The real tragedy of Donald Sterling's racism: it took this long for us to notice

The LA Clippers owner made his millions off racist housing policies. Where was the NBA and presidential outrage then?

Kevin B Blackistone

As riots exploded across America in early April 1968 in the immediate wake of Rev Martin Luther King's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson went on a Capitol Hill offensive to pass a law he hoped would, in part, quell some of the violence and best honor the man just slain. A day after King was buried, the Fair Housing Act was passed.

And in the nearly half-century since the enactment of that bedrock piece of civil rights legislation, which outlawed housing discrimination, there hasn't been a greater offender of it, perhaps, than longtime NBA owner Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Yet it was just this Saturday that there arose a hue and cry for the NBA to act against Sterling. It came in reaction to an audio recording allegedly of Sterling, who is white, telling his mixed-race girlfriend not to bring black people to his team's games.

Decades of racist policy renting housing in Los Angeles, which turned Sterling into a real-estate mogul wealthy enough to buy and run a professional sports team, didn't elicit any such furor. But decades of lousy Clippers basketball under Sterling's stewardship turned the Clippers into the butt of late-night TV jokes. The Clippers were laughed at for losing, laughed at for being cheap, laughed at for moving in with the star-studded Lakers, laughed at for being a second-class franchise in a first-class sports league.

more
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/donald-sterling-racism-la-clippers-owner