Race, Hypocrisy, and Basketball

There are various types of wrong opinions about race.  Racial prejudice consists of disliking, refusing to associate with, or disapproving of or liking, wanting to associate with, or approving of a person on the basis of his race or ethnic group. The error and the unfairness of this lie in judging a person on the basis of something irrelevant to his character, behavior, and capabilities and over which he had no choice. Racial bigotry is the practice of attributing bad or good (though usually bad) characteristics to members of a race or ethnic group indiscriminately  – such as claiming all Jews are mercenary and crooked or all  blacks are  brutal and stupid or all Englishmen are cultured and well educated. Racism is the doctrine that members of a particular race or ethnic group are necessarily and intrinsically inferior or superior to others on the basis of their membership in the race or group. 

It is not pedantic to make distinctions among the three, because the differences  matter.  Each of the second two is worse than the one(s) listed before it, being both more unreasonable and foolishly wrong and also liable to produce worse consequences. Racial prejudice alone, unless it is very pervasive within a society,  usually stops with bad, rude, and boorish individual social behavior.  Bigotry when widepread  in a society can lead to  large scale violence, systematic invidious discrimination,and  unjust laws, and even when uncommon often stimulates conflict and criminal activity. Besides all the wrongs associated the first two, racism can lead and has led to caste systems, race based  enslavement, and mass murder and even when  lacking many adherents and politically powerless inculcates brutal and inhumane attitudes and behavior. 

At present the apparently quite unpleasant owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA is being castigated for some rude things he said in private about black people. The man’s comments and opinions as reported fall into the category of boorish racial prejudice,  perhaps tinged with a touch of bigotry. A little while ago in the news,  famous rapper and associate of the president Jay Z publicly announced his affinity for people and opinions explicitly racist in the exact sense of the term.

It is useful to consider the two cases together. While assorted media and political queens of hearts are screaming for the team owner’s head or at least his property, there was scarcely a peep about the rapper’s saying something far worse by the standards espoused by those attacking the other man.  People operating fairly on the basis of thought out principles usually do not behave with that much inconsistency. Hypocrites, parroting ignoramuses, and phonies, on the other hand, do it all the time. These two cases present  another illustration that, while the Victorians may have had their hypocrisy and inconsistency on sex, our age’s treatment of race matches them and perhaps then some.  Future generations may  get the same sort of good laugh from it.