Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
2014
I knew it, as sure as rain is wet, that there would be some dissenters pushing back against any punitive censuring of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling for comments made in private. The right of free speech,
just-boycott-hit-‘em-in-the-purse crowd typically reduced the social infraction response debate to dollars and cents, to supply and demand, to vote with your wallet. Certainly, Sterling can hold any views he chooses, as long as those views do not violate criminal law or run counter to the contractual social, business, spiritual and/or religious tenets he has assumed. The penalizing authority for actionable offenses would rest first with the most directly associated hierarchy so vested. In this case, it is the NBA League, starting with Commissioner Adam Silver. Sterling doesn’t stand alone as a sole sports team owner accountable only to himself. The league as a whole, either by written charter or common consensus, defines what is acceptable or not in behavior or attitude for players and owners. Franchise ownership is not sovereign ownership, so free enterprise, corporations-are-persons spielers don’t waste valuable air on me, ‘cause I ain’t buying it.
Aside from business concerns and rights, there is the underlying social contract that goes with American citizenship. Last I heard America is a democracy founded on equality. The last I heard securing the people’s “inalienable rights” is the germ of democracy. If you’re making money, accruing prestige, gaining power—enabling you to acquire even more of the same—under the influential auspices of American national identity and puissance, then yeah, what you say in public and private counts. If you profess views contrary to the principles of this nation, thus failing to meet the requirements of your citizenship, you are practicing American under false pretenses, and are therefore in forfeiture of your rights to do business as an American. You forfeit your rights to our labor pools, our transportation systems, our roads and commerce, our protections under the law. You forfeit your right to enrich yourself off of the labor of talented African American athletes who you hold contemptibly as inferior. You are therefore “un-American,” unenlightened, vile and stupid.
It is not about free enterprise or free speech, about playoffs and championships, about the monetary compensation of “franchise” players. It’s about human commodification masqueraded as equality. It’s about waving the American Flag all the way to the bank, while defecating all over it.
Carl
Addendum:
What we have is a defining moment of what we propose America is as a nation and what principles define her and us as her citizens. These defining moments come all the time in our personal lives and in our collective lives as citizens and the symbolic soul of the country. The fact that all of us probably harbor to a certain degree—momentarily if not in general—race-centric traits formed by a prideful sense of superiority in certain characteristics of our own roots does not make us all equal in perpetuating systemic racism in the country. It is systemic racism flowing through our institutions and sectors of power that continues the edifice of inequality embedded in American culture. One’s station in life and the influence that flows from it is not incidental—just one more fool acting out (as we all are at times). Power moves people and institutions. Attitudes of those in high station find their way into the power base of the nation. What they say in private is not without relevancy. By virtue of their station, their private attitudes inevitably get reflected in the power base, trickling down to the least of us in either advantages or obstacles to equality and opportunity.
We all have by birth or earned right the obligation to be good citizens of the USA—a nation purported to be founded by and existing for the moral-principled ideal of equality and non-discrimination. Sterling failed his duty as an American citizen by employing talented African American athletes, while viewing them as a cash cow investment to be otherwise segregated against socially and professionally outside of their commodification as instruments of capital wealth. Thus, by virtue of Sterling’s discriminatory attitudes, his employment and compensation of African American players fails to meet the obligations of doing business as an American. Since the NBA alleges to embrace, by charter or consensus, the founding American principles of equality, its censuring (punitively in this case) of Sterling for failing to meet owner requirements is the proper message. It defines satisfactorily who we are as a nation and citizens thereof. While none of us necessarily live up to our American founding legacy constantly, it is important to emphatically state at defining junctures in time and history who and what we stand for. We can’t embrace literally, what we don’t embrace symbolically.
Tabernacle of Equal but Not
4/29/14