist speech than we should be, rather than the reverse?
Anyone who’s offended by WORDS, I can’t relate to that at ALL. Who cares.
The whole thing is a large gray area for me. I know the NBA is a private organization and they can make decisions for their organization, which is different than a government and punishing someone before there’s a trial, but there’s still something off about this. Then again, I was on A&E’s side on the Duck Dynasty guy.
The real question (as I live in Washington, DC) is what this means for Dan Snyder and the Washington Redskins?
Housing discrimination.
It’s the irony of Sterling’s job description that makes his comments more glaringly jarring, and gives it a certain Slave Master tinge.
Here we have a guy, at the top of the basketball food chain, not deeming black people worthy enough to be photographed with, but perfectly alright making millions off of the literal backs. The NBA is 83% black players for christ sake.
I understand your sentiment Dave and Lexg in really being fearful that the sensitivity police will be this all present entity, but fuck, he just became the real life version of Michael Fassbender from 12 Years a Slave. I’ll fuck you, you’ll pick my cotton, but don’t you dare step foot in my house, or take a photograph with me.
That’s why it seems wrong for him to continue to make money in the NBA. He despises the very people who are making him money, and if you are not good enough for a photograph, what else are blacks not good enough for?
And everyone is focusing on him. Shift your focus for a second on what it feels like to be Clipper for a moment, yes black and white, but especially black. Think about the conversation those players need to have with their kids about the man that daddy works for. Sterling made it clear that the Clippers are his modern day plantation, and that’s why there is this massive outcry.
I can understand that you may believe it may be too swift and an over reaction, but fuck, it’s the irony of it all Dave. As a black guy, that is what angered me the most.
This poorly argued and rambling attempt at lord knows what would embarrass Andrew Sullivan.
This is largely an internal matter for the NBA. They were losing sponsers and players had credibly threatened to boycott the games yesterday. In other words, important stakeholders in the NBA had made very clear that definitive action was required to avert even great damage to the organization. Other owners were shitting their pants because Sterling made the league look terrible at the worst possible time. Anything less than the maximum penalty would have covered the league in a cloud of suspicion and confusion for an indefinite amount of time.
What I will politely call your argument about the supposed pernicious consequences of this action are laughable.
Columbus Short was not fired. His contract was up and was not renewed. They killed off his character in the season finale (or implied that he was killed).
“I do not recall of a case in which there was nothing illegal done in which private speech turned into a hangman’s noose of sorts virtually overnight.”
Yes David, you have trouble thinking of OWNERS who face such consequences (and kudos for the hysterical analogy to lynching!!! You’ve got a job for Fox waiting in the wings). Unfortunately, working people face consequences all the time for their speech.
Here, a man was fired for complying with a subpoena and testifying truthfully. Presumably he was fired because he made his employer look bad: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2014/04/supreme_court_weighs_case_on_p.html
Here, we see dozens fired by Wal-Mart for daring to organize and advocate for workers rights:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/josh-eidelson-how-wal-mart-keeps-wages-low/2013/09/12/283d72de-1b35-11e3-82ef-a059e54c49d0_story.html
That’s just with a few minutes of looking. But if Donald Sterling is inconvenienced, it’s dangerous.
“And everyone is focusing on him. Shift your focus for a second on what it feels like to be Clipper for a moment, yes black and white, but especially black. Think about the conversation those players need to have with their kids about the man that daddy works for. Sterling made it clear that the Clippers are his modern day plantation, and that’s why there is this massive outcry.”
I’m a huge NBA fan, yet I have mixed feelings about this whole situation and I’m not a Sterling defender. But surely everyone who was paying attention over the last ten years knew about the housing discrimination issues involving Sterling. The NBA turned a blind eye to it, but so did the (black) players and (black) coaches who signed for him knowing that he was involved in racial discrimination practices in his businesses-it wasn’t a secret. So did all the sponsors who turned on a dime when this became public.
The NBA is making this decision for purely financial reasons, but it would be interesting to find out the final vote on this. Surely they will vote him out of his franchise for public relations purposes, but a lot of the owners have to be scared about what they have said in the past or who they’ll associate themselves with in the future. How many of these guys are against gay marriage? How many of them pay their female employees less than their male employees? How many of them have been involved in unethical decision lawsuits, or sexual harassment cases?
Does anyone really think this holds up in court-I have my doubts that you can force someone out of private enterprise for conversations that were illegally taped and considered privileged and private.
The legal fight will be next, and it will drag on for years. Sterling loves litigation from what I’ve been reading. Does anyone really think a team owner of 30 years hasn’t heard any racist remarks from other owners over that time span?? That’s laughable. Let the subpoena begin!
