Another scalp for the faux-outrage crowd. We see nothing wrong with the e-mail that Atlanta Hawks’ owner Bruce Levenson sent to his colleagues: he was calling for more diversity in the cheerleading team and arena music selection; citing the need to attract more affluent whites to the season ticket ranks; advancing a theory that perhaps some presumably racist white people are afraid to come to games and that the team should address their perception, while being careful to add that he didn’t personally share that perception (this second clause in his statement scurrilously left out of the Washington Post‘s coverage); and benchmarking other teams’ fan bases and marketing approaches. Seems like normal business.
Cue the moronic template statement from the NBA commissioner: “As Mr. Levenson acknowledged, the views he expressed are entirely unacceptable and are in stark contrast to the core principles of the National Basketball Association.” This mechanical pablum with utterly no context could have been issued at any time, in any of these phony “scandals.” If one didn’t know better, one would doubt its sincerity.
The interesting question is how the information came out. He sent the e-mail in August 2012 and reportedly “voluntarily reported the email to the NBA” in July 2014, triggering an “independent investigation” by the league. One wonders the circumstances of this reporting. Why would Levenson report it? Did he learn that some news was about to leak, and/or the NBA’s “investigation” was about to crucify him, prompting him to try to get out in front of it? Presumably, during the Donald Sterling fracas, Silver put the other owners on notice that a witch-hunt was coming. (Of course, the witch-hunt would be coming from the NBA itself, even though the commissioner is supposed to actually represent the owners not sell them out.) Did Silver offer the owners some type of amnesty, in asking them to get anything potentially damaging out there, and then renege?
(As hackneyed as it is, we can play the usual thought experiment and switch the races in Levenson’s message, and realize that, had he said that the team needs to add more black-oriented music and black cheerleaders, attract more upscale blacks, and otherwise address blacks’ perceptions of the brand to make the environment more comfortable for them, he’d probably receive an award for promoting racial harmony.)
These are all troubling questions, coming soon, no doubt, to your employer too.
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