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The firestorm enveloping L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling is supposed to be the kind of racism controversy everyone can feel good about. After all, the alleged tape of Sterlings remarks, reportedly recorded by his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, features the sort of mustache-twirling cartoon villain racism everyone can condemn without feeling implicated. Or does it?
As the New Republics Isaac Chotiner points out, there are bigger racial problems in the country than people privately spouting sinister garbage to their friends.
Sterlings past record of facing discrimination lawsuits, including one in a housing discrimination case that ended with a massive, nearly $3 million settlement (although Sterling admitted to no wrongdoing), and another from former Clippers executive Elgin Baylor that was later dismissed, hints at these larger, systemic problems. Long after the Sterling controversy grows cold, vast, racial disparities in wealth, education, employment, health care, social mobility, political representation and incarceration will still exist.
Im just saying in your lousy f***** Instagrams, you dont have to have yourself with, walking with black people, the man identified as Sterling says in the recording. You can sleep with them. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that, and not to bring them to my games.
Sterlings overt racism is of the sort that is rarely publicly expressed and, in fact, in his case, wasnt publicly expressed but even then rarely does the speaker consider his or her own remarks racist. Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher and conservative folk hero who speculated last week that black people might have been better off as slaves, insisted Im not racist. As NPRs Gene Demby writes,
