[News] Not Donald Sterling But the Washington “Redskins” - Racism in Sports

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Weekend Edition May 2-4, 2014
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/racism-in-sports/


*Not Donald Sterling But the Washington “Redskins”*


  Racism in Sports

by AJAMU BARAKA

The hypocrisy of race discourse in the U.S. is breathtaking. A week 
after Cliven Bundy, the white supremacist rancher in Nevada, voiced his 
views on slavery and the current plight of urban-based black communities 
that many white Americans either believe or have considered, the public 
is now collectively outraged by the silly, racist comments of NBA massa 
Donald Sterling. We are all supposed to pretend that his views on the 
social undesirability of associating with black people were something 
that just emerged from his sick imagination and not a sentiment shared 
(though not openly spoken) in polite white society.

But what really reveals the superficiality and dishonesty of the 
supposed outrage about racism in U.S. society and in sports is the 
complete cognitive dissociation between this outrage against black 
people and the ongoing degrading assault in the world of sport on the 
Indigenous people of this land.

Indigenous people of this territory called the United States have for 
years, as a simple matter of dignity, been involved in efforts to remove 
the racist names, mascots and other practices in major league and 
college sports that have perpetuated their de-humanization, with only 
mixed success. In the last few years, a major focus of these efforts was 
to change the name of the D.C.-based football team, the Washington 
Redskins – something one might think would be completely obvious in 
2014. But the campaign has met with fierce resistance. Why?

How is it that people can pretend to be outraged by Sterling’s comments, 
while the owners of the Redskins and the Atlanta “Braves” are not 
questioned as to why they insist on defending brands that Native peoples 
and others have condemned as racially offensive? Not only do the names 
remain in place, but they are defended by large cross-sections of 
society, including by many African Americans.

Not seeing or making the link between these two issues illustrates for 
me that the discourse on anti-racism in the U.S. is not to be taken 
seriously. These “conversations,” whether it is Obama’s pathetic appeal 
to white vanity and defense of integrationism in his “race speech” or 
the current discussion around the meaning of the movie /Twelve Years a 
Slave/, reveal themselves as phony, diversionary and racist exercises. 
Rather than advancing change, they provide cover for the real element 
that must be identified, deconstructed and abolished – the ideology of 
white supremacy and the material privileges that come along with it.

When the ideology of white supremacy that permeates all aspects of 
culture, politics and social being in the U.S. is reduced to a focus on 
the more crude expressions of anti-black racism, it is easy to jump on a 
Sterling, Cliven Bundy, or Ted Nugent and completely miss the more 
pervasive, and thus insidious, structural and ideological expressions of 
white supremacy. I couldn’t care less about the racist rants of  Donald 
Sterling when the more devastating expressions of white supremacy are 
reflected in national and global institutions dedicated to upholding the 
power of a racialized, white male, capitalist/colonialist elite.

Those expressions are reflected in the racist NATO assault on Libya; 
IMF-imposed structural adjustment to force the “profligate natives” in 
the global South to stop wasting state resources on such trivialities as 
education, the arts, sports and health; the rationalizations for the 
West’s “responsibility to protect;” the accepted racist musings of 
Charles Murray on black culture and educational ability; and the racist 
obscenity of attempting to wipe out a whole people and then subjecting 
their survivors to ridicule and disrespect with sports team names. Is 
there really a big leap between being unconcerned about the continued 
dehumanization of Native peoples in the U.S. and being similarly 
unconcerned about U.S. drone state terrorism that has killed thousands?

The new slogan for the LA Clippers is “we are one.”  It is a slogan that 
captures the hypocrisy, dishonesty and denial that characterizes the 
non-confrontation with the reality of white supremacy and white power in 
the U.S.  Something that I am sure the originators of the slogan did not 
see or intend – but that is precisely the point.

/*Ajamu Baraka* is a long-time human rights activist, writer and veteran 
of the Black Liberation, anti-war, anti-apartheid and Central American 
solidarity Movements in the United States.  He is currently an Associate 
fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C./

-- 
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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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