Donald Sterling is the wealthy, white, 81 year-old billionaire owner of the LA Clippers NBA basketball team. Sterling has been married for over 50 years to the same white woman, but reportedly he has also had a mixed race girlfriend for the past few years. In what appears to be a lover’s quarrel, the girlfriend tape recorded Sterling saying he was troubled by her appearing with blacks in public. Apparently the little love tryst has gone south so Sterling is suing the girlfriend, attempting to reclaim a $1.8 million house he provided, plus several luxury cars and lots of cash. Turning over damning audio tapes to TMZ appears to have been the girlfriend’s revenge.

As a result of all this, as of the moment of this writing, Sterling has been fined $2.5 million by the NBA and has had a lifetime ban placed upon him for associating with his own team or the NBA in general. Team sponsors are bailing by the minute, so far costing the team likely in the tens of millions of dollars in income. He will probably be forced into selling the team at a fire sale price far below that which Forbes magazine recently valued at $575 million.

Sterling told his girlfriend that he didn’t like seeing her in public with blacks, but that he was OK with her doing whatever else with them in private, up to and including sleeping with them, (his words.) Sterling has twice been honored and recognized with significant awards from the LA NAACP, the latest being quickly and hastily recalled. Sterling surrounds himself with blacks; that is, most of his players and the coach of his team as well.

So, Sterling will endure a financial hit of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars and likely be forced into selling his business because he told his girlfriend he didn’t like seeing her in public with blacks.

Let compare and contrast this with rap, rap artists, the rap culture and NBA players.

Rap artists routinely mix misogamy, murder, mayhem on the police and the encouragement of assaulting women while glamorizing gang-life and throwing the N word off on almost every lyric. They do this in exchange for millions of dollars. The NBA itself is no stranger to gang affiliation. At least eight players or former players are gang members. Many throw gang signs out to the crowd during games. Dozens have been arrested for anything and everything from murder to rape, robbery and assaults.

While happily taking Mr. Sterling’s millions in exchange for playing basketball, players are cranking up the sounds of those rap artists in their cars, homes and locker rooms, filling the air with the N word and every vile, disgusting and hateful form of speech quite imaginable to a fellow thug but completely revolting to the rest of us.

Now this group falls all over each other to express their outrage about Sterling when they should be filled with justifiable and warranted self-loathing, not only for their hypocrisy, but for their own personal choices in life and failures as role models.

Silence

“I know black contractors who have gone out of business because their black workers were not prompt or had negative attitudes. I know black workers who take pride about going to work any hour they feel like it, taking the day off when they feel like it … Many leaders who are black and many white liberals will object to my discussing these things in public. But the decadence in the black community … is already in the headlines; the only question is what should we do about it.”

Let this be a lesson why political correctness, (PC) is really censorship disguised as goodness and righteousness.

Jesse Jackson made this above quoted statement in 1976.

If I, as a white writer had said this, many would accuse me of racism. Many in Jesse Jackson’s community likely called him an “Uncle Tom” for saying it. Still others, cowed into silence by the PC Gestapo, read these words and nod in silent agreement; looking left then right, making sure no one sees them.

PC stifles spirited dialogue, differing opinions and open, honest debate. That’s its intended function; to SHUT YOU UP. Your tortured silence is then taken as agreement and approval, providing the fabrication of virtual consensus and broad acceptance in its real, actual absence.

Nearly 40 years after Jesse Jackson made this remark we since have had men and women of color in the highest positions of power; from the current President of the United States, former Secretary’s of State, Senators, Congressmen and women, judges in the highest courts, Governors and others across the spectrum of leadership and influence throughout the country. And with these advances, one would expect that the experience of being a black American would have realized a corresponding change as well and by any measure it certainly has. It has by some standards deteriorated.

The likes of the Jesse Jackson’s and Al Sharpton’s of the world, (aptly dubbed the “’poverty pimps” by former black congressman J C Watts), have demanded and obtained more and more government intervention and largess, intentionally replacing the traditional family, fatherhood and self-reliance with votes in exchange.

Robert Woodson Sr. is the CEO of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and a black conservative. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, he is quoted describing the current governmental infrastructure of welfare like this. “My worry and my fear is that the money and the resources will go to the same racial grievance groups, the same members of what I call the poverty Pentagon. They’ll give it to Al Sharpton and the others to do what they’ve been doing for decades, to do what doesn’t work-what in fact is making things worse.”

And there you have it; and only because a black man had the courage to say it and this white writer had the temerity to re-phrase it in today’s PC America.

What happened to our voice? Do we still own an opinion, or shall we let others do our bidding? Your silence does just that.

Bob Kingsley

Port Dickinson, NY

(Article attribution to the WSJ, Saturday/Sunday print edition, April 19-20, 2014, page A11, Opinion page, “A Black Conservative’s War on Poverty”)