One of the strains of complaint that has emerged from this headache is that African Americans have only themselves to blame for Sterling not wanting to have black people at his basketball games. They’re uncouth and craven and stand for nothing and stand up for less. This sociocultural perception of black people is of a piece with Rancher Bundy’s remarks last week that they were better off as slaves. His remarks contained a sentence constructed to make it seem as though they were incarcerating themselves. The Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP honored Sterling in 2009 and was scheduled to do so again this year (he’s been a financial donor for years). It has changed its mind about the second laurel while leaving vague whether it plans to desist in laundering his image. But the fact remains that Sterling was a donor, and, as such, does call into question, once again, the “advancement” part of the NAACP.

I’m always open to a conversation about the state of the black self-image, but not one that in any way occurs in the shadow of the racial and racist comments and behavior of Donald Sterling or Cliven Bundy or Donald Trump or Paul Ryan, not about the so-called culture of poverty. Sterling didn’t want to keep the residents of Watts or Inglewood away from or out of his enterprises (well, he didn’t only want to). He wanted to keep away the likes of Matt Kemp and Magic Johnson, who is now rumored to be interested in buying the Clippers. We’ve left the neighbors of culture and poverty and are strolling down the big, fat boulevard of race.

Quickly: I can’t believe you and I have made it this far without unpacking the actual recording that started it all. This is an astonishing conversation. The 80-year-old Sterling and his decades-younger mistress, V. Stiviano (Sterling’s been married for over 50 years to Shelly Stein), talk about race and racism not as combatants, but lovers.

Were it not for the mention of Instagram, Matt Kemp, and a couple of other totems of modernism, this could be a plantation master talking to his mistress about keeping the slaves in the field and out of his house. Actually, this more or less is a plantation master talking to his mistress, who has identified as Mexican and black and has the sort of cheekbones, eyes, and jawline you get when you live in Beverly Hills. It’s striking and heartbreaking how fed up with his hypocrisy she sounds (the recording is hers, but you don’t hear a “performance”; although Donald Trump called Fox & Friends this morning to say that, yes, Sterling said bad things, but Stiviano was disgusting for setting him up). It’s just as perversely moving to hear Sterling insist that he has no power to change the culture. As the owner of a team staffed with black men, who have black and interracial families, he doesn’t feel an obligation to fight racism. He feels a moral duty to accept his lot in life as a rich white person of power and keep the help away from him. And his mistress ought to know better.

In Sterling’s thinking on the recording, Stiviano being the sort of person with whom he doesn’t want her to publicly fraternize is secondary to her status as an erotic exception. Classification as one type of property trumps classification as another. Her being near Magic Johnson and Matt Kemp defies the terms he’s set for their relationship. She has defied being property, and it upsets him. This is one of the most complexly true conversations I’ve ever heard about race. It’s a white man grappling with his privilege while doing nothing to jeopardize it. It’s a black woman brought to question the disgusting nature of her having been privileged in the first place. He thrives in his hypocrisy. She appears to resent hers. Whether Stiviano was compensated to record this evening and submit it to the media, her having so done constitutes even a tiny escape from self-loathing.

Rem, did you know that next month, there’s another movie set to open about Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and lover? This never gets old, and even when it appears to have changed, it hasn’t. Goddamn, indeed.

Browne: The only thing I slightly disagree with here is the nature of her “performance.” I do slightly hear one on the part of Stiviano — there are a few “come on, Donald, say something racist for me” alley-oop moments — but on the whole, she seems to be routinely shocked at how bad Sterling’s beliefs and stances have gotten. Even for him.

When she says, “Honey, if it makes you happy, I will remove all the black people from my Instagram,” it was a god-honest jaw drop. It’s pretty amazing how something so quasi-trivial as Instagram photos could make me feel so temporarily worthless. Especially considering that it’s ultimately what Sterling wanted.

Before going on with the tape, something you said earlier reminded me of a clip. This notion of Sterling almost in a mini-panic, feeling like the blacks are rampantly growing in number and strength and rights and literacy. Remember that scene in The Original Kings of Comedy when Cedric the Entertainer is talking about space and white people?

White people love space movies, love movies about the moon and Mars, where they can be leaving our ass down here on Earth. That’s what they think. That they gonna leave us here on Earth and they gonna move to the moon.

I feel like were Donald Sterling to hear this clip, he’d be sitting at the edge of his chair, downing a bag of popcorn, crying tears of joy at the prospect — only to have his world shattered by Cedric’s next line.

