By Steve Sailer
04/30/2014
Josh Levin writes in Slate to endorse the spreading meme of Donald T. Sterling as Leonardo DiCaprioâs Southern slaveowner character in Django Unchained:
Yes, Donald Sterling Sees His Basketball Team as a PlantationItâs a provocative comparison, but in this case itâs an accurate one.
By Josh Levin
Donald Sterling has been banned for life from overseeing his plantation ⌠.
⌠I wrote that Sterling views the men on his roster âas tenants on a basketball plantation.â This analogy isnât just supported by words Sterling said to his girlfriend. Itâs been Sterlingâs modus operandi for years, and the NBA is only now doing something about it.
⌠As the New York Timesâ William Rhoden argues in his book Forty Million Dollar Slaves, âmoney does not necessarily alter oneâs status as âslave,â as long as the âownerâ is the one who controls the rules that allow that money to be made.â Still, I donât believe itâs fair to label any NBA commissioner a plantation overseer, an analogy that â in that case â trivializes slavery.
In the case of Sterling, the plantation comparison has less to do with dollars and cents than with how he views black people.
Itâs not just that Sterling said he gives his players âfood, and clothes, and cars, and houses.â As Yahooâs Adrian Wojnarowski writes, Sterling âhas an absolute plantation prism with which he sees players: He always preferred long, strong, physical players. To him, thatâs a basketball player: Big, black and strong.â Wojnarowski goes on to report that Sterling nearly scuttled the teamâs agreement with white shooting guard J.J. Redick because, in the words of a source, âHe thought it was too much to pay for a white player.â
Wojnarowski goes on to report that Sterling nearly scuttled the teamâs agreement with white shooting guard J.J. Redick because, in the words of a source, âHe thought it was too much to pay for a white player.â
Elgin Baylor, the Clippersâ longtime general manager, laid out Sterlingâs plantation mindset in a 2009 employment discrimination lawsuit. Baylor, an African-American, African-American, accused Sterling of saying he âwanted the Clippers team to be composed of âpoor black boys from the Southâ and a white head coach.â (In the years hence, Sterling did bring in Doc Rivers to coach the team, so I guess thatâs some kind of progress.)
Over the offseason, Sterling fired his white coach, Vinny Del Negro, who had led the Clippers to a franchise-history best 56-26 record last season, and hired the black Rivers with a contract of about $23 million over three years. Under Rivers' much more expensive tutelage, the Clippers improved to 57-25 this season.
If you donât catch a whiff of the plantation here, your nose is broken.
Actually, the only thing Southern about Sterling, who was born in Chicago, is that heâs lived in Southern California for almost 80 years. But, donât let that get in the way.