The Great Thing Donald Sterling Did for America

So virtually everyone is outraged about the Donald Sterling Situation: everyone but me that is. I am absolutely thrilled… tickled. Let me explain.

Clearly Donald Sterling is a closet racist and majestic hypocrite, enriching himself off of a mostly black team and having a half-black girlfriend while secretly despising the race. And had the girlfriend not set him up we would not have any idea of the depth of his bigotry. So a secret bigot has been outed, and he cannot act in bigoted ways secretly anymore. So that is a good thing. But the great thing that has me delirious with “I-told-you-so-esque” glee is the absolutely united outrage at the bigotry.

If we look back a very short while, just fifty years ago when I was born, undisguised bigotry was not only the norm rather than the exception, it was the law. In 1964 it was illegal for blacks to even drink from the same fountain as whites. They could not share lunch counters, or buses, or bathrooms. If blacks were allowed at all at a basketball game they were huddled in their own section and entered through separate entrances with bold signs proclaiming “Colored Section.” Black team members did not even share the same locker rooms. No white would think of bringing “Niggers” with them to watch the game.

So what I am so elated about with this situation is how far we have come in my short lifetime, and the virtually ubiquitous outrage over a single outed closet racist. An example of how far we have come is that most will be quite taken back, perhaps even incensed at my uncensored use of “The N-word” even as an example of bigotry in historically accurate context. What the race-baiters are quietly and assiduously avoiding is that this is not an example of continued widespread concealed racism but is rather a profound exposition on the ultimate demise of racism in the country. While the race-baiters continually bring out the corpse of racism and proclaim it alive and well, the corpse is long dead, and it is beginning to stink. While the race-baiters will point to this single incident hissing “See, more covert racism” they will completely miss the point of how profound this is exactly because in a country of 350 million that it is getting so hard to find such persons, and that virtually all universally and vehemently denounce such thoughts and actions, and that so many think it so wrong not only to act or speak as a racist, but to even think it.

Donald Sterling is a victim of a debunked way of thinking that this country taught him. Horrific blatant bigotry and oppression were the lawful institutionalized norm of this country when Sterling was 30 years old. He has had 50 more years to learn the horrific wrong of that mindset, as most others of the country have. Sterling has been unable or unwilling to learn and to change, and time has brought it too light, brought him low and history will despise him for it. It is a dark day for Donald Sterling. But this is not a dark day for America: far from it. Eventually it will be recognized that this is a glorious thing for America as this incident is recognized for what it really is: profound evidence that we are truly putting the final nails in the coffin of America’s dark racist past.