How many people are bigoted in one way or the other in this league? I don’t know. But you find one, all of a sudden you say well, you can’t play favorites being racist against African-Americans. Where do you draw the line?
(Huffington Post, April 28, 2014)
This, in essence, is how Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, defended the ownership interest of Donald Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers.
In fairness to Cuban, I should stipulate that he routinely demonstrates that there’s nothing he would not do or say for attention. This is why cameras spend almost as much time on him as they do on players whenever his Mavericks are playing. Frankly, only Donald Trump is a bigger attention-seeking buffoon.
But if Cuban does not know where to draw the line in this case, then every Black who plays for him, as well as every Black who cheers for his team, should draw that line for him.
Evidently, he has no problem associating with a racist like Sterling because he thinks every NBA owner should be entitled to spew such racist bile in private. For Cuban, ownership entitles Sterling to speak of his Black players as if he were a nineteenth-century plantation owner and they his slaves.
Except that he’s now reinforcing the unsettling fears about closeted-racists masquerading as White bosses, colleagues, and friends that I alluded to in my original commentary on this Sterling mess:
Let me hasten to clarify that the takeaway from this story should not be Sterling’s pathetic, hypocritical, misogynistic, chauvinistic, and racist admonition to his girlfriend. It should be what his admonition betrays about the insidious strain of covert racism that runs so blithely through this ostensibly non-racist White man … and others like him (We have to wonder now, don’t we?).
(“NBA Owner to GF: Your Photos with Blacks, Including Magic, Embarrass Me,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 27, 2014)
Cuban has put the NBA and Michael Jordan, its only Black owner, in an untenable position. After all, there’s little difference in the level of disgust one should have for a racist like Sterling and that which one should have for anyone so ignorant, arrogant, and insensitive as to publicly defend him.
It speaks volumes that Mercedes-Benz, CarMax, Virgin America, Sprint, Amtrak, Corona, CarMax, Red Bull and many more corporations have decided to blackball Sterling’s team. They did so because they clearly know where to draw the line when it comes to associating with an owner like him. That Cuban does not damns him more than he appears to appreciate. But he has now given his sponsors and advertisers just cause to blackball him too.
Finally, for anyone who thinks Cuban has a valid point, know this: Arguing that Sterling should not be forced to relinquish ownership for expressing racist bile he thought would remain private, is every bit as specious as arguing that Nixon should not have been forced to resign for conspiring to pervert the political process because he thought his incriminating words would remain private.
It is a given that people are entitled to their private thoughts, no matter how repugnant. But, once those thoughts become public (regardless of how), we have a duty to draw a red line. Because only this will convey, in no uncertain terms, that some thoughts so offend all notions of our common humanity that those who hold them should enjoy no position of honor or respect (as a private citizen or public official) in our society. Period!
Related commentaries:
Michael Jordan…Donald Sterling…