According to a report by
espn.com today, Donald Sterling has decided to change his mind and go through
with his plan to sue the NBA. The federal lawsuit is for $1 billion, and blocks
the sale of the Clippers to Microsoft CEO and gazillionaire Steve Ballmer for a
record $2 billion. Donald will also take his wife to court for her actions in
the sale of the team.
But really, are any of us
that surprised?
When NBA Commissioner Adam
Silver took the podium post-SterlingGate, he laid down the law, promising to
rid the NBA of Donald. But so far, no fines have been paid, no games have been
lost, delayed, or rescheduled, the team has not been sold officially, and the
owners never got to vote to kick him out. We all applauded Commissioner Silver
when he took a strong stand to start, and now he needs to start backing some of
this up.
And you know what, I don’t
blame Donald for wanting to pursue this lawsuit against the NBA. Clarifier:
Donald Sterling is a legitimately awful human being who deserves every last bit
of what he has coming to him. If this is the last anybody hears of Donald, I
think we’ll all be better off because of it.
But look at this from his
perspective: if he wins the lawsuit, he regains ownership of the team (a
valuable asset, to say the least), gets to sit courtside at the games like he
has for years (necessary to feed his colossal ego), and regain the lifestyle
he’s had for the last 33 years.
And if he loses—he gets
two billion dollars.
How in the world did we
get to this point, where a known racist can be allowed to drag the NBA through
five yards of white-supremacy smelling foulness, and then win no matter what
the outcome? Donald Sterling himself has to take the majority of the blame,
because he is the one who has created this whole mess. But if you give your
unsupervised toddler a new box of crayons in your white-walled living room,
where does a bulk of the blame have to go?
The man who used to have
the most power in the NBA, David Stern, ignored the housing discrimination
lawsuits, the civil lawsuit by longtime employee Elgin Baylor, and the numerous
racist allegations that came from these lawsuits. For Stern, keeping the owners
happy and flush with cash was the only priority. Making sure a bigot didn’t own
a franchise was not.
As mentioned earlier,
Commissioner Silver has yet to put to use the hammer that he threatened Sterling
with in that initial press conference. He has only been in his role as the
NBA’s leader for a few months, but that is no excuse to let this racist saga
continue. This will go down as a key point in Silver’s legacy, but only time
will tell if it will be positive or negative.
These two men have held
the most power in the NBA, and power is key when determining racism. Any
bigoted action is only ethnocentrism if there isn’t anything to back it up.
Racism is a doing, a deliberate act to enforce one’s power over someone of a
different group. Donald Sterling was a racist because he had the power over an
NBA franchise. The Commissioner’s let this power go, and now we are in a mess.
But still, these are
individuals. The problem goes so much deeper.
Look at the structure of
the NBA as a whole, and you find some vast racial dichotomy. During the
2012-2013 season, 76 percent of players were African-American, and only 19
percent were white. Compare that to the owner’s who control the teams, where 97
percent are white, and only 3 percent African-American during that same year.
The people who have all
the power in the NBA are white, and the ones who are subjected to this are
African-Americans. It is easy to find connections to this divide and the most
recent NBA lockout, where the owners bullied the players and took their lunch
money. There is something wildly disheartening about the gulf between the NBA’s
demographic makeup.
The demographics are
similar elsewhere in the league, with those having more power being majority
white (think Presidents, CEOs, General Managers), and lower level employees
being African-American, with coaches falling right around the middle. This is a
broken system, one that allowed for Donald Sterling to run his team like a
plantation owner, an opinion shared by everyone from ex-player and executive
Elgin Baylor to Oprah and Spike Lee.
This is a structural
problem. Don’t think for a second that this is a one-time case of an old racist
who is stuck in his ways.
If there is to be change,
it has to happen at the structural and institutional levels. They wouldn’t be
easy, and its safe to safe the owners, the highest level of power in the NBA,
wouldn’t exactly throw a party in celebration for change.
If the sale of the team
doesn’t go through, how amazing would it be to see the NBA sell the team to an
African-American person or ownership group. The symbolism of a team going from being
known for racial hatred to reconciliation would be astoundingly significant and
influential for the league.
Then the NBA can begin to
look at some of the other issues, and begin to make structural level changes.
What would be wrong with implementing an equivalent of the NFL’s Rooney Rule
for NBA executives, requiring at least one ethnic minority be interviewed for
any open position. Or getting rid of the age rule for the NBA draft, a rule
that is extremely discriminatory in nature as the demographic it would affect
is almost entirely African-American. 41 of the 42 high school players to go
straight to the NBA were black.
But the first step to
racial reconciliation is to get rid of Sterling. The NBA has a Constitution
that allows the owners to vote out one of their own if they see fit. Have the
vote, get rid of Sterling, and don’t let him continue to hold the league back.
By, Chad Sykes
No comments:
Post a Comment