Make Me Wanna Holler

Two recent headlines found on the main page of Yahoo!:

Rapper Foxy Brown skips NJ court session

Owens might not play until opener

If you take a second to read those articles, I'm sure you'll quickly understand that there's barely a worthy news story in either of them. Let's face it, if somebody somewhere saw T.O. with his shoelaces untied the press would probably run a piece on it. It's the Foxy Brown story that is really perplexing. How is that news? Check that, How the fuck does that make Yahoo!'s main page!? I'd sorta understand were it, say, 50 Cent or Kanye West, but Foxy Brown? What year is this, 1997? Does anyone even remember her anymore?

But she's a celebrity (or was) and she's black, and the mainstream press loves to report on their transgressions, however minor, as proven by the articles above.

Which reminded me of something I had been meaning to mention for the past two weeks. You see, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is being sued by the Department of Justice for housing descrimination. Sterling, it seems, has no problem hiring black players to help make him rich, but he doesn't want to rent homes to them.

The Sterling story is by far bigger than both the T.O. and Foxy Brown stories combined, but the case has been ignored by the press. Shit ain't right.

I urge everyone to read Bomani Jones's great ESPN article, Sterling's racism should be news, here.

An excerpt:

There was a time when Donald Sterling was a joke. His Los Angeles Clippers got all the laughs, but he got all the credit. Sterling was the absent mind behind the NBA's longest-running vaudeville revue, his stinginess serving as the fuel behind the rust standard for ineptitude.


He was condemned with ridicule for coldly running a losing basketball team, a sin deemed unforgivable by most. Sterling was a skinflint, so despicable that you couldn't help but wonder if the man who makes most of his money from real estate was only concerned with building a dream home in the most famous tropical enclave of them all: hell.


What Donald Sterling's doing now is no laughing matter.Now, Sterling signs free agents and signs his best players to extensions. Maybe he's OK after all?


Or, maybe not.


Sterling was sued by the Department of Justice on Monday for housing discrimination. Though Sterling has no problem paying black people millions of dollars to play basketball, the feds allege that he refused to rent apartments in Beverly Hills and Koreatown to black people and people with children.


Talk about strange. A man notoriously concerned with profit maximization refuses to take money from those willing to shell it out to live in the most overrated, overpriced neighborhood in Southern California? That same man, who gives black men tens of millions of dollars every year, refuses to take a few thousand a month from folks who would like to crash in one of his buildings for a while? You gotta love racism, the only force in the world powerful enough to interfere with money-making.


Sterling may have been a joke, but nothing about this is funny. In fact, it's frightening and disturbing that classic racism like this might still be in play.


What's even more disturbing? Sterling was sued for housing discrimination by 19 plaintiffs in 2003, according to The Associated Press. In this case, Sterling was accused of trying to drive blacks and Latinos out of buildings he owned in Koreatown. In November, Sterling was ordered to pay a massive settlement in that case. Terms were not disclosed, but the presiding judge said this was "one of the largest" settlements ever in this sort of matter. The tip of the iceberg: Sterling had to play $5 million just for the plaintiffs' attorney fees.


And the coup de grace? Neither that case, nor the more recent one, has qualified as big news.


The tragedy of Maurice Clarett is big news. So are the legal adventures of the Cincinnati Bengals, Rhett Bomar's inability to recognize that not all money is good money, Floyd Landis' daily excuse, and teenager Michelle Wie's being too nervous to tell a grown man she would no longer pay him to carry her stuff around a golf course.


But Donald Sterling's refusing to offer housing to blacks and Latinos? Must not have that sizzle.

Shit ain't fucking right.