Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a lot to say about the Donald Sterling scandal, and not all of it is aimed at Sterling. The NBA legend trained a lot of his ire on a culture that made Sterling’s behavior acceptable, that coddled him because of his riches, while also questioning the release of the tape.
What is striking, however, is the way his words are being used by the various media outlets. Consider this screenshot from Facebook:
Politico, reporting on a CNN appearance by the NBA hall-of-famer, focuses on Jabbar’s criticism of the “plantation mentality” that is at the heart of nearly all big-time sports (the owners of teams are nearly exclusively white, while the players are not). The rightwing sites like Top Right News, of course, are focused on Jabbar’s critique of the media and the “grievance mongers,” and are perfectly willing to ignore what Jabbar actually had to say — which is that Sterling should lose his franchise, that the person who made the tape should go to prison, that the Clippers as a team should not allow themselves to be defined by an 80-year-old racist owner, and that — most importantly — we shouldn’t rest on our laurels and say we did a good deed in the battle against racism.
Instead of being content to punish Sterling and go back to sleep, we need to be inspired to vigilantly seek out, expose, and eliminate racism at its first signs.
Jabbar is very clear that his targets are societal racism, a culture that accepts this racism, provided it is tied to money. and a news media focused on salaciousness for its own sake. And he is (rightly) critical of the taping and then leaking to the public of a private conversation — a tremendous violation that undercuts some of the moral force of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s decision to ban Sterling from the game.
Jabbar’s piece is no right-wing or libertarian defense. He very much comes down on the side of those who demanded action, though he is critical of them for getting worked up now and not before. If his ire is directed at both sides, it is because both sides have for too long allowed people like Sterling to maintain their positions of power.
I want to add, by the way, that Jabbar deserves some significant criticism, as well, given that his description of Sterling’s girlfriend moved beyond a critique of her actions to the kind of broad stereotyping he otherwise denounces:
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.
Wow. Did she lead him on? Perhaps — though, how much prodding was necessary is open for debate I guess. But it is one thing to say she led him on and another to say that he was essentially powerless against her feminine ways and to compare him, of all things, to the Sambo character (I hope he was being ironic — the Sambo stereotype is of the lazy, irresponsible, carefree black man, a man-child with no sense of responsibility). Sterling is the villain, Jabbar restates, but how much of a villain could he be if she was the one in control here, as Jabbar says? It is, for me, a great failing of an otherwise strong critique of a culture that accepts the misanthropic behavior and beliefs of its oligarchic overlords until it is no longer convenient.
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Hank Kalet 