Donald Sterling's "slippery slope": The limits of our new anti-racist consensus

[gollygee]

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/03/donald_sterlings_slippery_slope_the_limits_of_our_new_anti_racist_consensus/

I hope you enjoyed this respite from the Obama era’s near-constant fights over race as much as I did, because it’s almost certainly about to end. Once the debate naturally progresses past its first stage of blanket and superficial condemnation — and once we stop talking about how offensive Sterling’s comments were and start talking about whether he should have to endure any actual, tangible consequences for them — the uniformity of public opinion is going to collapse about as quickly as Barack Obama’s first-term approval rating among whites. In fact, we can see it happening already.

The first sign of a crack in America’s temporary anti-racist popular front came early and was courtesy of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. In the midst of the first wave of widespread anti-Sterling sentiment, before NBA commissioner Adam Silver had slapped the longtime Clippers owner and wealthy slumlord with a lifetime ban, a $2.5 million fine and a warning that his days as a member of the NBA’s ownership fraternity were numbered, Cuban was already following what’s since become an increasingly familiar script. He made sure to let everyone know that he didn’t think Sterling’s comments were anything other than “abhorrent,” but also cautioned against actually doing anything about them, saying that punishing Sterling for being an unreconstructed bigot would place the league on a “very, very slippery slope.”

(snip)

And as is almost always the case, one did not have to look very far to see the arguments offered by these plutocrats and conservative pundits echoed — albeit with far less sophistication — by the general population. On Twitter, there was a boisterous chorus of constitutional experts who couldn’t believe free speech in America had become so meaningless; and in the pages of the Washington Post, there were readers arguing that punishing Sterling would be a mistake and that it would be much wiser for all involved to treat the incident as “a teachable moment in race relations” because “offensive speech made in a private conversation should be treated differently than publicly conveyed hate speech.” Why make Sterling sell the Clippers, one reader asked, when you could encourage him to do so and, in the process, begin his attempt to “seek redemption”? After all, isn’t Donald Sterling the real victim here?

Taken together, these pseudo-defenses of Sterling hardly constitute a consensus of enough scope to rival what still remains the mainstream response to the Sterling recording, that he is an odious racist whom the NBA should’ve booted long, long ago and still can’t get rid of soon enough. But they do show that, if you scratch just a little past surface, you’ll find Americans aren’t actually as “evolved” on the issue of race as the intensity of the Sterling demonization might lead you to believe. For many Americans — mostly but not exclusively Republicans and conservatives — what Sterling said is to be condemned (“to be sure,” as many of the authors mentioned above like to say), but not in the same way that, say, shoplifting or speeding is, with material consequences. Instead, Sterling-style racism should be considered as a kind of extreme faux pas, as if it were essentially no different from texting in a movie theater or lecherously staring at your friend’s partner on a dinner date.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. It's a real worry for them.

Once it's happened for abhorrent racist remarks, the door's open to doing it for abhorrent remarks of other types, such as sexism or homophobia.

Owners are not angels, and Cuban is right to be worried. He might be next, if he gets recorded saying something beyond the pale.

Of course, that's the worry for the owners, not the rest of us. This could actually lead us down a slope in which plutocrats loose interest in owning teams, if they're worried that it might cause people to stop excusing their abhorrent views. What if we wind up with more teams being owned by cities instead of millionaires and billionaires?