Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
The following essay is so rich that readers who are familiar with the sort of men who dominate today’s NBA will be forgiven for assuming that it was ghosted. I assume no such thing. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar/Lew Alcindor is an intelligent, literate, educated man. As a writer, he is limited to “sprints,” but this is a sprint.
About 20 years ago, Jabbar/Alcindor published Profiles in Black Courage under his name, but the smaller name below his (“and Alan Steinberg”) was that of his white ghostwriter.
Still, Jabbar/Alcindor graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from UCLA in 1970, during the reign of John Wooden, who chose players who displayed a level of intelligence virtually unthinkable in today’s NCAA, players who, I believe, did their own class work, or at least Alcindor did. Thus, no one has to patronize the man, the way white racial socialists did Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks.
Intellectual standards in this country were staggeringly higher than they now are, and Jabbar/Alcindor is a bright guy, to begin with.
However, his strongest points are not intellectual, per se, but matters of moral and intellectual integrity. He emphasizes what the MSM have swept under the rug—that a crime was committed here against Donald Sterling, a crime that can’t be ignored, simply because one doesn’t like Sterling’s racial notions.
However, that doesn’t mean I otherwise agree with Jabbar/Alcindor, or that he does not fall prone to certain common fallacies, which are just as common among tenured professors of philosophy, most notably the notion that America was built on the civil rights/communist notion of “equality,” and that “racism” is the biggest evil America faces. When, at the end, the writer brings “freedom” into the equation, it makes no sense, if you know anything about liberty or American history. Unfortunately, most Americans under 60 years of age have no idea what’s wrong with Jabbar/Alcindor’s thinking.
Take II: Having slept on it, I’m still impressed with Jabbar/Alcindor’s rhetorical flourishes, and his emphasis on the criminal act behind the “scandal,” but his preoccupation with “racism” is ridiculously hypocritical. If the term meant anything but “white” people, he would be attacking blacks more than whites, since they’re the biggest racists. Most blacks not only oppose trafficking with whites, just as Donald Sterling said to his whore of many names to avoid publicly trafficking with blacks, they’re not even afraid to tell opinion researchers that.
Welcome to the Finger-Wagging Olympics
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar @kaj33
April 28, 2014
Time
It's time to look at ourselves — and our collective moral outrage — in the mirror, says former NBA player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Moral outrage is exhausting. And dangerous. The whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Wagging. Not to mention the neck strain from Olympic tryouts for Morally Superior Head Shaking. All over the latest in a long line of rich white celebrities to come out of the racist closet. (Was it only a couple days ago that Cliven Bundy said blacks would be better off picking cotton as slaves? And only last June Paula Deen admitted using the “N” word?)
Yes, I’m angry, too, but not just about the sins of Donald Sterling. I’ve got a list.
But let’s start with Sterling. I used to work for him, back in 2000 when I coached for the Clippers for three months. He was congenial, even inviting me to his daughter’s wedding. Nothing happened or was said to indicate he suffered from IPMS (Irritable Plantation Master Syndrome). Since then, a lot has been revealed about Sterling’s business practices:
2006: U.S. Dept. of Justice sued Sterling for housing discrimination. Allegedly, he said, “Black tenants smell and attract vermin.”
2009: He reportedly paid $2.73 million in a Justice Dept. suit alleging he discriminated against blacks, Hispanics, and families with children in his rentals.
(He also had to pay an additional nearly $5 million in attorneys fees and costs due to his counsel’s “sometimes outrageous conduct.”)
2009: Clippers executive (and one of the greatest NBA players in history) sued for employment discrimination based on age and race.
[That was a shakedown lawsuit by Elgin Baylor. If anything, only whites have ever had grounds for suing Sterling for racial discrimination.]
And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. 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.
They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping.
I don’t blame them. I’m doing some whooping right now. Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.
[What “American ideals of equality”? That would be the American ideal of equality before the law, not the racial fairy tale that we’re all equal.]
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That’s the smoking gun?
He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. [He didn’t prevent them from getting housing; he just kept them out of his building.] It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?
[“Resignation” from what?]
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. [Actually, no. Romney was giving a private speech.] The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.
Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil. In our quest for social justice, we shouldn’t lose sight that racism is the true enemy. He’s just another jerk with more money than brains.
So, if we’re all going to be outraged, let’s be outraged that we weren’t more outraged when his racism was first evident. Let’s be outraged that private conversations between people in an intimate relationship are recorded and publicly played. Let’s be outraged that whoever did the betraying will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing with the Stars.
The big question is “What should be done next?” I hope Sterling loses his franchise. I hope whoever made this illegal tape is sent to prison. I hope the Clippers continue to be unconditionally supported by their fans. I hope the Clippers realize that the ramblings of an 80-year-old man jealous of his young girlfriend don’t define who they are as individual players or as a team. They aren’t playing for Sterling—they’re playing for themselves, for the fans, for showing the world that neither basketball, nor our American ideals [?], are defined by a few pathetic men or women.
Let’s use this tawdry incident to remind ourselves of the old saying: “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” 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.
[“Freedom”? “Freedom”? Hunting “racists” and freedom are completely incompatible.]
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time National Basketball Association champion and league Most Valuable Player. Follow him on Twitter (@KAJ33) and Facebook (facebook.com/KAJ
I appreciate your description here:
ReplyDelete"Maria Vanessa Perez, alias “V Stiviano,” alias “Monica Gallegos,” alias “Maria Monica Perez Gallegos,” alias “Maria Valdez,” et al. The face of multiculturalism: Aggressive, vulgar, and stupid"
Nothing sums up my experience with a large number of blacks better than aggressively stupid. They celebrate ignorance. It's a sign of great achievement to them, while it comes to them easily.