Donald Sterling, owner of the L.A. Clippers basketball team, has been banned for life for ugly racist sentiments. In this bad news/good news story, the good trumps the bad. Yes, shocking, overt racism at that level. But the reaction to it is, at least for anyone who was conscious during the 1960s and earlier, a cause for celebration.
In our country there are many reasons to be pessimistic about the trend of things. (Abortion rights, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.) But all the moral outrage being aimed at this particular rich guy, whose only crime is saying what a great majority of the country would have said or felt 50-60 years ago, is heartening.
Moral outrage not just in the tone in which commissioner Adam Silver pronounced the ban, but in the reaction in general, in the fact that this story has broken out of the sports pages and become a big story for American life in general.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
Racism is not dead; this is not a time for self-congratulations. But it is downright moving, especially for those who remember how it used to be.
There are no doubt people out there still harboring Sterling’s views. I was surprised to see one poll showing only 56% in favor of the ban (and that probably shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that those opposed are all racists). Rush Limbaugh, predictably, is more against Silver than Sterling. But in general one gets the impression that unlike 50-60 yeas ago, claims of racial inferiority are not popular, not part of the above-ground conversation.
For our society, the part that dares show its head, to exercise such moral outrage in the Sterling case is a great confirmation of how far we’ve come.
In this way at least, we have made heartening progress in a direction we seem as a society to agree on.
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