Last night the Lakers beat Denver in what was yet another fine NBA playoff game. The NBA's theme for this year's playoffs is "where amazing happens" ---or something like that---but I want to know what is amazing about a bigoted sexist owner who treats people like shit. Donald Sterling is an owner in the NBA, and the NBA and all its enablers ought to be ashamed of themselves for allowing this creep to still own an NBA franchise. I know I ripped Elgin Baylor earlier for suing Sterling after being his house boy for so long, but reading Peter Keating's article was too much, and it sheds a totally different light on old Donald. Hey, maybe Elgin knew something that the rest of us didn't know all along. (Although his ass still should have spoken up sooner.) And now, thanks to ESPN the Magazine, we all know, and so it's time for Sterling to go.
The NBA fines one owner, Mark Cuban, thousands of dollars for complaining about the referees, yet they allow another owner to discriminate against minorities and sexually abuse females? That is a fucking disgrace!
Anyway, let's play a little game: its called spot the house Negroes and honorary house Negroes in the article. I am going to give you the first few paragraphs of the article and then the link to it. Please go through it and give me the number of these clowns you spot. For the record, I spotted at least seven. I swear these current and former mental slaves in the NBA make me sick to my stomach.
"It was 2002, and Donald Sterling was talking to Sumner Davenport, one of his four top property supervisors, about a tenant at the Ardmore Apartments. Already the largest landowner in Beverly Hills, Sterling had recently acquired the Ardmore as part of his move to extend his real estate empire eastward toward Koreatown and downtown LA. As he did, Sterling "wanted tenants that fit his image," according to testimony Davenport gave in a discrimination lawsuit brought against Sterling in 2003 by 19 tenants and the nonprofit Housing Rights Center. (That case ended in a confidential settlement in 2005; attorneys for the Center declined to comment for this story. In a separate suit, also concluded in 2005, Davenport claimed Sterling sexually harassed her, and lost. She declined comment. The Magazine has obtained depositions in both cases.) Cultivating his image, Davenport said, meant no blacks, no Mexican-Americans, no children (whom Sterling called "brats") and no government-housing-subsidy recipients as tenants. So according to the testimony of tenants, Sterling employees made life difficult for residents in some of his new buildings. They refused rent checks, then accused renters of nonpayment. They refused to do repairs for black tenants and harassed them with surprise inspections, threatening residents with eviction for alleged violations of building rules.
When Sterling first bought the Ardmore, he remarked on its odor to Davenport. "That's because of all the blacks in this building, they smell, they're not clean," he said, according to Davenport's testimony. "And it's because of all of the Mexicans that just sit around and smoke and drink all day." He added: "So we have to get them out of here." Shortly after, construction work caused a serious leak at the complex. When Davenport surveyed the damage, she found an elderly woman, Kandynce Jones, wading through several inches of water in Apartment 121. Jones was paralyzed on the right side and legally blind. She took medication for high blood pressure and to thin a clot in her leg. Still, she was remarkably cheerful, showing Davenport pictures of her children, even as some of her belongings floated around her. Jones had repeatedly walked to the apartment manager's office to plead for assistance, according to sworn testimony given by her daughter Ebony Jones in the Housing Rights Center case. Kandynce Jones' refrigerator dripped, her dishwasher was broken, and her apartment was always cold. Now it had flooded. Davenport reported what she saw to Sterling, and according to her testimony, he asked: "Is she one of those black people that stink?" When Davenport told Sterling that Jones wanted to be reimbursed for the water damage and compensated for her ruined property, he replied: "I am not going to do that. Just evict the bitch." Repairs never came. The shower stopped working, and the toilet wouldn't flush; Jones needed to use a plunger and disposed of waste tissue in bags.
Kandynce Jones departed the home she loved but that caused her so much grief when she passed away, on July 21, 2003, at age 67.
Two years later, Sterling resolved the Housing Rights Center case with a payout. The details of the agreement are confidential, but U.S. District Court judge Dale Fischer called the settlement "one of the largest ever obtained in this type of case." Plaintiffs were awarded $4.9 million in legal fees alone. In August 2006, the Justice Department hit Sterling with the federal housing discrimination charges he faces today. They portray a pattern of behavior far in spirit from the starlit world of Spago and Staples that Donald Sterling revels in publicly."
"Just evict the bitch"? What a sweetheart. It just goes to show you that if you have money and power in A-murder-ca you can be anything you want; even a bigoted jerk.
Read the rest of the article here.
Finished? Good. Now tell me how many you spotted.
