Donald Sterling is a racist. That’s pretty clear. Not only
is that evident from the secret tapes disclosed to TMZ, but his history of
discriminatory housing practices confirms it. People ought to be outraged by
his racism, because racism is wrong.
The outrage, though, sounds pretty tinny and hollow to my
ear. It highlights how difficult it is to muster moral outrage when the things
that incite you are highly limited to a few popular issues. Where is the moral
outrage against infidelity considering the tape came from a mistress? Or, why
do we not care that, as the tape reveals, Sterling nor his mistress care if she
sleeps around with other boyfriends? That’s called promiscuity. We used to care
about these things.
Beyond the cesspool of Sterling human behavior, what about
the moral outrage of fans against the cluster of offensive behaviors that seem
to pervade the lives of so many players? Where is the moral outrage when fans
discover players are using illegal drugs, exploiting women, neglecting parental
responsibility of children by multiple women, or are connected with a gang?
It doesn’t exist because we lost moral integrity with the
society’s jettisoning of a defining moral standard. Of course, up to this
point, when some of us raise the question of the moral acceptability of things
like certain sexual practices, we are often told, “What happens in someone’s
private life isn’t our business.” That really doesn’t work here, does it? It
was in Sterling’s private life that the damning conversation occurred. The stuff
of Sterling’s past was certainly very public, but that wasn’t the genesis of
today’s reaction. Moral problems are problems whether public or private.
Racism is wrong and it needs to be removed from American
life, but the impact of anti-racism efforts seemed to have plateaued. Why is that? One possibility is that the
plateau correlates with the vacuum of an absolute standard of right and wrong.
Without it, we have no moral ground to stand upon to make a clear claim of why
something like racism is wrong. If we had a solid moral standard, the outrage
against Sterling could have been just one more expression of a people committed
to right over wrong, good over evil. But were not. Consequently, our moral voice
is weak and ineffective, but our nation’s ears have become dull to a moral word
anyway.
