Enes Kanter (right), — then of the Utah Jazz, now of the New York Knicks — attempting to block a shot by Patrick Beverley at the Houston Rockets’ Toyota Center March 17, 2014.
Everyone is entitled to his opinion, until, of course, someone thinks he isn’t. Recently, three incidents have challenged our concept of freedom of speech.
Read MoreLos Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling is under fire for allegedly having a conversation – reported on TMZ.com – with a woman identified as V. Stiviano, in which he warned her about hanging out with black people and bringing them to the Clippers’ games. (Apparently, Stiviano, the defendant in an embezzlement suit brought by the Sterling family, released the tape to TMZ.)
This is not the first time Sterling’s name has been associated with prejudice. In 2009, he paid $2.7 million to settle a government claim that he refused to rent apartments to Hispanics, blacks and families in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood.
The revelation comes four days after New York Mets’ pitcher Matt Harvey deleted his Twitter account. Harvey’s last Tweet was a picture of himself giving the finger on the half-year anniversary of his Tommy John surgery.
I would agree with those who say that prejudice is far worse than crassness – though there’s no excuse for this deliberate kind of obscenity. (It’s not like a curse word uttered when you stub your toe.) Both prejudice and obscenity are a failure of culture, a failure of education. They say that we hold ourselves and others so cheaply that we think nothing of demeaning them, of demeaning ourselves. (Or perhaps we just don’t think, period.)
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Boy, nothing like a day spent meeting members of the public to measure character – yours and theirs – as I discovered when I appeared wearing my deux chapeaux, as WAG editor and author of the new novel “Water Music,” at the recent Hudson Valley Gateway Experience in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y.
First, a big shout out and thank you to Chereese Jervis-Hill of Events to Remember in Mount Kisco, N.Y.; Deborah L. Milone, executive director of the Hudson Valley Gateway Chamber of Commerce in Peekskill, N.Y.; and The Mansion at Colonial Terrace in Cortlandt Manor for a truly terrific day. Some 500 guests milled about the antebellum manse, with its Doric columns and brocade wallpaper, savoring carrot-ginger soup, gluten-free crab cakes, mango ice and sweet potato tartlets. Attendees saw cooking demonstrations; got a chance to meet authors like young Claribel Ortega, who’s on her way with the teen witch novella “The Skinwalker’s Apprentice” (more on her in my upcoming women warriors post); and received freebies like the sweet plants provided by Manzer’s Landscape Design and Development and the smart, sturdy canvas bags from Entergy. Who doesn’t love free stuff?
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