You had me until this paragraph:
“The court of public opinion is unavoidable. And some bimbo – and if you are a pretty young lady of mixed race having sex with or trying to have sex with a married, unattractive, coarse, racially-insensitive billionaire twice your age or more, you qualify, except in very, very rare exceptions, as a bimbo – releasing a private tape of you being an asshole is not really so shocking in 2014… anymore than Barack Obama using the phrase “clinging to religion and guns” or Mitt Romney talking about “the 47 percent.” Was a law broken? I don’t know. Someday we may know. But “Caveat asshole” and all that.”
Yeah, somehow I suspect if the whistle blower here wasn’t a “bimbo” you wouldn’t write this piece. In both those instances mentioned above the messenger was not crucified. So yeah. Ultimately, this is all nonsense. A distraction from serious issues facing our country.
Please. You helped foster this mob mentality, Poland.
Sterling deserved to get bounced because he’s been a problem since the 80’s. It’s been known by all players just as long. Players are only embarrassed because it got out that they hadn’t done a damn thing about him for decades.
Sterling is known to talk about player as n****rs. He short-changed execs, constantly threatened to sue the league, tried to bribe employees for sex, on and on. This was all known. Fck, I knew about this decades ago. My god, his current team is only good thanks to the league, not his savvy.
But this guy’s ouster is troubling?
Have any of the other 29 NBA owners said racist or otherwise unquestionably offensive things in private? Should we be seeking out all history of this kind of behavior?
When they go after Mark Jackson or DeVoss for the personal beliefs, I’m sure you’ll be just as concerned.
No, you won’t.
Racist and anti-semitic speech is illegal in countries deeply committed to free speech. It’s treated the way we treat child porn.
“He despises the very people who are making him money”
I think you just described at least 95% of all business owners.
Oddly, Brendan Eich hasn’t been mentioned here once and yet wasn’t the right all up in arms over his rights to free speech? (…to which the left replied that you can say anything you want but be prepared to suffer the consequences if it hurts your employer).
People are held accountable for their expressions of free speech all the time–heck, teachers can be fired if someone spots them on a Facebook page holding a Solo cup at a party. It might contain some demon rum, after all, and we can’t have the kiddies see that.
When that asshole Bill Maher said that Sterling did nothing “illegal” I choked – Yes, you smug entitled prick, he actively discriminated against black and brown people for years and paid out because he woulda been killed in court.
The Clippers are not heroes however. Nor is the NBA. Nor the LA NAACP. Nor the scum at TMZ.
But this pure KARMA Sterling deserves. A week after the Supreme Court decided that rich powerhouses like Sterling and Bundy don’t discriminate anymore while we get daily editorials on FOX and AM radio about liberals always playing that phony race card…
I don’t really have a problem with the way the NBA handled this situation, this time. What I do have a problem with is the glaring inconsistency exhibited by the NBA. When it’s a white billionaire owner “aggrieving” a team or league of 85% African-American millionaires, it get’s this kind of punishment? But when it was poor African-Americans and Hispanics, Stern didn’t do a thing. I realize that Silver isn’t Stern but when he was asked about whether this punishment had any roots Sterling’s known past bad behavior he said no. Why the hell not? At least it would make more sense if it did.
The media frenzy is just as laughable. Where the hell were all of them doing endless hours of wall to wall coverage back when his housing discrimination was coming to light? Have you read some of the things both he and his wife were accused of having done? But again, that was about poor African-Americans and Hispanics, not millionaire professional athletes.
Sexually harassing unpaid interns isn’t illegal, either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong. So maybe you could cut Maher some slack for pointing out the ugly truth.
sasha stone already mentioned it, but oh the irony of an editorial comment on the consequences of institutionalised racism in sport laced with a healthy dose of completely unnecessary good-old-boy puerile sexism to make your point, the leykis-brained morons will love it
i’ve only read about this whole thing cursorily, but HoopersX and others seemingly make a good point here about the latent ‘classism’ rearing its head: be a gaping racist butthole to poor people of colour and ‘the media’ couldn’t give a flying shit, who cares, but degrade and demean people with money at your peril… (it sounds to me like it may have been far too long in coming because there’s nothing like the curtain of wealth and power to shield and protect a hateful sociopath from consequences for their actions, but this human skidmark has reaped what he sowed)
Sam, what does that awful but non-relevant link have to do with this situation? Is it either/or?
I was responding to “When that asshole Bill Maher said that Sterling did nothing “illegal” I choked” by pointing out something else that’s thoroughly awful yet perfectly legal.
Does Sterling have the right to say anything he wants? Sure. But the people who buy the tickets and merchandise that support his lavish lifestyle and multiple women can say “Eff no” to the team if they don’t like what he’s saying.
