A Sterling Silver decision
“I am banning Mr. Sterling for life from any association with the Clippers organization of the NBA.”
聽— NBA Commissioner Adam Silver
There is a day I’ll never forget.
My mother stood on the front porch of our house on Coolspring Street, and the son of a Uniontown alderman told her, “My father told me to tell you that he doesn’t want me (and a mutual friend) to walk to school with Allen, because he’s colored.”
Mothers shouldn’t be forced to have the look on their face that mine did that day. My parents, to that point, had shielded me from the reality that America’s lofty promises of racial equality, were just words — fit only for history books.
My mother was powerless to inoculate me from the ugliness of racism. She certainly knew I’d experience it sooner-or-later. The sad look in her eyes told me I’d been confronted by it much too soon. But that was 1953. I was five years old.
Racism, I’m told, was cured by the election of the nation’s first black president. I think they call it a “post-racial society.”
I guess everybody has been aware of that, except washed-up rocker Ted Nugent, who referred to the president as a “subhuman mongrel” two months ago.
There’s the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who’s now vowing to fight for the state’s 2011 photo ID law, despite the fact that a federal court judge last week ruled it’s a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman sided with opponents of the law, claiming it “imposes an unfair burden on poor and minority voters.” Who does that judge think he is? We’re supposed living in a “post-racial society.”
When TV chef Paula Deen admitted in a deposition that she’d repeatedly used the N-word, maybe she hadn’t gotten the “post-racial society” memo, either.
There’s no shortage of incidents that serve as reminders that race is still a serious problem in this country.
Just ask Paul Ryan, the Republican lawmaker from Wisconsin. He probably should have bitten his tongue the day he decided to claim, “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, and just generations of men not thinking about working or learning the value of work.”
Here’s a legislator who worked all of 159 days last year and who’s only authored a handful of bills during his two dozen years in Congress, questioning the work ethic of men in the “inner city?” That’s a lot of nerve.
It took even more nerve for that welfare rancher Cliven Bundy to take a stand against paying a million dollars in back taxes to the federal government, while he publicly “wondered” if “the negro” might be “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under (skillet calling the kettle black) government subsidy?”
That was so strong that I think some of his staunchest right-wing supporters even fled to Harlem.
But the poster-boy for the PRE-post-racial society — Donald Tokowitz, er, Sterling. (Tokowitz was his last name until he changed it to Sterling.)
Within hours after the release of those now-famous taped recordings, in which he forbade his young girlfriend from associating with black people (He gets one point for not using the phrase “the negro”), there was a near-universal outcry.
NBA legend Magic Johnson was one of the people Sterling didn’t want his girlfriend to appear with in public. He was the first of the high-profile people to denounce him — and with due outrage.
By the time NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced his decision to ban and fine Sterling, there was a national sigh of relief. That’s heartening.
There’s no doubt that race-relations have improved a great deal since that day I was confronted by racial insensitivity when I was in first grade. Sterling and the others have shown that racism is an unhealed scab that still festers, even among the well-heeled.
We’ve come a long way, as they say, but we have such a long way to go.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net