Lovers’ Spat

Christopher Caldwell offers this concise analysis of the fateful conversation between Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling and V. Stiviano:

It is “pathetic intimate quarrel between Mr Sterling and a 31-year-old woman, V Stiviano. Something is upsetting Mr Sterling very much, but it is not black people – at least not primarily. It is the Molière-esque predicament of an 80-year-old man with a young companion he cannot control. Ms Stiviano posted photos of herself on Instagram with two black athletes many decades his junior. Some of his characterisations are racist. (‘Why should you be walking publicly with black people?’) But what makes the audio bizarre is that, when race enters the conversation it is she, not he, who introduces it.”

I have no interest in defending Sterling, who comes off as a manipulative jerk. But to call what he says an expression of “views” elevates a lovers’ spat into something else.