Image courtesy of funny-pictures.picphotos.net.
We are a few weeks removed from the Donald Sterling situation, and I am finally going to address it, from the perspective of a 21-year-old soon to be college graduate.
Unless you have been living under a rock, then you are very familiar with the Donald Sterling situation. But let’s assume that you have been living under a rock, for conversational purposes.
Donald Sterling is of course the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers (for now) that was recorded making racist remarks in a conversation with his…..girlfriend? Yeah, we will call her that for now. As a result of the private comments made public, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling from the league for life, and he will begin the process of forcing Sterling to sell the Clippers.
Initially, when the recordings first came out, I was not too surprised at the sentiments expressed by Sterling, mainly because I am pretty sure that he is not the only owner of an organization or company that has these modern day slave-like mentalities and views. The only thing that was surprising was that Sterling was recorded saying those comments, and to an extent, that wasn’t surprising either considering he is old and not too familiar with technology, I would imagine.
Sterling has a history of being prejudice, and that history reared its ugly head thanks to the audio recording. Yes, the woman who recorded him is no Saint, and quite frankly, she has a set of her own issues because she seems very accepting of a man who looks at her as nothing better than someone to sleep with. AND, she also seems to have some deep self-hate if she was willing to be with someone who blatantly disrespects her and her race, or races considering she is mixed with Black and Mexican. But I digress on her.
What the audio recording did was give tangible proof of Sterling’s mindset and beliefs. As we learned when the situation hit the limelight, Sterling has been sued in the past for prejudicial practices, but he settled out of those cases, largely brushing them under the rug with the exception of a few diligent journalists who were not willing to let him off the hook that easily. But with the new-found evidence that proves that he is indeed racist, the league was finally able to put him out, even though actions against him should have been taken a long time ago.
As an African American male, I know how Sterling would view someone like me. I would be nothing more than a “good ol boy” that was just good enough to work under him or make money for him, but not good enough to attend his games or have a public relationship with him, or his side piece. In present day 2014, that is sad, but it is okay because I don’t have to work for him, and I don’t have to take that kind of treatment from a man like him; and neither do the members of the Clippers organization. Had the league not taken substantial actions against Sterling, I would like to believe that not only would the Clippers players had protested, but all members of the NBA community would have joined them in solidarity. Thankfully, with it being playoff season, those actions were not needed.
As far as I am concerned, Sterling’s hate and disdain for minorities is only going to hurt himself. For a man like that, all you can do is pray that he has a change of heart, but after 80 years on this earth, I doubt that will happen.
The Introvert 
Michael Brown and the Black Man’s (boy’s) life in America
Another day, another young Black male gunned down senselessly. At this point, as sad as it sounds, this is something that I am almost becoming used to, especially with all of the deaths in recent months and years. But something about this particular situation was a little bit different than the other cases, which prompted me to write this blog.
I learned about the Michael Brown situation while browsing Twitter Saturday afternoon. I saw several people tweet and retweet that a young Black male had been shot and killed in Ferguson, St. Louis by the police. I conducted my own research, and what I learned about the story greatly saddened me. While all the details of the story were not fully known, a few important key facts immediately stood out: Brown was an unarmed teenager who was shot multiple times while holding his hands in the air, according to witnesses at the scene.
These facts were all I needed to know. Immediately, I tweeted #RIPMichaelBrown, and I began to reflect on my life in this country as a young Black man who recently graduated from college. Brown was preparing to begin college on Monday. All of the experiences that I had just went through over the last four years, he was about to go through in his own shoes. That thought alone was overwhelming. Knowing that another young brother was taken away from this earth before realizing his full potential (see Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis and Darius Simmons) is something that stuck with me throughout the evening.
While social media has its pros and cons, the one pro that it has is that stories like these can no longer go unbeknownst to the public. In fact, stories like these can spread like wildfire in just a matter of hours, because by the end of the night, a large portion of the people I follow were tweeting about the unfortunate event. In a short period of time, Michael Brown went from unknown to yet another poster child of police brutality against Black men in America.
When you’re dealing with social media, you have to deal with it all. The good, bad, indifferent, level-headed, ignorant, and everything else in between. There really is no middle ground or gray area. Some people talked about responding violently to situations like this, while others talked about prayer. Some people brought up the countless amounts of young Black males killed in places like Chicago, and others said “hey, this isn’t the time or place to discuss that, stop taking away from the matter at hand.” Despite social media not providing a middle ground in this case and cases like this, I find myself still gravitating towards something in the middle, because there is a big picture that I believe some people are missing when it comes to this situation and others like it.
The problem in present day 2014 is that Black men have the least amount of value attached to their lives out of any other demographic in America. It has been that way for a long time, and having the first Black President of the United States has not changed that, despite many of us believing that it would. In fact, I could argue that since Barack Obama has been in office, the value of our lives has decreased if anything in that short time period.
In my personal opinion, it doesn’t matter who is killing us. What matters is that we are being killed by any and everybody, and there seems to be no changes on the horizon. I live in Washington D.C, a place that from the outside looking in appears to be one of the safest place in America to live because it is the home of the country’s politics and president. But just this morning, six people were shot, three men and three women. Luckily nobody died, but for years, D.C. has been one of the top cities in the country when it comes to shootings and crime rates. D.C. used to be known as the murder capital back in the 1990s, so all this is very familiar to me.
So people can’t say don’t bring up places like Chicago (there were 500 murders in Chicago in 2012, 82 shootings over the 4th of July weekend this year) where Black males are being killed basically every day. You can’t tweet or post on Facebook your disdain for the alarmingly high rate that Black men (and in a lot of cases boys) are being murdered, and then turn around and say, “Black on Black crime has nothing to do with this.” It has everything to do with this because on the end of those murder weapons are Black lives that are being taken away.
As bad as police brutality is, and as much as it seems to be increasing in recent weeks with cases like Eric Garner in New York, John Crawford in Ohio, and now Michael Brown in St. Louis, there are still hundreds and thousands of Black men across the country being killed by their own for absolutely no reason. Don’t just get mad when somebody else kills one of our own; get mad when we do it to ourselves as well, because that is a HUGE problem.
I pray for the family of Michael Brown, and I pray that justice is achieved in this case. He didn’t deserve to die, and based off of what is being reported right now, you can’t convince me otherwise.
At the end of the day, it’s not about who’s doing the killing, it’s about who is being killed. And right now, it is open season on young Black males in Amerikkka.