[Update: On Tuesday, Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, announced that Donald Sterling would be banned from league activities for life and fined two and a half million dollars, and that the league would do what it could to force a sale of the Clippers. He also said that an investigation had confirmed that not only the voice on the tape but “the hateful opinions ... are those of Mr. Sterling.” ]
You shouldn’t have to be Magic Johnson to be welcome, as a black man, at a Los Angeles Clippers game—or anywhere. And yet one of the shocks, for many, of a tape recording in which a man, said to be Donald Sterling, owner of the Clippers, berates a woman identified as V. Stiviano for “associating with black people” and bringing “them to my games” is that the fight was apparently triggered when she posted a picture of herself with Magic on Instagram. (“Don’t put him on an Instagram… And don’t bring him to my games.”) Even racist white boyfriends are supposed to be proud of that.
There is a lot to talk about with the Sterling situation, perhaps foremost the employment conditions of the Clippers players and coaches, and how long they should be expected to endure them. But it’s also worth talking about how we let racism hide in a tissue of supposed dispensations. A Magic Johnson gets a pass—usually—and the people at the parties where he shows up congratulate themselves with the idea that their discomfort around other black people had nothing to do with race at all. It is, supposedly, because of “culture” and attitude, education and status. This presumes that it’s left to black people to erase the racial aspect of their presence (or absence)—that is, to remake themselves so that they fit in certain rooms. That is an unfair obligation to start with. (If Magic Johnson isn’t a respectable person to be seen with, how about the President of the United States?) But the recordings expose the fraudulence of the whole transaction, the whole setup.
The tape was first posted by TMZ on Saturday; Deadspin got an extended version the next day. The reasons the recording was made are not quite clear. Sterling is still, for the moment, married; his wife, Rochelle, was at the game on Sunday, and informed reporters, “I am not a racist.” He has also been involved with Stiviano, and appeared with her publicly. (The Los Angeles Times noted that Stiviano is “nearly 50 years Sterling’s junior.”) The team, in a statement, questioned Stiviano’s motives, and noted that the “family” was suing her, alleging that she “embezzled” money. That is a pretty shameless way to describe a suit Mrs. Sterling filed, according to the L.A. Times, to get back the gifts her husband gave Stiviano. In the recording, Stiviano—her lawyer has said that she is the woman—is referred to as “my girl,” as in when she asks whether the only option a person has is going along with a racist culture (“Shouldn’t we take a stand for what’s wrong? And be the change and the difference?”). The man said to be Sterling replies,
Stiviano asks, “Do you know that you have a whole team that’s black, that plays for you?” (She also notes that she, herself, is part black and part Mexican.) This is a reasonable question, in terms of the cosmic dissonance of all this; it also points to the number of people who are hurt directly by having to work with him, and the complicity of the league in tolerating him while marketing itself to, and drawing its talent from, the black community. But let’s be clear: it’s not the blackness of N.B.A. players that imposes some unusual obligation on Sterling to be a decent human being. The N.B.A.’s racial mixture does not make it some strange industry in need of particularly specialized handlers. (This is on him, not on the players.) What are we saying, really, when we ask how an N.B.A. owner, of all people, could say those things? It’s true but it’s not enough. Is the idea that part of the job is putting on a non-racist mask that somehow isn’t required elsewhere in society? Sterling, not incidentally, has paid $2.7 million to the federal government to settle a housing-discrimination suit alleging that, as a landlord, he avoided renting to black and Latino families.
He also prevailed in an employment-discrimination suit brought by the former Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor, who alleged that Sterling wanted “a Southern plantation-type structure” for the Clippers. The answer on the tape to the question about the players’ race might have been helpful, in that suit. The man says,
Does Sterling understand the concept of free labor any more than Cliven Bundy did? Basketball has made him a good deal of money, even though he is, by all accounts, a quite bad sports executive. For that reason alone, there’s no real puzzle about why a man who didn’t like black people would go into a business where he had to work with them. And perhaps he presumed he could treat his employees as less than full actors, because of who they were, and do so with impunity. Let’s see if he’s wrong about that. If the owners think they “make the game,” it’s time for them to consider re-making it without Sterling in their midst. (This may be one of the options the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, considers; the league is “investigating” the situation.) Sunday afternoon, the Clippers players staged a silent protest, coming onto the floor with their warm-up shirts inside out, so that the team logo didn’t show, and then leaving them in a pile there. They played, against the Golden State Warriors, wearing black socks and armbands, and lost; the playoff picture, though, is clearly no longer their greatest source of emotion or anger. “No one was happy about it,” Doc Rivers, the team’s coach, said Sunday, describing the players’ reaction to the tape.
Sterling does not, at any rate, seem to get the notion of respect. There is a painful exchange about what might be called racial bargaining in the Deadspin transcript:
“I met his mother”—he is nice, he is light. (Kemp, in response, picked “Black or White” as his walk-on music Sunday.) How are we still at the point where a woman is pleading that the men she is seen with somehow shouldn’t count as black? The mistake here would be to think that Sterling’s only problem was one of not recognizing extraordinary black people, or the proprieties of his particular business. That brand of politeness isn’t enough. Loving Magic doesn’t mean the end of racism.
Photograph by Danny Moloshok/AP.
