The Burden of Race: On Sports, Blood Sports, Politics and Society
In the novel of life, any book, essay, article, treatise, that we read is inevitably informed by time and circumstance. The book or essay we read 40 years ago, with our sophomoric interpretation, is very different from the book we read today, several decades later with intervening life experiences, having, hopefully, deepened, enriched and informed our more mature interpretation of the text. And so it was that I was moved by recent events to re-read Mailer's "The White Negro", (1957).
For, it is perhaps fitting to have another look at bigotry and
prejudice - even mimicry, the so-called "wannabes" - as it still
pervades slowly ever changing American politics and society, in the
aftermath of Donald Tokowitz Sterling's vile and bigoted rampage, gone
viral, and the NBA's recent response. Let us not forget his fellow
octogenarian, Robert Copeland, the Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, 82 year old
Police Commissioner, whose equally gratuitous, vile and wicked, "n--"
attack on President Obamawas also clearly, in his own words, race-based.
Neither Sterling nor Copeland could be faulted for being pristine defenders of "civilized values", notwithstanding the moral duty we all have to conserve what is best in society. Rather, they are the very antithesis of Mailer's Hipster, or the young, white, college educated idealists, who saw in candidate and later Pres. Obama an agent of change. In this context, Sterling more resembles a common robber, not so much a robber baron, as a pirate exploiting the athletic skills of those he despises, (his girlfriend's black friends are not even to come to the Clippers' games), and using them solely to enrich himself, and Copeland, an unapologetic racial thug, belatedly unmasked. What justice could a black complainant receive from such a Police Commissioner?
Financially, a Titan, Sterling - allegedly worth $ 1.9 bn showed himself for what he really was and remains, a racial Taliban, with a long history of racial discrimination. Indeed, he might well be charactized as morally, an unevolved, primitive, giant "white" pigmy, who drew an arbitrary distinction between "white Jews" versus "black Jews". He is, Sterling, not so much nouveau riche, as a latter day plantocrat, with the equivalent of a few prize studs.
All this goes to show that immense wealth is never a substitute for, Character, Ethics or Principle. Thus, the inherent Equality, of all God's children, "created equal" means nothing to a sterling (common "s"). This might be all the more surprising - strange that one whose Eastern European antecedents, tragically ravaged by the ugly, merciless monstrosities and genocide of the Nazis with their Aryan philosophy - should adopt and espouse similar such reprehensible racist views!
In fact, was it not also a few weeks ago that a 72 year old White supremacist, Frazier Glenn Cross, shouting "heil Hitler", in his anti-semitic hatred, went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish Community Center and a nursing home in Kansas City, and mistakenly shot and killed 3 Christians, as he clearly attempted to kill members of the Jewish faith? Was it not only yesterday that a gunman entered a Jewish Museum in Belgium and killed three (3)?
Yet, Sterling and his like, blithely ignorant of the Other's history, steadfastly advocate ancient attitudes rooted largely in their beliefs in the aristocracy of skin color!
Barack Obama might have been elected and re-elected President, but in many respects the fundamentals essentially remain the same. You see the basic ingredients of an apple pie do not change, even though the crust, the confectioner's sugar and other trimmings (like creature comforts) might differ from time to time, and place to place.
Thus, the argument that racism is as American as apple pie still retains some potent practical and intellectual force.
What we have here, stripped to its bare fundamentals is a historical context in which a White man, robbed, decimated and massacred the Native, then stole all of his Land. The White man then, thanks to the Dominican Friar Las Casas (and such others who initially advocated Black Slavery, like a sugar substitute, for native genocide), turned on the Blacks - having already routinely massacred and terrorized them, brutally robbing them of their lives, their labor, their dignity, their culture, and their basic personality, even ascribing them names like Pompey, Bolton, Ficklin, Lynch, Forde and Pilgrim - in some cases dynamiting or firebombing them out of their homes in the middle of the night. Whereupon, the Blacks often fled. ... As in Black Wall Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma 1921.. As in Forsyth County, Georgia (1912) ... Based on the historical record, it would seem that in many quarters "Nigger hunting" was a favored pastime not dissimilar to whites hunting the aborigines in Australia and New Zealand, the consequent ethnic cleansing and the wholesale theft of native property).
Many Blacks then repressed this aspect of their history. How does a nurturing mother explain such murderous trauma to an infant child, and shield her child from such personal psychological ravages. Their formal education then also pawned, spawned or passed unto them a skewed victor's history, whereby they had been the beneficiaries of Christian civilization, absent which they would have remained primitive and benighted savages. Thus, there developed a sense of collective amnesia, as to the Rape of the Negro, and ignorant of their History and more recently buoyed up by the election of a "black" President, some even bought into the hollow myth of a post-racial American society, happy negroes sadly unaware of the unreconstructed racial prejudice of a Sterling or a Copeland so deeply rooted in American psyche and society. Nothing else could explain the decision of the LA NAACP's Chapter to grant Tokowitz a life time achievement award. In a wider context nothing could be further from the truth than the myth of a post racial society.
