From The Ramparts

                                               Junious Ricardo Stanton

           Donald Sterling and the NBA Good Ol Boys Club

            “It’s the world! You go to Israelthe blacks are just treated like dogs.- Donald Sterling. “So do you have to treat them like that, too?”- Girlfriend “The white Jews, there’s white Jews and black Jews. Do you understand?”- Sterling. “And are the black Jews less than the white Jews?”- Girlfriend. “A hundred percent, fifty, a hundred percent.”- Donald Sterling Recorded private conversation between NBA owner Donald Sterling and his mistress.

            When the TMZ network released the audio of a private conversation between Donald Sterling the owner of the NBA Los Angles Clippers team and his girlfriend apparently in her home, immediately it went viral on the Internet, YouTube, wifi, cell phones etc. When TMZ released the audio it caused a national stir and a social firestorm. It became the hot topic of the day even pushing the situation in Ukraine off the front pages.

The Clipper players “protested” by throwing their uniform sweats down in “disgust” during warm ups prior to their NBA playoff game. The media played portions of the conversation over and over and folks took sides as to whether Donald Sterling should be punished in some way, some wondered if the Clipper players were modern slaves. On Tuesday April 29th new NBA Commissioner Adam Silver took the bold move to ban Donald Sterling for life, meaning he could not attend Clipper games, practices, team workouts, participate in the operations of the team or be a part of the NBA owners board of governors.

The fallout from all that exposed the convoluted relationships between Donald Sterling, Clipper Coach Glen “Doc” Rivers, the team players, the NBA, corporate America and the Los Angles NAACP who gave Sterling an award despite his known and lengthy history of racist behavior including being a mega slum lord and not paying NBA legend Elgin Baylor the former General Manager of the team. Baylor had to take Sterling to court in an attempt to get paid! Even Barack Obama weighed in on the fiasco during his trip to Malaysia thus adding more fuel to the fire and garnering more exposure for the story.

The corporate mind control apparatus played it as Sterling being a closet racist despite his lenghty history of openly bigoted actions and exploitation of black people from renters, home owners to NBA players. Most black folks suspect Sterling’s opinions are not the isolated ranting of a bigoted rich white man. Most astute people suspect the major board rooms and corporate suites around the country think and feel the same way Sterling does. While the corporate media picked this up from TMZ and ran with it, it’s interesting that Sterling’s whole conversation which was taped unbeknownst to him is rarely played in its totality. Sterling’s words while they may appear silly because they are so irrational and illogical; triggered a PR nightmare for corporate sponsors, the other owners and internationally for the state of Israel. Israel? Yes Israel. Sterling mentions Israel in his rant but that part of the conversation rarely got mentioned or scrutinized in the avalanche of comments and opinions heard on radio, the sports talk shows, the cable or TV networks or on the Internet. Why because most of the media and many professional sports franchises are owned or led by Jews.

I suspect this is the real reason the new NBA Commissioner who has only held the position a few months banned Sterling for life; because Sterling brought unwarranted attention on the good ol boys club of NBA owners, many who happen to be Jewish and he singled out the apartheid state of Israel in his remarks to his girlfriend.

 The NBA owners are a good ol’ boy club in the truest sense of the term. It is a small group of rich white dudes NBA great Michael Jordan is the majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats formerly owned by Bob Johnson the former owner of BET so in effect Charlotte is the token franchise. There are a few franchises like the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers that have minority partners. The NBA owners decide who they let in, who can own a club and which cities will get franchises next. The NBA like Major League Baseball has franchises in Canada and is contemplating expanding to Europe. They operate by their own rules, they govern and discipline themselves and rarely do folks like us get to peek inside the club.

When his girlfriend exposed Sterling’s racist rant and it went viral, it pulled back the curtain and the resultant exposure was so volatile they couldn’t sweep it under the rug. For this, Sterling had to be punished; not because he is a bigot, but because his exposed bigotry could impact the bottom line for all of them and reveal just how much of a good ol’ boy network professional sports ownership really is.

The other reason Commissioner Adam Silver lowered the bum on Sterling was because Sterling mentioned Israel and admitted it was a racist apartheid state. During his recorded conversation Sterling didn’t mention the Palestinians, what he was recorded saying was “Israel treats Black Jews like dogs.” When his girlfriend asked him if he thought the white Jews (Ashkenazim 8th century Eastern European converts to Judaism) were better then the Black Jews, Sterling responded emphatically “one hundred per cent, fifty, a hundred fifty per cent.”  When asked if he knew his whole team had black players Sterling said, “I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? … Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?” 

Sterling’s response sounds pretty paternalistic to me. A few days after this went public I received numerous E-mails, cartoons and posts equating the Clipper players to slaves; albeit millionaire “slaves”. This too was viral.  I think Adam Sterling decided to take such a bold move banning Sterling with the intent of taking the franchise from him because they didn’t want it to bring additional attention to the good ol’ boys club. Silver made the issue about Sterling’s personal racism to deflect it away from their corporate or ethnic mindset.

What makes the NBA owners a good ol’ boys club? Because it is the select group of rich white guys many who are Jewish. They obviously don’t want any racial controversy equating them with being slave owners or running a plantation system, which is what Elgin Baylor said of Donald Sterling when he sued him. Such comments might get people thinking and asking questions about not only the Jews’ role in professional sports ownership today but about chattel slavery and the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade hundreds of years ago! The fact of the matter is Jews are very prominent in professional sports ownership especially the NBA. They may not mind us knowing that but they don’t want their racism or the fact they played a huge role in the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade to become public knowledge.

