Don Sterling, Clippers owner
Sports Saturday
Something historic happened this past week when Don Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers, was fined and banned from the NBA for his racism. Although Sterling has a long history of racist actions, privately recorded racist comments brought him down in the end.
According to ESPN, collective anger from NBA players, who are overwhelmingly African American, scared the owners enough to override their qualms about the “slippery slope” of an owner being disciplined. (Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban uttered the phrase and then backed down the following day.) Faced with a threatened boycott from players who are pushing the worth of their franchises to $1 billion and more, they chose to oust one of their own.
Where in poetry do we encounter images of African Americans rising up against those in charge? Lucille Clifton imagines such a day in a poem written in 1969 at the height of the black power movement. While Clifton didn’t often write revolutionary poetry, in this poem, set in a slave ship, she foresees a day of reckoning.
The unexpected severity of the sentence against Sterling signals just how worried the owners were. A vision of the sea crashing into their deck gets it about right.
if something should happen
By Lucille Clifton
for instance
if the sea should break
and crash against the decks
and below decks break the cargo
against the sides of the sea
or
if the chains should break
and crash against the decks
and below decks break the sides
of the sea
or
if the seas of cities
should crash against each other
and break the chains
and break the walls holding down the cargo
and break the sides of the seas
and all the waters of the earth wash together
in a rush of breaking
where will the captains run and
to what harbor?
We know what harbor the NBA ran to. Like the captain in the story of Jonah, they tossed the cause of the storm overboard. As in Jonah, the storm then subsided.