The few experiences we have mentioned are not just unpleasant shards of memory. They are simple, historical facts, which sadly elude many. The Sterlings of this world thus fail to recognize that the starting point in the race for material prosperity and consequent social recognition has never been equal in America. Let us leave aside systemic and structural issues and the still tremendous inequality between the races in contemporary American society. For instance, a family might arrive from Eastern Europe, land at JFK and immediately receive social benefits and entitlements. Their support system is not only personal, familial, religious, but also systemic. On the other hand, another family, say from Haiti, risking life and limb to reach American shores, and pursue the American Dream may be detained, abused, destined for a time to live in an American jail, then summarily deported.
As Mailer himself pointed out back in 1957, "the cameo of security for the average white: mother and the home, job and the family, are not even a mockery to the millions of Negroes; they are impossible".
I read somewhere that Sterling was a lawyer. This only goes to prove that one can be trained (like a savage lion, a service dog, a dolphin, a spotted leopard - racists like a Sterling can never change their spots, or a killer whale at SeaWorld); you can be trained, but not necessarily educated. His lawyers have now entered an insanity defense. They now claim that, according to neurologists they hired, that he has dementia. This is all to convenient ... It all may well remind us of the nursery rhyme about the crooked man who walked a crooked mile, who found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile, he then bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse. They all then lived together in a crooked, little house. Sterling's house, however, has not come tumbling down, despite its shabby a-moral foundations. If anything, his worth previously estimated at $1.9 billion, mau well have increased. The Sterlings are now reported to have sold the Clippers for $2 bn. A cool profit of approximately $100 m, and one less headache. It appears that American society has a way of rewarding its own. Remember Imus who referred to those Rutgers "nappy headed hos" and Jiggaboos. After he was terminated by CBS, there allegedly followed a small financial gain by way of a settlement for approximately $40 million. The moral might well be that, for some, there is money to be made in insulting black people.
Thus, Dr. King's Dream, and the aspirations of countless millions mean nothing to such local home-bred talibans. It is perhaps a forlorn hope that respect for basic human rights, fundamental fairness, and common decency will ultimately some day, somehow compel a different conclusion, and such septuagenarian and octogenarian attitudes will not have died too soon.
Caleb M. Pilgrim
Chair, Legal Redress Committee
Greater New Haven NAACP
545 Whalley Ave
New Haven, CT 06511
In the novel of life, any book, essay, article, treatise, that we read is inevitably informed by time and circumstance. The book or essay we read 40 years ago, with our sophomoric interpretation, is very different from the book we read today, several decades later with intervening life experiences, having, hopefully, deepened, enriched and informed our more mature interpretation of the text. And so it was that I was moved by recent events to re-read Mailer's "The White Negro", (1957).
Neither Sterling nor Copeland could be faulted for being pristine defenders of "civilized values", notwithstanding the moral duty we all have to conserve what is best in society. Rather, they are the very antithesis of Mailer's Hipster, or the young, white, college educated idealists, who saw in candidate and later Pres. Obama an agent of change. In this context, Sterling more resembles a common robber, not so much a robber baron, as a pirate exploiting the athletic skills of those he despises, (his girlfriend's black friends are not even to come to the Clippers' games), and using them solely to enrich himself, and Copeland, an unapologetic racial thug, belatedly unmasked. What justice could a black complainant receive from such a Police Commissioner?
Financially, a Titan, Sterling - allegedly worth $ 1.9 bn showed himself for what he really was and remains, a racial Taliban, with a long history of racial discrimination. Indeed, he might well be charactized as morally, an unevolved, primitive, giant "white" pigmy, who drew an arbitrary distinction between "white Jews" versus "black Jews". He is, Sterling, not so much nouveau riche, as a latter day plantocrat, with the equivalent of a few prize studs.
All this goes to show that immense wealth is never a substitute for, Character, Ethics or Principle. Thus, the inherent Equality, of all God's children, "created equal" means nothing to a sterling (common "s"). This might be all the more surprising - strange that one whose Eastern European antecedents, tragically ravaged by the ugly, merciless monstrosities and genocide of the Nazis with their Aryan philosophy - should adopt and espouse similar such reprehensible racist views!
In fact, was it not also a few weeks ago that a 72 year old White supremacist, Frazier Glenn Cross, shouting "heil Hitler", in his anti-semitic hatred, went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish Community Center and a nursing home in Kansas City, and mistakenly shot and killed 3 Christians, as he clearly attempted to kill members of the Jewish faith? Was it not only yesterday that a gunman entered a Jewish Museum in Belgium and killed three (3)?
