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.
