By TJ Wass
NBA commissioner Adam Silver is expected to announce what punishment Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling will face due to his racist rant caught on tape. Here is the full audio of the comments courtesy of TMZ.
The NBA league constitution bylaws allow owners to expel one of their members. However, any lifetime ban is “limited to a financial inability to run a team, gambling on a team, or game fixing.” Sports commentators speculate that the Clippers will be suspended for up to two years or at least until a new owner can be found to buy the team from Sterling.
After analyzing the spectrum of opinions offered by sports pundits, Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire businessman Mark Cuban is the NBA insider with the most common sense on the issue. Cuban has described himself as “a libertarian at heart” and that Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead “was incredibly motivating to me. It encouraged me to think as an individual, take risks to reach my goals and responsibility for my successes and failures. I loved it.”
Here is what Cuban has to say so far about the Sterling scandal:
“What Donald said was wrong. It was abhorrent. There’s no place for racism in the NBA, any business I’m associated with, and I don’t want to be associated with people who have that position. But at the same time, that’s a decision I make. I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do. It’s a very, very slippery slope. Again, there’s no excuse for his positions. There’s no excuse for what he said. There’s no excuse for anybody to support racism. There’s no place for it in our league, but there’s a very, very, very slippery slope. If it’s about racism and we’re ready to kick people out of the league, OK? Then what about homophobia? What about somebody who doesn’t like a particular religion. What about somebody who’s anti-Semitic? What about a xenophobe? In this country, people are allowed to be morons.”
Ayn Rand echoes these common sense sentiments on pages 126-127 in The Virtue of Selfishness:
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism…A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.”
Morons are best punished in the marketplace by customers and stakeholders. Racism is bad for business and hurts the pocketbook in our globalized economy. A significant number of companies have either suspended or terminated their sponsorships or advertising with the Clippers and include the following: State Farm, Red Bull, Kia Motors, Aquahydrate, Lumber Liquidators, Yokohama Tire Corporation, Corona, Samsung, Sprint, Carmax, Virgin America, Chumash Casino, Mercedes-Benz, and Amtrak.
NBA players and basketball fans are also following the civil disobedience tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. by displaying non-violent protests as a powerful means to pressure Donald Sterling to sell the team. Here is a clip of the Clippers wearing their warm ups inside out.
And here are members of the Miami Heat showing solidarity with the Clippers. Similar protests are spreading across other teams in the NBA as well.
The Donald Sterling scandal has been one of many recent racially insensitive remarks featured in the media. However, one common theme found in each of these cases it is due to the generational gap that is thankfully fading away with each passing year. Mr. Sterling was born in 1934 and much has changed in America over the past eighty years that he has lived.
The racial stereotypes of the silent generation (people born between 1925-1942) and baby boomer generation (people born between 1946-1964) are slowly fading into obscurity as the millennial generation (born between 1980-2000) becomes the majority of the voting population in America. Younger generations value the words of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. by judging individuals on “the content of their character and not the color of their skin”.
To prove this point, we see that “one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history, 87% of Americans now favor marriage between blacks and whites, up from 4% in 1958.”
Huffington Post writer Travis Irvine elaborates on this trend:
“It’s likely that liberals’ disappointment with Obama is driving this progressive surge, in the same way conservatives upset with the wars and deficits of the Bush/Cheney years drove the libertarian surge on the right. As millennials slowly become 75 percent of the population by 2020, we will likely continue these trends. The post-9/11 world that my generation has grown up in has been fraught with wars on terror, wars on drugs, wars on gays and even wars on civil liberties, combined with a ballooning national debt that we all will inherit.”
In closing, this quick clip of Family Guy parodying Marty McFly and Doctor Emmett Brown from Back to The Future sums up the generational gap between older generations who still cling to outdated racial stereotypes while millennials favor a libertarian meritocracy.
Authors Bio: TJ Wass is a public speaking consultant and an academic advisor at the University of Kansas. He received both his Bachelor’s degree in History and Master’s Degree in Communication from Pittsburg State University where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity. He was a speaking delegate for Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul at the Southeast Kansas GOP caucus in 2008 and has volunteered his services for organizations that respect the Constitution like Young Americans For Liberty and Campaign For Liberty. He grew up on his family cattle ranch near Parsons, Kansas where his family has owned a small business since 1996 that specializes in welding, manufacturing hydraulic hoses, and other machine shop projects.
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