If Mark Cuban was trying to defend Donald Sterling yesterday, he failed.
Suggesting that we shouldn’t throw stones at the LA Clippers owner for his racist comments, Cuban said, “I know I’m prejudiced. I know I’m bigoted in a lot of different ways. If I see a black kid in a hoodie on my side of the street, I’ll move to the other side of the street.” Sorry, Mark Cuban, but you are not — at least to judge by that sentiment — a bigot.
In fact, you’re in good company. Jesse Jackson once famously acknowledged, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Former Spelman College President Johnnetta Cole has written that in her many conversations with black women, “One of the most painful admissions I hear is: I am afraid of my own people.”
No, Mark Cuban. You’re a rational person making a set of reasonable calculations about your safety based on available information.
The tragic fact is that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. They are about 13 percent of the population, but between 1976 and 2005, blacks committed more than half of all murders in America.
Sometimes, people who are wearing hoodies — or, say, baggy pants with no belts — are dressing to send a message. It’s an aggressive message, one glorified every day by rappers and other arbiters of black culture. And whether young men who dress in ghetto attire may intend that message for their friends or neighbors, they’re also sending a message to other folks, black or white, who don’t know them.
The white man with a shaved head and a bunch of tattoos — whom Cuban also said he would avoid — is doing the same thing. He, too, is sending a message — that he doesn’t care what others think of him. And I, for one, will be more than happy to take the hint. I prefer to be around strangers who care about what society thinks of them. It suggests they will follow society’s other rules.
We all act on incomplete information.
Women regularly make the decision not to get into an elevator or a subway car with men they don’t know. It’s not that they assume all men are rapists or murderers. It’s simply that given a limited amount of knowledge, we make calculations about what is safe.
It is surely a sign of how much whites are plagued by liberal guilt that someone like Mark Cuban calls himself a bigot. Contrary to what the liberal race-baiters would have us believe, we are not all Donald Sterlings hiding our true feelings about people of other races. Do us a favor, Mark, give yourself a break.