#donsterling

[carmnyc]

He just doesn't know when to stfu does he?! Someone needs to beat the shit outta this guy. #weareone #donsterling #clippers #clippernation #stopracism #noracism #magicjohnson #racism #fuckracism #thisisntamerica #iger #igers #instagramhub #instagrammer (at The Sky Pad)

[thedocreport]

FNL Radio #130 (5/2/14)

[rexsmith731]

Don Sterling

Over the past few days the media craze and top story headlines have involved Los Angeles Clippers owner Don Sterling and some prejudice/racist remarks said by him in private. I have nothing bad to say about him or his opinions. All I can do is pray for him and his family. Who am I to judge?

[artofthebeast]

View this post on Instagram

@lincoln2step is telling like it is .. #lincoln2step #donsterling #fuckracism

[the-hoodoisie]

STERLING AND US

"You're not our owner." Isn't that what the abolition of slavery was supposed to allow black bodies to say to their wealthy white owners who extracted profit from them? The slave plantation may be over--or, at least populated by another kind of non-citizen rather than the slave, like the undocumented migrant worker--but Don Sterling's comments let us know that plantation logics are alive and well. Basketball courts, charter schools, prison cells, and music videos are all sites where black bodies still accrue big bucks for a white wealthy elite.

  The Clippers players are not slaves; they make thousands and millions of dollars annually. So do hip-hop and rap artists. Sure, they all were once just kids who wanted to play ball, or to take a big stage, and "get paid." But what the Sterling incident reveals is that basketball and hip-hop stars are part of a still existent economy that is racially organized, exploitative, and inescapable.

  There's an online editorial floating around calling out the Clippers players as "cowards" for their play-in-our-warm-up-shirts "protest," advocating that the players should just not have played. My radically political imagination would've loved to see them cross that line. After all, capitalism, racism, and every other -ism, has always only found its limit against an organized body of people.

  Maybe the Clippers didn't get Montgomery-Bus-Boycott on that NBA-ass because they wanted to get paid and as little boys dribbling on park courts, they never wanted to become socio-political symbols in the first place. The Clippers can't stop being black, no more than any of us can stop being whatever identity we claim or is projected upon us. Like those players, we're all tethered to economy.  But, f*ck: When are we going to realize that we're also in ecology? There are duties bigger than our desires.

  Our social and political eco-systems are imbalanced, hostile and violent. Obama donor billionaires roam free after kicking their girlfriend 117 times while boys in Bed Stuy can't stand still on the platform without the prospect of police brutality. I don't know what conversations the Clippers had to draw the extent of their collective action. But I do know this could have been an opportunity for them to challenge the racial conscious and inequality of the profit-making schemes and private interests of our economy and at the same time stuff motherf*ckers with the interdependent relations that comprise our shared ecological reality. I want to come down on the Clippers, but they’re not alone.

  Sadly, when we see people of color find themselves chillin' on the upper rungs of the ladders of economic success, they DO NOT challenge the logics and power relations that fuel racial inequality for profit to try and transform them. Nope: They obey them. Obama signing over our health and land to Monsanto; Juan Rangel raping the families his charter network claimed to be educating for millions; or, [insert hip-hop/rap artist name here] who buy their bling with monies made from cool-ifying misogyny and violence in their music and selling it to the populations most affected by it.

  These enterprising people of color fit what Pharrell might call the "New Black." They are individuals who made race work for them rather than be bound by it to ascend to an impressive level of "success." The problem is these "New" Blacks or Browns are in a country steeped in the Same-"Old"-Racism.

  I don't see an end to economy and wage-labor anytime soon. However, I want to see what might happen if people of color who "make it" would start measuring their success not by the dollar "value" of their paychecks, but by the "values" they embody and propagate in their actions and words. We don’t just need to remind the Don Sterling’s or our ascended kin that is our backs on which they got fat; we need to never forget that we are all always indebted to each other. We owe each other everything.