(April 30, 2014 at 11:44 am)Manowar Wrote: Yeah, but a litmus test for racism might be if you have a black girlfriend, like he did, might mean you are not racist, just my opinion.Correction: his black mistress. One of many, apparently, which he had no qualms about flaunting.
As for the actions taken against him by the NBA, they are acting within the bylaws that were accepted (indeed, ruled upon) by the owners of the 30 teams. Which includes Donald Sterling. I understand the concern over the fact that this was a private conversation that was leaked to the press, possibly with the intent of harming him. But there are a few things to keep in mind. For one, this is not a case where he blurted out the n-word or made an offhand stereotypical remark. He is warning his BLACK/LATINO mistress against "bringing blacks" to his arena, and demanded that she take any photos with other blacks in them off of her Instagram account. This is not exactly a man who gives a fuck about anyone else's right to privacy and "freedom of speech."
Second, the NBA doesn't have much of a choice in the matter once the tapes go public due to the content. They have a brand to protect, and the same rich old white guys who looked the other way in the past (when Sterling's offensive words and actions didn't blow up in the press) couldn't afford to do so now. They may even see it as an opportunity to portray themselves as sensitive on the issue (in fairness, the NBA seems to have at least three minority owners and one fairly young and liberal owner whose team is most appropriately named the Mavericks). Sterling has been a lousy human being for a long time, and a lousy NBA owner for a long time. The NBA knows that they can only really do something about the latter.
TL;DR-- racist shitbag human who happens to be the owner of a pro sports team makes nasty, disturbing racist comments to his young, half-black mistress just before he dumps her, and pays a much larger price than he anticipated. I --and apparently a lot of other people-- are having a bit of trouble working up any sympathy for him.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
