| Team owner Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers and V. Stiviano watch the San Antonio Spurs play against the Memphis Grizzlies during Game One of the Western Conference Finals of the 2013 NBA Playoffs at AT&T Center on May 19, 2013 in San Antonio, Texas (Getty Images) |
Sterling and His Black Girlfriend and the World of White-Male Racism
by Frederick H. Lowe
When Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, told his girlfriend he did not want her bringing blacks to Clippers’ games, he wasn’t talking to some blue-eyed blond.
His girlfriend, V. Stiviano, is African American and Mexican.
Sterling, who is Jewish, has a well-earned reputation for racist behavior.
In 2006, he was sued in a housing discrimination lawsuit that alleged that Sterling wouldn’t rent apartments to black and Mexican families in Beverly Hills and other LA neighborhoods. The suit alleged that Sterling had once said that “black tenants smell and attract vermin.”
In 2009, Elgin Baylor, the Clippers former general manager, charged in a lawsuit that Sterling was a racist. The lawsuit was dismissed.
So why would a guy like Sterling who had no use or respect for black people have a black babe on his arm and why would the NAACP repeatedly honor him? In an odd moment recorded on tape, he referred to Stiviano as a white Latina.
“Racism is an odd, chameleon-like force,” Randall Kennedy, professor of law at Harvard Law School. “Some blacks are anti-black racists. Some whites who look down on blacks generally make exceptions of blacks they happen to like. Racists can be conflicted and inconsistent too.”
| Prof. Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School |
The NAACP also is conflicted and inconsistent.
In 2009, the same year Baylor brought his lawsuit, the Los Angeles NAACP honored Sterling with its Lifetime Achievement Award. The L.A. NAACP was scheduled to honor him again on May 15, but after TMZ, an entertainment website and network, published Stiviano’s tapes of Sterling berating blacks, the NAACP withdrew its Lifetime Achievement Award and returned his donations.
So why would the NAACP go to someone like Sterling in the first place?
“Weak grassroots financial support of the NAACP has led it to enter into all sorts of embarrassing entanglements over the years,” Kennedy said. “The worst was with the death-dealing tobacco industry. That the NAACP was set to give an award to Sterling despite his bad record is a cause for attention and reform.”
