This diary is intended as a reflection after days of reading the news about Donald Sterling. I don't have any brilliant conclusions to offer about what I consider to be a problem that is deeply embedded in the fabric of American society.
After Donald Sterling's interview with Anderson Cooper I am inclined to give some credence to his wife's claim that he has developed dementia. The original dust up started over what was supposedly a private conversation. It's plausible to assume that people are likely to say what they really mean in private. However, when someone goes on TV in an effort to salvage their reputation and protect their financial interests, you would expect them to craft their statements to meet those ends. Sterling starts with an apology for his previous remarks and then launches into a rambling attack on Magic Johnson. This does not appear to be rational behavior. Whether he would be clinically diagnosed with something like Alzheimer's would require a medical exam, but this does seem to point in that direction.
So if that is true should it have any impact on the way that his generally obnoxious and offensive behavior is regarded by the public? The picture of him that has emerged is that he has been a generally nasty sort for a long time and that if he does have dementia it is probably a fairly recent occurrence. Dementia has not turned someone who was the soul of generosity and compassion into a foul mouthed old curmudgeon. It has more likely lowered the level of inhibition.
At some point Donald Sterling is going to be shuffled off the public stage. Possibly his wife or other parties will go to court and partition for conservatorship. The ownership of the basketball team which has giving this situation much of its media value will get resolved in some manner. We are still left with what I think are important questions about what this controversy tells us about racism in America.
I am someone who does not buy the notion that we have reached a point of being a post racial society just because we elected a black president. Racism is a very active force in American society and in most others as well. It takes different forms. There is personal racism where a person with a racially privileged position makes negative and derogatory assumptions about all members of a racially disadvantaged group and projects them onto specific individuals simply on the basis of their membership in a racially defined class. This is what we see reflected in Sterling's various statements.
There is also institutional or structural racism. It takes such forms as economic disparity along racial lines, racially influenced outcomes in the criminal justice system, etc. Is there a direct connection between structural racism and personal racism? This is a subject of ongoing debate. Structures that perpetuate racial disparities were originally created by personal and cultural attitudes about race that largely went unquestioned. With the civil rights movement of the 1960s those attitudes began to be openly questioned. Some things have changed since then.
One thing that is demonstrated by the Sterling and other such media controversies is that things have reached a point at which a majority of the American public believes that it is no longer acceptable to make blatantly racist statements in public. That is an improvement over the way things were 50 years ago. Their remains a question as to how many people still hold such clearly racist personal opinions but are merely more careful about where they express them. I don't have a clear answer to that question, but I do think that it is more than a few.
There will be people who will attempt to dismiss Donald Sterling as some sort of aberration. The possible evidence of his dementia will make a convenient excuse for them. One question that all of this raises for me is what is being accomplished by the extensive public protest about him and his behavior. I think that some things are being accomplished. There is a continuing effort that has been going on since Nixon tried to put blatantly racist judges on the Supreme Court to establish the principle that blatant racism is incompatible with public responsibility. Some progress has been made.
What is less clear to me is whether this focus of huge amounts of energy on the actions of a single individual helps to advance a better understanding of racism. I'm not sure that it does. This is not a society that wants to look under the rug. If racism gets defined as people saying nasty things in public and everything else is somehow considered to be a matter of personal opinion, then things will continue pretty much as they are and the structures of racism will remain in tack.