So now everyone gets to pat themselves on the back for taking care of racism and get back to fighting against “Obamacare”, voting rights and affirmative action. How convenient
Martin s… you are wrong about me.
And yes, the principles of freedom of speech and thought matter, even if the person we’re discussing is an asshole and a fool.
If everyone knew what Sterling was, as you assess it, then the NBA failed by not doing anything about it earlier.
But in principle, organizations with power over players and owners (in this case) don’t get to act like you and I, deciding to punish people because we think they are jerks. And the reason is simple… because the opinion about what defines “a jerk” can change. On a dime. It wasn’t long ago that being of color officially made someone less of a person in this country. And even this year, the Supreme Court has stripped protections against racism from the law.
I find that most people are comfortable dumping the rules that hold what we call civilization – though we often fail – together when something they believe is at stake.
I don’t really want to start a flame war over it, but having watched the entire OJ trial, I do not believe the state made their case. And I think that when people scream that only an idiot could not “know” that OJ did it, they are speaking out of ignorance. But everyone is allowed to have whatever opinion they choose. The court is not…. at least not in principle. I believe in that principle, whoever is in the line of fire.
Sasha and Leah… sorry, but the reason that is included is because it is true in this case. And moreover, to pretend that it isn’t is to be just as wrong as white-washing Sterling or the NBA’s methods here.
Don’t be the hammer than sees everything as a nail.
And Sasha, you are dead wrong. I would write this piece no matter who leaked a private conversation to TMZ. Geez… don’t I write about studios leaking stuff to journalists and pretending it’s news all the time?
If you think that I think that way, you miss the entire point of this piece. This situation, in which pretty much everyone thinks that Sterling is a piece of excrement and deserves whatever embarrassment he suffers, is easy. Big bright dumb villain. Who cares? But if we accept this shift in the principle, it accrues to non-villains as well… perhaps even victims.
Neither morality nor law works effectively when it shifts to match our taste or mood of the moment. If law or morality are a moving target, than they are meaningless… a fig leaf for hypocrites.
“Don’t be the hammer than sees everything as a nail.”
hey, how ’bout “don’t write a bunch of puerile sexist nonsense in your posts” (and defend doing so with ‘because it’s true’…good grief DP, GOOD ONE!). your comment above is dismissive and condescending, but i’m sure you know that already.
i wouldn’t claim you wouldn’t have written about this story at all if it had been ‘leaked’ somehow by a male person in some sort of similar or comparable situation/role, but i’d bet the farm your commentary wouldn’t include infantile gendered frat boy bro culture shaming/blaming language to describe a man in a similar position, that further HAS NOTHING TO DO with the point you’re trying to make, which is shaky at best: freedom of speech is a governmental concept drafted to prevent the regulation of/persecution for speech by the State, it doesn’t mean there can’t or won’t be consequences imposed for objectionable speech by the private sector. that these were comments made in private may have some bearing if sterling was being prosecuted for a crime wherein his expectation of privacy as a legal issue may be relevant, but in this case it’s highly unlikely the same standard applies. (and if you think your being cool or edgy trying to appeal to the simpering lexg faction by being a sexist tool in your writing, then congrats, well done – but for all your ranting about better journalistic standards, kinda shooting yourself in the foot there man)
Incidentally, it appears that Sterling requested the recording of his conversations due to his failing memory, and the tapes were actually likely leaked by Sterling’s ex-wife’s divorce team.
That “some bimbo” now appears to have nothing to do with the whole scandal apart from being the target of Sterling’s outrage. But well done for jumping to conclusions.
haha classic (hopefully you didn’t mean me jumping to conclusions, i know the ‘bimbo’ has claimed all along that she didn’t release the tapes so that was never clear, but it is now. hey maybe DP can now write a retraction for his unfounded, sexist comments. i’ll wait here by my bong and elephant beers)
Leah – if you thought the “jumping to conclusions” comment was directed at you, I’d say you have your bong mixed up with your crack pipe. 😉
In other news, my next international assignment is in Indonesia – apparently Wolf of Wall Street was only 30 minutes there due to all the cuts made so it complied with the censorship laws.
“And some bimbo – and if you are a pretty young lady of mixed race having sex with or trying to have sex with a married, unattractive, coarse, racially-insensitive billionaire twice your age or more, you qualify, except in very, very rare exceptions, as a bimbo”
A bimbo is more of a sexified numbskull. What you’re describing here is a gold digger, which isn’t in and of itself automatically synonymous with bimbo.
Here might be an amusing solution to the Sterling problem:
“I propose that we take every awkward, geeky, and dorky kid who has ever felt inspired by Yost’s Blue Ranger, put them in the same room with the allegedly homophobic producers of Power Rangers, then lock the doors and ignore the screams for the next 20 minutes.”