One person I've been waiting to hear from during the fascinating Donald Sterling controversy is basketball legend, former teammate of the slurred Magic Johnson, and former employee of Sterling himself, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Kareem, author of multiple books that at least touch on the history of America's troubled racial history, is also a prickly sonofagun, and I mean that in the best way.
Kareem's Sterling piece for Time is an entertaining read, regardless of whether you agree with his conclusions. Using the power of selective quotation, you could use some of Abdul-Jabbar's formulations as the basis for a Sterling defense, or at least a righteous plea for contextualization:
Moral outrage is exhausting. And dangerous. The whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Wagging. Not to mention the neck strain from Olympic tryouts for Morally Superior Head Shaking. All over the latest in a long line of rich white celebrities to come out of the racist closet. […]
[N]ow the poor guy's girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing "pin the fried chicken on the Sambo." She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee. They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping. […] Shouldn't we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn't we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen's privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney's comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn't steal the cake but we're all gorging ourselves on it.
But if you think Kareem's letting off the Clippers owner easy, read on:
I don't blame them. I'm doing some whooping right now. Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven't yet licked. What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn't just his racism. I'm bothered that everyone acts as if it's a huge surprise. Now there's all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above [about Sterling being sued multiple times for racial discrimination] has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That's the smoking gun? He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn't want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn't we have all called for his resignation back then?
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