Basketball was hit with a massive scandal this week as racist comments from Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, were recorded by his girlfriend and then ended up online. The comments, seemingly sparked by a photo Sterling’s girlfriend, Vanessa Stiviano, took with Magic Johnson have understandably caused outrage throughout all of Basketball and of course the wider black community. Protests aiming to send a message to the Clippers owner have been coming in thick and fast ever since the comments hit the web courtesy of TMZ. With big names in Basketball and public arena all publicly lambasting Sterling, an announcement is to be made by the NBA concerning the comments.
One of the many to protest against the hateful comments was Jonathan Rosenberg, a Senior VP of products for Google. Attending the Golden State Warriors game this past Sunday, Rosenberg was pictured with friends holding up banners saying “I brought a black guy to the game”, clearly in defiance of comments made by Sterling that black people weren’t welcome at Clippers games.
We report on mostly Android smartphones, tablets and by extension a lot of Google products, but this has been a hard story to ignore and it’s great to see someone from Google stand up for this shameful behavior. Racism in sport is something that shouldn’t be tolerated, and considering there a good portion of people working on Android and the products we love are of varying nationalities, racism in tech shouldn’t be tolerated, either. Rosenberg unsurprisingly got a lot of positive feedback for the images on Google+ and while his message probably want’s felt as hard as others, Google+ is far from a ghost town as other outlets would have you believe, and with this protest adding to the long, long list we’re sure the NBA will be handing out harsh sanctions and hopefully let the Clippers get back to playing Basketball.