Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 The average NBA player makes more money in a single season than most Americans will earn in a lifetime. The average NBA owner made more money while you were reading that first sentence than your children will accrue if they live to be 150 years old. LeBron James has a mansion. Portland Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen has a yacht equipped with two submarines and a music studio. And if he gets bored with lying around on one of the world’s longest superyachts, he can console himself by spending time on another of the world’s longest superyachts. Which superyacht does he like best? These are the questions that try NBA owners’ souls. 
 
 For a billionaire like Allen, though, a big boat isn’t all that special—they’ll sell one of those to anyone these days. There are a mere 30 franchises in the NBA, meaning there are just 30 opportunities to buy in to one of the world’s most exclusive clubs. An NBA team is the ultimate middle-aged-rich-guy status symbol, an instant ticket to cultural cachet. How else can you explain the lowly Milwaukee Bucks selling for $550 million? 
 
 The owner of a sports franchise acquires his cultural cachet by basking in the reflected glory of his players. There’s a dark side to that owner-player relationship that we don’t really think about, an uncomfortable truth that’s particularly fraught when you consider the racial dynamics at play in the NBA. A white plutocrat like Los Angeles Clippers owner/Hall-of-Fame-caliber bigot Donald Sterling doesn’t just own a basketball team. He owns the black players who suit up for that team, too. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 For the men who control the NBA, great basketball players are another kind of expensive toy—superyachts that can dunk. The Dallas Mavericks’ Mark Cuban is the most benign example of the athletes-as-playthings phenomenon. Cuban, a dot-com billionaire, has parlayed his wealth into a little boy’s fantasy of hanging out with the pros. When the Mavs’ Vince Carter hit an amazing three-pointer to beat the Spurs in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs, Cuban ran in to join the scrum, grinning maniacally as he wrapped his arms around his player’s waist. Carter, for his part, didn’t seem to notice that the guy who signs his checks had latched on to him like a koala. 
 
 Sterling, as is his wont, takes things to the vilest possible extreme. The longtime Clippers owner seems to view the Clippers players less as his super-tall buddies than as tenants on a basketball plantation. In a recording that allegedly features Sterling’s voice, he can be heard telling his girlfriend that she shouldn’t post pictures of black people (including Magic Johnson) on her Instagram account. He also tells the woman, V. Stiviano, that he’s not racist because he takes care of the guys on the Clippers’ roster. The transcript, via Deadspin: 
 
 Stiviano: Do you know that you have a whole team that's black, that plays for you? 
 
 Sterling: You just, do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? … Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners that created the league? 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 
 
 Sterling is not a typical NBA owner. I’d have to imagine that his basketball-world brethren see their employees as remarkably talented human beings rather than the needy, subservient recipients of charitable food donations. Even so, it’s impossible to ignore that pro basketball is a business in which most of the employees are black and the vast majority of the owners are white. A whole lot of NBA players are incredibly rich, and a bunch of them are cultural icons. But like Sterling says, it’s the super-duper-rich guys who control the league while the players provide the entertainment. When an NBA owner tells his players to jump, the guys in sneakers are contractually obligated to ask how high. 
 
 Sports fans and sportswriters don’t ignore this power dynamic. They celebrate it. On NFL broadcasts in particular, announcers treat owners like royalty, bowing obsequiously to men like “Mr. Kraft” and “Mr. Rooney.” Many owners surely treat their players well, but there’s something creepy about celebrating their beneficence, as if money necessarily buys virtue. Donald Sterling is the human embodiment of the danger of giving the richest guy in the room the benefit of the doubt. Despite innumerable appalling acts, Sterling has remained ensconced in the NBA penthouse, rarely if ever criticized by his fellow owners or former Commissioner David Stern. As the New Yorker’s Ben Greenman wrote on Twitter, “It's not just Donald Sterling's ignorance that's the problem. It's the decades that ignorance has been tolerated because of wealth.” 
 
 If Sterling is sanctioned severely, that will send a message that the NBA won’t tolerate virulent racism, so long as it’s preceded by years of comparable bigotry, it’s captured on tape, and everyone on Earth gets really angry about it. But no matter what happens to the Clippers owner, we shouldn’t lose sight of who controls the NBA. The players can wear their warmups inside out or upside down, but they’re still serving at the pleasure of the owners, still raining in jumpers as the guys with music studios on their yachts clap their hands. That’s not going to change, whether Donald Sterling’s running the Clippers or not. ||||| As riots exploded across America in early April 1968 in the immediate wake of Rev Martin Luther King's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson went on a Capitol Hill offensive to pass a law he hoped would, in part, quell some of the violence and best honor the man just slain. A day after King was buried, the Fair Housing Act was passed. 
 
 And in the nearly half-century since the enactment of that bedrock piece of civil rights legislation, which outlawed housing discrimination, there hasn't been a greater offender of it, perhaps, than longtime NBA owner Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers. 
 
 Yet it was just this Saturday that there arose a hue and cry for the NBA to act against Sterling. It came in reaction to an audio recording allegedly of Sterling, who is white, telling his mixed-race girlfriend not to bring black people to his team's games. 
 
