It would be insulting for me to act surprised by LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling's latest racist statements, from a leaked audiotape.
Sterling has a history of saying racist things. He is an established, unabashed racist.
But this audiotape, in which he tells a woman identified as a former girlfriend named “V Stiviano” not to bring African-Americans to his team’s games and not to post pictures with them (including with NBA luminary Earvin “Magic” Johnson) to her social-media accounts, at least provides more incontrovertible evidence of that truth.
It adds at least a little more weight to the argument that some way, any way must be found to muscle him out of the NBA.
Not being black, I can never know how personally these kinds of comments might hurt.
I cannot feel the anger at his words as viscerally, the indignation as forcefully. Nor understand as deeply the burn of his insult.
But I can know the comments for what they are: incomprehensibly backward and fundamentally wrong.
League officials may not be able to take away his team, but they can suspend him. They can fine him.
They can, at least, send a message: that for Sterling, and what he represents, the blind eye he has enjoyed will be turned no longer. That there is a straw that breaks the camel’s back.
That Donald Sterling, a miserable, 81-year-old man, has no place in the NBA.
jraymond@thenational.ae
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