Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, said Wednesday that Donald Sterling isn’t the only NBA executive who harbors bigoted thoughts.
Cuban told attendees at a conference in Nashville, Tenn. that he isn’t ready to say publicly whether he’ll vote to force Sterling to sell the Los Angeles Clippers.
“You’ll find out. I know how I’m going to vote, but I’m not ready to comment on it,” Cuban said, according to the Tennessean newspaper.
But in a moment of candor, Cuban acknowledged his own prejudices.
“I know I’m prejudiced and I know I’m bigoted in a lot of different ways. If I see a black kid in a hoodie on my side of the street, I’ll move to the other side of the street,” Cuban said. “If I see a white guy with a shaved head and tattoos, I’ll move back to the other side of the street. None of us have pure thoughts; we all live in glass houses.”
After a recording surfaced last month of Sterling making racist comments to his girlfriend, Cuban initially expressed reluctance about ousting the longtime Clippers owner.
“I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do,” Cuban said at the time. “It’s a very, very slippery slope.”
But a day later, after NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced that he had imposed a lifetime ban against Sterling, Cuban tweeted that he agreed “100%” with the ruling.
Maybe, but we don’t all live in gated communities.
Cuban is worried about the stupid actions he might do in the future…I
know when I see a self centered,me first billionaire I move to the other side of the street.
Shaved heads and tattoos bother me just as much as any racial thought I might have, but I think Cuban is acknowledging what many people would prefer not to discuss. It takes some effort for people to overcome the natural tendency towards xenophobia. Fearfulness isn’t easily acknowledged, understood, and processed.
Why is it… when people speak of their bigotry, they always feel obliged to say ‘how we’re all No Different from them’?
I’m an indigenous American, raised by a beautiful black Puerto Rican mom and my wife is white. Sorry bigots – you get NO absolution > HERE<.
What Cuban is admitting to is class bias as much as if not more than racial. And that’s the point here: Sterling didn’t say anything that the typical CEO of a major corporation wouldn’t operate on, and say if push came to shove, but as a nouveau riche low flyer (on the capitalist scale) he doesn’t have enough sense to know how to handle his private affairs. And since he’s in a business where race and public relations matter, he’s discardable. Cuban just doesn’t want such private life digging among the rich to become SOP.