"Sources: GM Danny Ferry's reference to Luol Deng's African heritage initiated Hawks investigation" - headline from the link I posted.

You guys can stop putzing around.

Well the Hawks owner was just following racial demographics and numbers from other teams.

The NBA actively collects detailed information on their fan base and passes that information along to the owners to help boost revenues. The league most likely sent the Atlanta Hawks statistics on its racial demographics and which racial class spends the most money.

I'm thinking if this is what makes a guy lose his team, there are 28-29 other owners who most likely were discussing the same things behind closed doors on how to further boost ticket sales.

Walk it back.

Danny Ferry isn't the owner, he's the GM. And that's a different topic.

Right. But when the GM is getting the organization investigated in the first place for making racial remarks the claim starts to become dubious that it is just the owner following racial demographics.

Confirmed POS human being

I think the scouting report remark on Luol Deng by the GM was just absolutely stupid. "He's got some African in him" as if that means anything and that's closer to Sterling style racism.

But the actual contents of the email itself is not racist, maybe a tad ignorant. But if that's all the investigation found, one email written 2 years ago, I'm not buying it.

There's still questionable material in the email like...

And yet, as has been mentioned at least twice, he thinks they have the best kiss cam in the league. It's a bit inconsistent.

Racism doesn't necessarily mean people have to hold animosity towards other races. To me, from this email and the GM saying what he did, it looks like a gentleman's kinda racism. Where the actors in this event are still looking down at black people instead of looking at what poverty does.

Is it the hawk's owner's job to fix poverty or is it his job to get walking bags of flesh with money attached thru the turnstiles?

Gives rich people something to own when they get tired of horses?

I'm usually pretty quick to shame a racist, but this is pretty innocuous TBH.

That question isn't really valid in this circumstance. The owner has a problem with blacks being scary. He writes a kneejerk letter about it, and has since agreed to sell off his team.

If I was the owner of the Hawks my thoughts wouldn't dwell on blacks as consumers of my products. But how to help people become even better consumers of my products. Owners have a vested interest in helping alleviate poverty whether they know it or not.

This is a good discussion -- is the guy still racist even if he personally likes, interacts with, and is comfortable around other races?

Yes.

Because the power relationships and the impact on people goes way beyond an individual's personal feelings.

This guy says straight up, let's make money by pandering to racists. And as he makes blacks more invisible, he helps keep them stigmatized. He creates a private playground for racists, rather than making them get along if they're going to watch ball.

As a team owner, this guy has far more ability to marginalize African Americans than any Klan member. When suburban whites go through there lives without having to share space with other races, they often turn out horrible and stay that way. And that's what's happening when the games are kept white.

So yes, he's a racist. The worst kind -- the kind who really has the means to marginalize African Americans.

So he's genuinely fond of the maid and sent her kid to Harvard. Big deal. His marketing proposal is supposed to be okay because he does it for money instead of racial ideology?

It boils down to this. Are we going to define racism by the mental condition of an actor, or the results? Or both?

Even so, we can still make a case that he's a traditional racist since he cares so little for a group of human beings that he's willing degrade them for money.

It is anybody's obligation not to be a vile, destructive greed head.

Is he? Much of what I read was him recognizing the target demographic he wants to appeal to, then musing about ways in which he could go about catering to them. I admit I didn't read all that carefully so maybe I'm overlooking important details...

Pffft.

Who and what did he destroy by turning 90/10 black/white audience into a 60/40 black/white audience?

He is told by the league experts that the 35-55 year old white demographic spends the most money. Do you simply ignore that?

You have 20 000 seats to fill and thousands of season tickets to sell, and you're co-owners are looking directly at you.

What did he destroy? Seriously? Comity. Civilization.

And boo hoo he's got seats to fill. There's some things you don't do for money. You don't sell child porn, arms to Iran, or ethnically cleansed leisure.

Racists always have this silly assumption that their private preferences have no real world impact. This is because they are racists. They refuse to empathize and ponder the implications of a group of people being stigmatized. Unless that group is themselves, accused of being racists, then they find all sorts of ways in which their rights are trampled.

So if the team goes under and 100% of the white and black fans lose their ability to watch games, does that loss count as more or less worse than slanting the ratio more towards whites?

That's the big issue, isn't it? If I can do nothing and other people fix poverty, then I'm even better off! But if everyone acts that way...

I'm pretty sure this is like a thing in macro Econ.

It's also one of the cases for why welfare states exist.

It wasn't going under. They were calculating how to get a few more bucks by pandering to racist yuppies.

And yes, if the only way to make a venture work is by keeping racists in a lily white bubble, you do something else. These owners are not going to make their kids hungry. It's the difference between having a Lear jet or a Gulfstream.

The intent to do something to somebody because of their race combined with a desired outcome that is racially inequitable. Also a preferentially-toned acknowledgement of racially segregated culture.

Whether or not the person who wrote that email is racist, he was likely thinking of 'racist dollars' when he wrote that, to use a metaphor.

The nice guy trying to make a business decision tone of the email plus the whoops I'm racist move of self reporting is peachy.

If ESPN instructed camera crews not to put so many kissing white couples on the jumbo cam because it's vaguely vulgar, unsettling, and bad business, I'm sure the frat boys would find their outrage.