They might be loathe to admit it, but good cheer likely wasn’t the only reason so many people connected to the NBA were so quick to declare Tuesday morning the final chapter in Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s relationship with the league. The problem is, the league’s own mechanics all but ensure that won’t be the case. And that’s just on paper.
While it took just four days for the publication of Sterling’s
racist and misogynist remarks toward girlfriend V. Stiviano to be met
with a lifetime ban, a $2.5 million fine, and the league publicly indicating it’s willing to turf Sterling out as soon as possible, ESPN’s Jemele Hill correctly pointed out that it was, or should have been, years in the making.
“I didn’t look at Donald Sterling like a first-time offender,” Hill said shortly after NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s roundly-praised verdict. “I looked at him as a habitual offender. It’s just that we caught it on audio. Again, this is a man who, since 2003, settled sexual-harassment suits, racial discrimination [suits]. Anyone who takes the time to read some of those things that are in those reports, you understand that this was far deeper than what happened here.”
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The lack of the “morals clause” is likely why Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban initially called the idea of forcing Sterling out a “slippery slope”; if the league’s Board of Governors was that interested in policing its fraternity of sporting oligarchs, after all, Silver would have been granted the authority to fine a reputed billionaire more than $2.5 million.
Part of the league’s strategy thus far in the court of public opinion has been to Other Sterling, painting him as the One Bad Apple in the league “family.” Silver might be disconcerted to know that people like
Bill O’Reilly and his ilk have also seized upon Sterling for the same reason, arguing that the Clippers owner is the type of outlier that disproves the existences of white privilege or institutional racism. That’s what racism really is, the argument will go, often citing people like Sterling as a point of demarcation through which to denigrate activists as “race hustlers.”
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Looking beyond both the basketball court and the court system, however, the temptation will be great for a lot of people to follow the league’s signal and call everything hunky-dory now that Bad Guy Sterling is on his way out. The NBA would definitely not like you to remember or question
its efforts to not present players who look like “thugs.” Silver’s remarks on Tuesday also barely saved his young administration from being remembered for a
mass boycott by players during nationally-televised (and highly lucrative) playoff games.
But as Brittney Cooper
writes in Salon, it’s still dangerous to look past the cases of Sterling and
Cliven Bundy in the wake of the
Supreme Court’s hit-job on affirmative action:
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“Having people think before they speak is only a partial victory if racism just perpetuates itself in silence,” Hunter-Gault observes. Indeed, while we’d probably all like to believe that Donald Sterling will represent a bump in the road, the mechanics of the culture in which he thrived ensure that won’t be the case, either.