When Sports and Politics Collide: Racist Comments are Bad, but so are Racist Land Owners

Yesterday, an email written by Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson surfaced, in which the 10-year owner lamented over his team’s predominantly Black fan base. This largely Black fan presence, according to Levenson’s email, comes at the expense of White people attending games.

Levenson has since decided to sell the Hawks.

Levenson’s email brings to memory the saga of Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who was recorded expressing incredibly racist opinions, and, as a result, was also forced to sell his team.

Both Levenson’s email and Sterling’s comments respectively generated a media uproar and outrage from the broader community. Rightfully so.

But while the great amount of attention these comments have received are justified, that same outrage — especially among White folk — is absent in regards to structural racism.

Sterling’s saga offers us a great example. More specifically, Sterling not only slung around a few racist, pejorative comments — but he also systematically discriminated against people of color, barring them from being able to rent from his apartment complexes, the latter of which received very little coverage.

In 2006, Sterling was sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination, the feds alleging that Sterling refused to lease his Koreatown- and Beverly Hills-owned apartments to Blacks and Latinos. Sterling paid $2.65 million to settle these allegations. In 2003, Sterling was sued by 19 plaintiffs for the same charge, and was forced to pay over $5 million dollars in settlements.

Both in 2006 and in 2003, neither of these lawsuits received any coverage from media outlets, as is addressed powerfully here by ESPN contributor Bomani Jones. Even after Sterling’s comments circulated, the housing discrimination lawsuits didn’t receive much coverage.

As is often the case, Sterling’s racist housing actions are also a part of an even larger problem: racist public-housing policy. Jones addresses them well:

And, of course, racist-public housing policy gets no play in the media either.

As with Sterling, people will continue to show outrage over Levenson’s comments, but will fail to do so when instances of structural racism are revealed. For example, just a few days ago, Matt Bruenig of Demos used the Federal Reserve’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances report to calculate wealth gaps along various lines. In regards to race, Bruenig holds:

“The median White family has a net worth of $134k. The median Hispanic family has a net worth of $14k. The median Black family has a net worth of $11k.”

Bruenig also finds that White families own 90 percent of the country’s wealth, while Black families hold 2.6 percent and Hispanics 2.3 percent.

These numbers indeed deserve outrage, and outrage that is used to construct policy.

As a White guy, I have never felt the incredibly powerful and inhumane blunt of either structural or interpersonal racism, and thus I have no way of suggesting which one is worse. In other words, I can’t make the argument that the racialized wealth gap is more important than someone using the n-word; or visa-versa. Because of my White privilege, I lack the insight.

By the same token, however, I can wage the argument that well-intentioned White folk should not only be showing outrage over Levenson and Sterling’s comments, but also extolling similar levels of outrage over structurally racist actions and policies.

Ultimately, if one is outraged about racist comments, one should also be outraged about the racialized wealth gap, the racialized incarceration gap, racialized policing, and the continued existence of segregation.

That is to say: don’t just show up for the sexy social justice issues; show up for the policy-driven ones as well.

If we reacted as outraged at these structural problems as we do at outdated comments, we would certainly have a more equal and just society.