The liberal media's Donald Sterling race-baiting

By Selwyn Duke

Never let a racial crisis go to waste is, I suppose, the credo of the Machiavellian mainstream media. Since the release of the Don Sterling audio, liberals haven't missed a chance to play the race card for all its worth. One of the worst offenders is a New York Daily News columnist named Harry Siegel, who – in a piece of pablum bearing a picture of NBA owners portrayed as Klansmen – bemoans the lack of Diversity™ in league ownership and management. Unfortunately for Siegy, his points, which start with the Klan hoods, only get worse from there.

A man with a conscience (malformed though it is), Siegel laments that the NBA is "a league where three-quarters of the players are black, but fewer than half the coaches and not even a fifth of the league office staff are black, as of October, 2013, and every majority team owner except Michael Jordan is white." But there's an easy remedy.

Institute a quota ensuring that whites, and other races, get proportionate representation among NBA players.

This would make the league approximately 63 percent white, 17 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 6 percent Asian. The remaining one percent can be represented by Clint Eastwood's empty chair on the sidelines, and we can throw in a primordial dwarf if it makes the Diversity™ didacts feel better.

And why not? Why should proportionality go only one way? The bias here lies in self-righteously bloviating about Diversity™ when whites dominate an area while acting as if you don't even notice it when blacks do.

Of course, liberals would say that the players have earned their positions. But how do we know the owners haven't? After all, some individuals definitely seem to have a gift for building financial empires. This isn't to say that every rich person makes his fortune through respectable means. Heck, some people even make millions dribbling a ball around.

But it seems that liberals, prejudiced to the core, only have a problem with it when the "wrong" groups succeed. With the contraception con spent, Barack Obama (PBUH) has used his Teleprompter recently to rail against the male/female wage gap – and he wasn't talking about the one where young urban women earn 8 percent more than their male peers (because they're 50 percent more likely to graduate college; I don't think ol' Barry mentions this gap, either). Libs could also cite how NBA owners are inordinately Jewish, but that narrative won't work yet. And the highest-earning religious group in the nation is Hindus, but, last I heard, colleges weren't schooling mush-head kids in "Hindu privilege."

But talking about those things might be "publicly toxic"; you know, in the sense that Siegel said he's sure that Sterling is "not the only owner whose private thoughts are publicly toxic." No doubt. And I'm certain this is limited to rich white NBA owners, or at least white people in general. It also occurs to me, however, that people can develop a tolerance for certain toxins, such as when black ex-basketball players suggest all-black leagues or black civil-rights hustlers call a city "Hymietown." And, in keeping with the toxicological principle "The dose makes the poison," tolerance for toxins disgorged by whites stands at about .010 parts per million.

Then there are the millions, of dollars, that Siegel laments the NBA players are not getting, writing that theirs is a "league where the 360 or so athletes who, in fact, make the game, split its proceeds about 50-50 with ownership." Note that he also dismissed the owners, who allegedly believe they make the game, as "[w]ealthy men...[who] think highly of their own contributions."

Now, some might say that the fans make the game; after all, you earn zilch without a market. But what is Siegel's point? Wouldn't the proceeds split be much the same in the virtually all-white NHL? And how is that different from any corporation or successful business? A person doesn't invest his heart and soul and risk capital in a venture without the carrot of a possibly handsome return; not even liberals such as Little Big Gulp (a.k.a. Michael Bloomberg), Warren Buffet and Donald Sterling do that.

So it sounds as if Siegel is lamenting economic freedom, as if he'd prefer a Marxist model (this certainly would have the upside of not enriching men who dribble balls and pundits who dribble ideas). Of course, nothing is stopping the players from pooling their resources and trying to buy into their team.

But perhaps most telling about Siegel's article is what could be akin to a Freudian slip. A recurrent theme of his is that "we" can feel good about ourselves for taking the principled stand against Sterling, but there is much work yet to do. He writes, "We can all take a moment and pat ourselves on the back for not being as horrible as this appalling old man," and later, "Once we're done feeling good about not being Sterling...," it's time to beat the Diversity™ drum. But he also self-righteously states that Sterling's "obscene behavior...has been well documented" and asks, "how could this have gone on for so long?"

What this gets at is the phoniness of the left. Let's be clear on something: the "we" here isn't me. It's not most of you readers, the Heritage Foundation, Catholic Church or Southern Baptist Convention.

It is the left.

Notoriously liberal Mark Cuban, who now calls Sterling "abhorrent," said in 2009, "I like Donald. He plays by his own rules." (Translation: a lib who becomes a liability to the cause is "abhorrent." A lib who is getting away with it "plays by his own rules.") Black actor Leon Isaac Kennedy called Sterling "a prince among men." The NAACP gave him an award and was set to bestow another. And ex-NBA commissioner David Stern, who some libs now criticize for not only tolerating the owner but even rewarding him, is, like Sterling, a Democrat donor.

The "we," libs, is you.

It's not conservatives. It's not white people. It's you.

You anointed yourselves arbiters and overseers of acceptable racial commentary; "racism" is your hang-up, your defined One Deadly Sin, your great litmus test. Don't blame "society" – upholding your principles is your responsibility.

So most of the lib outrage over "racism" is, when not downright phony, motivated by selectively triggered emotion. It's a ploy used to tear down tradition and traditionalists on specious grounds and win the culture war. It's not for lib-enablers, such as late Senator Robert Byrd, who'd been in the KKK; blacks such a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton; Bill Clinton with his Obama-coffee remark; or fat cats who make big donations – until it's time to throw them under the bus.

As for Siegel, if he's so concerned about Diversity™, perhaps he could turn his columnist slot over to a minority. After all, the vast majority of columnists are white, Siegy, and you wouldn't want some future writer to have to lament, "how could this have gone on for so long?"

© Selwyn Duke