Yet, Sterling and his like, blithely ignorant of the Other's history, steadfastly advocate ancient attitudes rooted largely in their beliefs in the aristocracy of skin color!
Barack Obama might have been elected and re-elected President, but in many respects the fundamentals essentially remain the same. You see the basic ingredients of an apple pie do not change, even though the crust, the confectioner's sugar and other trimmings (like creature comforts) might differ from time to time, and place to place.
Thus, the argument that racism is as American as apple pie still retains some potent practical and intellectual force.
What we have here, stripped to its bare fundamentals is a historical context in which a White man, robbed, decimated and massacred the Native, then stole all of his Land. The White man then, thanks to the Dominican Friar Las Casas (and such others who initially advocated Black Slavery, like a sugar substitute, for native genocide), turned on the Blacks - having already routinely massacred and terrorized them, brutally robbing them of their lives, their labor, their dignity, their culture, and their basic personality, even ascribing them names like Pompey, Bolton, Ficklin, Lynch, Forde and Pilgrim - in some cases dynamiting or firebombing them out of their homes in the middle of the night. Whereupon, the Blacks often fled. ... As in Black Wall Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma 1921.. As in Forsyth County, Georgia (1912) ... Based on the historical record, it would seem that in many quarters "Nigger hunting" was a favored pastime not dissimilar to whites hunting the aborigines in Australia and New Zealand, the consequent ethnic cleansing and the wholesale theft of native property).
Many Blacks then repressed this aspect of their history. How does a nurturing mother explain such murderous trauma to an infant child, and shield her child from such personal psychological ravages. Their formal education then also pawned, spawned or passed unto them a skewed victor's history, whereby they had been the beneficiaries of Christian civilization, absent which they would have remained primitive and benighted savages. Thus, there developed a sense of collective amnesia, as to the Rape of the Negro, and ignorant of their History and more recently buoyed up by the election of a "black" President, some even bought into the hollow myth of a post-racial American society, happy negroes sadly unaware of the unreconstructed racial prejudice of a Sterling or a Copeland so deeply rooted in American psyche and society. Nothing else could explain the decision of the LA NAACP's Chapter to grant Tokowitz a life time achievement award. In a wider context nothing could be further from the truth than the myth of a post racial society.
The few experiences we have mentioned are not just unpleasant shards of memory. They are simple, historical facts, which sadly elude many. The Sterlings of this world thus fail to recognize that the starting point in the race for material prosperity and consequent social recognition has never been equal in America. Let us leave aside systemic and structural issues and the still tremendous inequality between the races in contemporary American society. For instance, a family might arrive from Eastern Europe, land at JFK and immediately receive social benefits and entitlements. Their support system is not only personal, familial, religious, but also systemic. On the other hand, another family, say from Haiti, risking life and limb to reach American shores, and pursue the American Dream may be detained, abused, destined for a time to live in an American jail, then summarily deported.
As Mailer himself pointed out back in 1957, "the cameo of security for the average white: mother and the home, job and the family, are not even a mockery to the millions of Negroes; they are impossible".
I read somewhere that Sterling was a lawyer. This only goes to prove that one can be trained (like a savage lion, a service dog, a dolphin, a spotted leopard - racists like a Sterling can never change their spots, or a killer whale at SeaWorld); you can be trained, but not necessarily educated. His lawyers have now entered an insanity defense. They now claim that, according to neurologists they hired, that he has dementia. This is all to convenient ... It all may well remind us of the nursery rhyme about the crooked man who walked a crooked mile, who found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile, he then bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse. They all then lived together in a crooked, little house. Sterling's house, however, has not come tumbling down, despite its shabby a-moral foundations. If anything, his worth previously estimated at $1.9 billion, mau well have increased. The Sterlings are now reported to have sold the Clippers for $2 bn. A cool profit of approximately $100 m, and one less headache. It appears that American society has a way of rewarding its own. Remember Imus who referred to those Rutgers "nappy headed hos" and Jiggaboos. After he was terminated by CBS, there allegedly followed a small financial gain by way of a settlement for approximately $40 million. The moral might well be that, for some, there is money to be made in insulting black people.
Thus, Dr. King's Dream, and the aspirations of countless millions mean nothing to such local home-bred talibans. It is perhaps a forlorn hope that respect for basic human rights, fundamental fairness, and common decency will ultimately some day, somehow compel a different conclusion, and such septuagenarian and octogenarian attitudes will not have died too soon.
Caleb M. Pilgrim
Chair, Legal Redress Committee
Greater New Haven NAACP
545 Whalley Ave
New Haven, CT 06511
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