Donald Sterling: The Latest ‘Great White Defendant’ By Larry Elder

Donald Sterling
Lady Liberty Photo Credit:  Bill Frymire

By Larry Elder, May 4, 2014

Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher in a dispute with the Bureau of Land Management; the Duke lacrosse college students falsely accused of sexual assault; George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman accused of and acquitted for the murder of a black Florida teenager; and now Donald Sterling, the billionaire owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers.

What do these men have in common?

They are white males. More than that, they are -- to the media -- white male villains. In the 1987 novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe talks about the hunt for the Great White Defendant. In the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin, case, the media initial assumed he was a non-Hispanic Jew -- not exactly the kind of WASPy Great White Defendant described by Tom Wolfe in “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” but close enough. Zimmerman was also rather inconveniently not rich, but again one takes what one can get. Worse, it turns out his ethnicity is more like non-white Hispanic, but still…

The media love it when a white, and ideally, rich male commits a crime or does something we can collectively condemn. There’s a reason TV’s Lt. Columbo was more likely sent to Bel-Air than to Compton or Watts where the per capita murder rate is much higher.

No one gets mad over media coverage of rich white people doing bad things to other rich white people. White males are used to being called bad names, rich whites even more so. White males have no special interest group behind them, no NAACP, no NOW, no CAIR. They are the dominant class, the moneyed class, and therefore an agreed-upon target.

A close cousin to the Great White Defendant is the Great White Topic. The Los Angeles Times ran a story the mistreatment of black tradesmen who worked in upper-class suburban Los Angeles. They told stories of rude, distrustful white homeowners who yelled, sic dogs or otherwise treated blacks plumbers, painters and the like.

I mentioned this story to a friend who works at a newspaper. I told him about a roofer who recently worked for me. The roofer told me that when on a job in South Central someone shot at him. The bullet struck a tile nearby. “Where’s that story in the Los Angeles Times?” I said.

To this, my newspaper friend said: "You're right. No one is mad at the black people who mistreat rich, rude white people. But a story the other way around -- there's a problem.

This is from “The Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe:

“Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John`s Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab`s mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, ‘What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.’”

The hunt for the Great White Defendant also applies to television and movies. Ben Shapiro wrote of “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How The Left Took Over Your TV.” John Langley, the creator of the reality show “Cops,” told Shapiro that “Cops” intentionally under-depicts black criminals and black crime.

Conservative media critic Steve Sailor, on the crime show, “Law and Order”:

“The press' lack of interest in minority violence is even more true of movies and television shows.

“Three years after Bonfire, TV producer Dick Wolf took Tom Wolfe's basic procedural framework of detectives and district attorneys and turned it into the television drama ‘Law & Order.’ Its first few seasons were among the best and most realistic in the history of television.

“The only problem was that ratings were lousy. Sure, at the time, New York City was in the middle of hideous gang wars among black and Latin crack dealers, with 4,298 people human beings murdered within the city limits in 1990 and 1991 (an annual toll about three times higher than the average during the current Iraq war).

“Unfortunately for TV producers with aspirations toward realism, less than 10 percent of the NYC victims, and even fewer of their murderers, were white. The white television audience found that L&O's initial set of heavily minority murderers boring and depressing. What white people like are stories about bad white people, especially, snooty bad white people, to whom they can feel morally and culturally superior. Whites just don't really see minorities as competing with them in the Great American Status Game.”

Meanwhile, less newsworthy but of greater importance, 86 percent of black households in Richmond, Virginia, have no fathers, and 60 percent of all Richmond households are fatherless.

Despite the election and election of the first black president, “race” still occupies a lot of media attention. In just the last few weeks, we saw accusations of “racism” against Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, for saying the welfare state hurt poor minority families. Ryan apologized for the “inarticulate” way he explained it. Ryan moved over for rancher Cliven Bundy who supposedly made “racist” comments about “the Negro” and “the Spanish people.” Bundy apologized on television, holding up a boot to symbolize how his mouth often got him into trouble. Bundy has now moved over.

Now it’s Donald Sterling. He’s rich, real rich, has a bad reputation for being cheap and demeaning -- and has been accused of “racism.” Perfect.

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