powerlineblog | The more you learn about the story, the stranger it gets. If you
listen to the tapes, which have been made public by TMZ and Deadspin, it
is hard to make sense of them. Sterling doesn’t want Stiviano to put up
photos of herself with African-Americans on Instagram or bring them
with her to Los Angeles Clippers games. He says he doesn’t care if she
associates or sleeps with black people, just don’t put them up on
Instagram. An odd distinction! His request was motivated, evidently, by
the fact that one or more of Sterling’s friends called him to comment on
the Instagram photos. While Sterling never says this, reading between
the lines it appears that someone must have teased him about his
mistress consorting with blacks.
What makes this bizarre is that Stiviano herself if black and
Mexican, a fact that she reminds Sterling of during their argument. The
situation is otherworldly, in that Sterling seems not to have noticed
that his own girlfriend is black.
So Donald Sterling emerges as a pathetic figure: a reverse image of
Othello, a doddering old man with a young black mistress who cheats on
him. He understands, but asks her not to embarrass him before his
friends. He may also be suffering from dementia. For a billionaire, he
makes precious little sense on the tape(s). But then, most of us
probably wouldn’t make much sense to outsiders if tapes of our domestic
arguments were made public. Not a single person has defended Sterling, to my knowledge.
So an 80-year-old man with a much younger, mixed-race girlfriend is
sexually insecure–go figure! He has a friend, a negative-image Iago, who
plays on his insecurity and teases him when the mistress posts pictures
with black men, however innocent they may be. So the old man asks her
not to do it. She can spend all day with black men and even sleep with
them, he says, just don’t post photos or attend Clippers games with
them. But the young woman already has one foot out the door, and she
illegally records her conversation with the old man, and then turns it
over to two of the most disreputable gossip sites on the internet.
On the tape, Donald Sterling says, “I love the black people.” I can’t
vouch for his sincerity, but there is nothing in the DMZ/Deadspin tapes
that belies that sentiment. It is telling that this domestic upheaval
between an aging billionaire and his gold-digging, disloyal mistress
represents the best the Left can come up with to support its claim that
racism and the “legacy of race and slavery and segregation” are alive
and well. As for Sterling, he is merely collateral damage.