“Most Americans don't realize either that the transatlantic slave trade was driven by the sugar trade. Sugar cane was a scarce medicinal plant in medieval Europe. But when white colonizers started cultivating sugar in the fertile tropics of the Americas, it rapidly became a staple-and a great source of wealth for Europe's shipping and trading powers. This New World economy of sugar and slaves-of vast, labor-intensive plantations-began in earnest in Brazil during the 1500s, according to historians. The involvement of Jews in black slavery began there also.-- Brazil. The Portuguese were the first to colonize Brazil, and Sephardic Jews from Portugal were among these early settlers. ‘In its early years,’ writes Seymour B. Liebman in ‘New World Jewry, 1493-1825,’ Brazil was built by Negro slaves (400,000 between 1570 and 1670) and the acumen, hard work and calculating perseverance of the Jews.’… -- Colonial North America. The far-flung Sephardic ‘trade diaspora’ in the Caribbean led ultimately to the founding of Jewish communities in North America. Before the Revolutionary War, the largest settlement of Jews in the colonies-perhaps as many as 1,000 by 1760-was in the bustling port city of Newport, R.I. Aaron Lopez, formerly a Marrano (Jewish convert to Christianity) in Portugal, laid the first cornerstone of the Newport congregation's synagogue in 1759. (The building is now a historic site, the oldest synagogue in the United States.) Lopez later became a shipper of legendary prosperity. Black slaves were among his cargoes, as his biographer, Stanley F. Chyet, has noted. Gentiles, however, overwhelmingly controlled the slaving business in colonial America. Rhode Island's Sephardic merchant-shippers were known mainly for their prominence in the business of selling oil from sperm whales used in candle making.” The Debate Over Jews and Slavery by David Mills

The fact is Ashkenazim Jews are prominent in professional sports team ownership. “In reality, the NBA like other professional sports leagues have been dominated by Jews for quite some time now.  Even the New Republic ran a piece detailing how Jews have played a major role in the league throughout its history. Considering that Jews represent such a small percentage of the American population it is interesting to see how such a large percentage of NBA teams have been owned or previously owned by Jews.”  http://www.dailyslave.com/the-nba-is-dominated-by-jews-not-white-people/  See also http://thezog.wordpress.com/who-controls-professional-sports/ for an even broader look at professional sports team ownership by ethnic grouping.

            I don’t begrudge anyone from owning a business a sports team or anything else, that is not my issue. My issue is the fact that racism is inextricably interwoven in the fabric of this nation and has been so from day one. So for the corporate media to act like Donald Sterling is the only one, that he is an isolated case is ludicrous. The fact is whites control professional sports and they rarely allow blacks to get a piece of the pie is the issue for me. For example as great a football player as Walter Payton was, the NFL denied his application to own a team. Payton had solid financial backing to own a franchise but the NFL owners all who were white said no. The great Wilt Chamberlain was traded from Philadelphia to the Lakers because he claimed Ike Richman the owner reneged on his promise to offer Wilt a piece of the Seventy-Sixers ownership. Richman wasn’t going to allow that to play out in the press  so he got rid of the greatest player in NBA history.

 Non-white ownership is a sticky issue the NBA and other professional sports owners don’t want in the limelight.  A report by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Professional Sports graded the NBA very well overall, but their most recent data (2012-2013) showed only one African-American as being a majority owner of an NBA team, Michael Jordan. The report shows there are twenty-four persons of color as minority share owners, twelve women with minority shares and one with majority ownership. http://www.tidesport.org/RGRC/2013/2013_NBA_RGRC.pdf  In fact they show slippage in several areas such as African-American head coaches, “In the 2012-2013 NBA season, the number of head coaches of color decreased slightly from the record set in the 2011-2012 season. Overall, people of color represent 46.7 percent of all NBA head coaches compared to 53.3 percent in the 2011-2012 season. African-Americans now represent 43.3 percent of all head coaches, a decrease of 3.4 percentage points from 2011-2012. However, it is the second highest percentage in NBA history. The number of white head coaches increased to 53.3 percent from 46.7 percent in 2011-2012. Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat remains the only Asian head coach, and has been for the past five seasons.”  http://www.tidesport.org/RGRC/2013/2013_NBA_RGRC.pdf  By that reckoning the NBA, while it is the best of the other professional sports diversity wise, is still a good ol’ boys club!

Racism is just as deeply entrenched in professional sports as it is in the rest of this culture, the facts and data don’t lie. “In 2013, 76.3 percent of NBA players were African-American. The fraction of African-Americans shrinks as we move up the management chain; 43.3 percent of NBA coaches were black compared with just 2 percent of the league’s majority owners (of the NBA’s 49 majority owners, Michael Jordan of the Charlotte Bobcats was the only person of color, according to Lapchick’s data). Likewise, save for one owner (Shahid Khan, the Pakistani-born owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars), the majority owners in the NFL were all white, according to Lapchick. In 2013, about one-third of NFL players were white, and two-thirds were African-American. One of the more interesting differences among MLB, the NBA and the NFL is their respective head coaches. In MLB and the NFL, close to 90 percent of managers and head coaches were white. The NBA’s top coaches were more diverse. Just over half were white, and 43 percent were African-American.” Three Leagues, 92 teams and One Black Principle Owner http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/diversity-in-the-nba-the-nfl-and-mlb/

What this shows is professional sports like slavery in the Ante Bellum USA is a white good ol’ boys club and they do not want to disrupt the status quo. So for the benefit of the rest of the good ol’ boys and their bottom line Donald Sterling had to go!

 

                                                 -30-

                    

 

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