Common sense: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Los Angeles real-estate billionaire Donald Sterling, eighty years old, owner of the basketball team, the Clippers, was recorded making racist remarks during an argument with his girl-friend; and the recording was made public. 

A basketball-great, and now a common-sense-great, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, has written well about this: Welcome to the finger-wagging Olympics:

What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise...... He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?

Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.

 Read the whole thing.