At this writing—April 28th, 2014—there is an enormous flap over what were deemed the racist remarks of Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers professional basketball team, in a telephone conversation with his girlfriend that has gone public. No less than the President of the United States has weighed in on the matter: President Obama called Sterling’s comments “ignorant” and “incredibly offensive” and “an example of how the United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation.” The media are in an uproar, and there have been calls for a boycott of the Clippers’ games and drumming Sterling out of the National Basketball Association.
I’m interested in the place of organized sports in American life, and there hasn’t been a bigger sports story in my memory. I was eager to listen to the actual recording of the phone call, which is online. I was struck by the contrast between what I heard on the tape and what I had gotten from media reports and from people I talked to. The audio left me with the impression that while Sterling, for sure, is no saint, the depiction of him as the devil incarnate based on this audio tape goes way beyond what reality warrants, and that it reflects a unfortunate pattern all too prevalent in our time.
Based on this nine minute recording of a private phone conversation with his girlfriend, who is of mixed race (the word is that there are hours of tape not yet made public—I’m only writing here about the audio that is thus far available), Sterling is labeled by nearly everyone as an anachronistic, despicable racist, period. No qualifications. Stone him. There is no exploration of what was said and intended by both parties on the tape—including suggestions that we hear from Sterling about what, from his side, he was up to—that I can find in the public discourse, nor any attempts to put it in the context of anything good Sterling might have done in his life as a human being and businessman, just posturing and self-righteous moralizing and unrestrained condemnation and musings about possible ways to rain blows on him.
Everything Sterling is doing and has ever done in his life, or what he has to say for himself, is now immaterial; this chat on the phone trumps everything. He heads a very successful sport exhibition business — the Clippers regularly sell out; he hired a black coach this year and all but two of his players are black, and he pays them salaries the rest of us would relish; he’s donated large sums of money to minority causes and gotten awards for his civil rights activity—all beside the point of the simple generalization chiseled in stone: he’s ignorance and malevolence personified, beyond the pale of enlightened and decent society. Read more