It's Bigger than Donald Sterling

I’m sure that if you didn’t know who the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers is, you do now.  Donald Sterling has garnered a colossal amount of media attention for his recorded comments about black people attending his games and being seen with his mistress in photos.  At the risk of story fatigue by writing about it, what you won’t read in this post is a rant berating him because my blog is not a bully pulpit of righteousness.  Did I find his words insensitive, offensive, and discriminatory in a racial nature?  Of course.  But I ask you to think deeper about this beyond just the incident itself.

You see here we are again.  Yes, again.  A high profile person has a discriminatory rant of a racial nature.  A simple Google search of “racist celebrity comments” reads like a celebrity party list.  I say this not to mitigate the serious nature of the comments, because it truly is a serious matter and highly offensive.  Do not misinterpret my message.   However, this is unfortunately not the first or the last time we will see or hear of something like this happening.  That doesn’t condone the behavior but it is a very serious reminder that although we as a nation have come a long way, we collectively have a very long way to go when it comes to race relations, and the mindset that some people have towards people of different races.

Now I’m not talking about how more people need to be more politically correct.  Political correctness has transformed into people learning how to sugar coat what they really think in some sort of guised verbiage.  Typically behind closed doors that political correctness flies out the window and true colors are revealed.  Instead, I’m talking about how people’s mentality and hostile attitude towards those who are ethnically and culturally different from them in a derogatory, and discriminatory manner needs to change.

Sometimes as Americans we have a historical amnesia, or intentionally selective memory about our nation’s history.  Sure the recordings and pictures are in black and white, but the civil rights movement (in its most commonly recognized form) was during the generation of my parents.  Therefore we are not as far removed from discriminatory words, acts, institutionalized practices or deeply held beliefs as we would like to think.  In fact it’s not that difficult to find some that still exist today, just in a less overt form.

The fact that you don’t see water fountains, bathrooms, or lunch counters that say “White’s Only” and “Colored People Only” does not mean that we’ve arrived to some sort of utopian post-racial safe haven.  It feels like we’ve progressed a lot, and admittedly there have been major strides made.  However, for every one high profile person that gets an infamous spotlight placed on them for their behavior or comments, there are hundreds of others in our own backyard communities who have said something of a similar severity, or worse.  Remember the backlash of tweets and Facebook posts from everyday Americans when the Miss America winner was of an Indian-American heritage?  Or the Cheerios ad that had an interracial couple, and a bi-racial child?  What about the comments about our Nation’s President interrupting a football game with an important press conference?  The list of events where non-celebrities have lashed out racially is longer than this post, especially with the veil of social media that many folks coward behind.

I do believe Donald Sterling has received the appropriate sanctions from the NBA.  It goes to show that while we do have the freedom of speech in this nation, that speech has consequences attached to it.  Like all decisions in life, there are implications that follow what we do or say.  Having said this, the Donald Sterling fiasco is just a microcosm of a larger picture.  As I watch people who are outraged about this event post about it on social media outlets, and I hear people discuss it I see a lot of outrage and anger.  But if we are truly outraged and angry about it, let’s not let this just slip into just another high profile offensive incident. 

We should harness that energy of anger about Donald Sterling's comments and make an effort to constantly educate ourselves and others about the effects of racism, and call people out when they make derogatory comments.  We should also take this beyond just race, and look at the effects of all ‘–isms’ against marginalized groups and learn about how this affects the everyday lives of the people in our communities and do something about it.  We should not be a bystander, and take an active role to engage in conversations with those in our own communities to talk about and try to change discriminatory practices, and derogatory comments. 

I’ve trained numerous staffs on issues of diversity, as well as handled incidents of derogatory slurs scrawled on items and said on university campuses.  While engaging in dialogues for those various training sessions or instances of bias and harassment, the greatest lesson I’ve learned is that our work in developing ourselves and engaging others on the topics of diversity is never fully complete.  Even if you are a nationally recognized trainer, there is always more work that can be done, and more education that can be acquired on those topics.

So once the sensationalism of this quiets down, and we move on with our lives, let’s use this incident as a catalyst for change and not let it slip away into our consciousness as just another incident.  Let something good come of this awful incident in our own communities.