Can We Please Hold Blacks to the Same Standard as Donald Sterling?

Richard Winchester / American Thinker

The NBA has banned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life, and fined him $2.5 million for allegedly making racist statements.  (Sterling’s antipathy for “people of color” has long been known, but his latest diatribe was evidently too much, even for those who previously liked his money.) 

With Sterling’s come-uppance, America has witnessed the reality that for a white person openly to express negative feelings about blacks is virtually “the kiss of death.”  As former CBS television journalist, Bernard Goldberg, observes, Sterling’s near-universal condemnation is “good news” about racism in America these days.

If American society needs any more vivid demonstration of how it treats whites’ racist comments, I’m hard-pressed to know what it would be.

Did America go too far?  Subsequently, Goldberg has warned that if Sterling can suffer for racist comments made privately, others may also.

Question:  If an overwhelming majority of Americans condemn whites who make racist statements, when are we going to hold blacks to the same standard?  

Are blacks perceived to be racist?  Although polls cannot readily plumb actual racist sentiments, they can tell us if there is a perception that this or that group, or society as a whole, is racist.

A poll of American adults that was reported in Rasmussen Reports (July 3, 2013) provides helpful information.  According to this poll, 37% of American adults think “most blacks” are racists, compared to 15% who believe the same about “most whites,” and 18% who say that about “most Hispanics.” 

Blacks in the poll were more likely to say that “most blacks” are racist (31%), compared to 24% who harbored this view of “most whites,” and 15% who felt that way about “most Hispanics.”

The list of prominent blacks whose racist comments are on record is too long to be adequately cited.  Some blacks have uttered far more egregious racist comments than others.  Calling for the murder of white babies, for example, is a far graver breach of civil talk than asking for the creation of an all-black professional basketball league.

Nevertheless, the “conventional wisdom” among academic social scientists is that blacks cannot be racists.  Only whites are racists.

The popular notion in Academe that blacks can’t be racist can be traced to the development by the late Harvard law professor Derrick Bell of “critical race theory” in the 1970s and 1980s.  Critical Race Theory has several facets, but three are of especial relevance.  First, the theory posits that racism is a collective, not an individual, phenomenon.  Second, and more important, racism is endemic in American society.  Third, blacks cannot be racists.

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