 Decades of racist policy renting housing in Los Angeles, which turned Sterling into a real-estate mogul wealthy enough to buy and run a professional sports team, didn't elicit any such furor. But decades of lousy Clippers basketball under Sterling's stewardship turned the Clippers into the butt of late-night TV jokes. The Clippers were laughed at for losing, laughed at for being cheap, laughed at for moving in with the star-studded Lakers, laughed at for being a second-class franchise in a first-class sports league. 
 
 But all those years, not enough people looked at Donald Sterling as the racist landlord the law so bore him out to be. 
 
 Neither the league, nor the players, nor the sports media paid much if any attention to Sterling's agreement in 2003 to pay upwards of $5m to settle a lawsuit brought by the Housing Rights Center charging that he tried to drive non-Korean tenants out of apartments he bought in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles. Only a few observers noted in 2006 that the Justice Department sued Sterling for allegations of housing discrimination in the same neighborhood. The charges included statements he allegedly made to employees that black and Hispanic families were not desirable tenants. 
 
 And while a handful of us in the media excoriated Sterling and the NBA in 2009 when Sterling settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay $2.73m following allegations he refused to rent apartments to Hispanics, blacks and families with children, the story didn't resonate – despite it being the largest housing discrimination settlement in Justice Department history. 
 
 There was no investigation from the NBA, like the one new commissioner Adam Silver announced under pressure this weekend, promising to move "extraordinarily quickly". 
 
 There was no condemnation from black players who predominate the league like the one that erupted Saturday and Sunday from current superstars, including LeBron James and Chris Paul, and from retired icons like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. Paul, the Clippers star and head of the National Basketball Players Association, joined his teammates Sunday in stripping their warm-up gear and throwing it unceremoniously into a pile in a demonstration to disown the team's nickname in protest of their owner's loathsomeness. 
 
 SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) An inside look at the Clippers' protest in Oakland of Donald Sterling. (via @ArashMarkazi) pic.twitter.com/WooMM3cIMg 
 
 And there was certainly no President Barack Obama to denounce Sterling, as he did Sunday. The comments with which the owner had been charged with spewing, the president said, showed how "the United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation." 
 
 But pro sports have their own legacy of ignorance as bliss. 
 
 The sudden Sterling backlash exposed a mythology that we've allowed to grow in sport's billion-dollar commercial industrialization: sport leads social change. In many cases, however, such as the blind eye cast to racial discrimination of prodigious proportion, sport is a laggard in social reform, its leaders tacit supporters – if not propagators – of unethical and immoral behavior. 
 
 Indeed, the NBA front office and its member owners continued to embrace Sterling, and players – black and white – continued to accept offers to play for him without condition. Paul, so apoplectic about Sterling now, jumped to autograph a five-year, $107m contract exactly one minute after the midnight free agent signing period opened last summer. Clippers coach Doc Rivers, who Sunday said he was uncertain about returning to the team next season in the wake of the newest unsavory report about Sterling, moved from Boston to Los Angeles last summer to accept Sterling's $21m offer to coach the Clippers. 
 
 That is the norm. 
 
 Instances wherein pro-sports participants have taken a stand against social intransigence, like the walkout of the 1965 American Football League All-Star Game by black players angered that they were denied rooms and board in the host city New Orleans, are few. It took Major League Baseball years before it ousted Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, who became infamous for spewing barbs about black players and homosexuals and marveling at Hitler. And while the majority of American society became accepting of gay people in recent years, it wasn't until the past year that an active gay pro basketball player and would-be gay National Football League player felt comfortable enough to declare their sexuality in public. 
 
 It was an overdue reckoning this weekend when so many voices started calling for the NBA to sanction or oust Donald Sterling. Ironically, he was only able to become one of the league's owners due to the wealth he amassed – wealth amassed in part by refusing to lease land to people who look like most of the players in the NBA. As such, he should've been treated like a pariah years ago. But he wasn't rebuked, or worse, way back when – and that should be the biggest outrage of all.
– Everyone from NBA colleagues to the NAACP to President Obama is outraged over Donald Sterling's alleged racist comments—but this is a man who made the millions that allowed him to buy the LA Clippers in the first place through decades of racist rental policies, writes Kevin B Blackistone in the Guardian. In 2003, he paid $5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging he tried to force non-Korean tenants out of apartments in LA's Koreatown; in 2006, he was sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination including allegedly telling his employees "that black and Hispanic families were not desirable tenants" and refusing to rent to them. Where was the NBA investigation and the widespread condemnation then? The New Yorker's Ben Greenman agrees, tweeting yesterday, "It's not just Donald Sterling's ignorance that's the problem. It's the decades that ignorance has been tolerated because of wealth." And on Slate, Josh Levin takes it further, delving into what he sees as a troubling truth: "Pro basketball is a business in which most of the employees are black and the vast majority of the owners are white," he writes. And that dynamic is celebrated, with NFL announcers treating owners "like royalty." Sure, most of them probably treat their players well, "but there’s something creepy about celebrating their beneficence, as if money necessarily buys virtue." In fact, that's why Sterling "has remained ensconced in the NBA penthouse" for so long despite his racism. Click for Levin's full column, or Blackistone's.