Ain’t gon’ happen. Ya’ll move to the moon, dammit we coming to the moon.

So yeah. Just felt the need to share that.

Back to the tape: It really does have all you could want from a bigotry case study. Perfect material for a race, class, and gender sociology seminar. So much so that it begins to feel not real. Not in the sense that you’re surprised someone could think this way  — not even close. But more in the sense that this whole thing — from the racial revelations to the symbolism of the players’ uniform removal — starts giving off strong vibes of a Disney race movie. Suddenly, Doc Rivers becomes Coach Boone in Remember the Titans. You have your team, composed of individuals clearly wanting to respond in a variety of ways, some more vocal than others. And, of course, there’s your clear racist villain, y’know, the one who doesn’t want his daughter (in real life, actually played by his then-mate) fraternizing with that colored boy. With films like these, as well as this real-life Clippers situation, the common ground is the general lack of nuance. To borrow an oft-too-perfect Twitter meme, there’s no “gotta hear both sides” in this story. There’s only one side. Really, one of the few questions we have to ask ourselves is how we let him get this far. How’d we let him stay owner after all he’s done? How’d we even let him get close to an NAACP lifetime achievement award, as well as seemingly finagle a mutually beneficial relationship with the organization’s L.A. branch, after the open disrespect he’s shown toward [insert minority group]? As DJ/writer/social commentator Jay Smooth smartly notes, why is it that racist words incite attention, while racist practices can easily be swept under the rug?

With Sterling, the damage has been done, but it’s not too late. Because there’s no reason why he would suddenly stop now. Or change his ways. The only way for him to stop is for him to be stopped. And, you know, then to be treated like Sisyphus or Tantalus, or whichever Greek mythological character who taught a lesson forever that you prefer.

I’m all about the bad eggs outing themselves, by the way. It’s obviously a shame that all this happened, but there are few things I love more than the coverts accidentally overting themselves. It’s like finally catching that dastardly elusive fish that’s been getting away from you all season and not throwing it back in the water. Because you’re going to take a picture with it. And then take it home. And then cook it. And then eat it. And then look at what’s left and do this, over and over and over again:

Every Clippers employee and black season-ticket holder should get the opportunity to do this to Donald Sterling. Minimum five minutes each.

Also, to briefly backtrack, how great is it that we live in a world where LeBron is pushing Jordan? I don’t want to pat him on the back too much, given that it’s what he should be doing, but it is wonderful to have the most popular, most talented athlete of a generation be someone who understands the power of his platform — and approach issues not just as a basketball player, but also as a father of two young black sons who he knows will be privileged, but understands will not always be respected equally, regardless of their lineage. If there’s any silver lining in all this mess, you’re right, it’s the reality of adult LeBron continuing to impress off the court.

One question: If Sterling’s your boss — you, Wesley Morris, writer of things, not basketball player (no disrespect to your legendary hooping past) — what’s your play a day after? Or a week after? I bring this up only because I’ve had quite a few conversations with friends this weekend, ones surrounding the idea of “What would I do?”

Morris: Ay yi yi. I don’t know. I hate this question because it deserves an answer, and I’m always afraid of what it might be, that it might be inadequate, that I should turn into Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale or Oprah on Main Street in The Color Purple. Let’s say we’re dealing with generic absolutes and we’re just talking a workplace and an employer, and the employer (by the way, I’m done with “owner” because I’m not owned; and professional sports might, at least, consider the implications of a term like “ownership”) is revealed to have committed some racist act …

You know what? I don’t think absolutes work here, actually. I wouldn’t quit. Why should I? The employer would have to go. Presumably, I’d be part of a team of coworkers and we could band together to do something. This happens in workplaces. The “what to do” here is simpler to me than what women have to deal with all the time, and the stations of guilt and self-recrimination and uncertainty sometimes required just to say “something happened.” With people of color and insult, there can be uncertainty, hypersensitivity, and ambiguity — graycism. But usually there’s nothing gray about it.

The question is: Does the team have the standing to demand change? Does the team have the power to demand respect? Does it have any agency? This, of course, is at the heart of this problem, right? Players at Northwestern took a vote for voicehood, for union, for not being treated like chattel and ATMs at the same time. College athletes aren’t really even asking for a debit. They’re asking for more food. This is the practical problem with ownership in 1814 and 2014: Somebody’s going to feel owned. This is the one area in this conversation where a clear racial headache naturally dovetails with the issue of class.    

What if we took the directly personal off the table (“personal” as it related to you and me) and dealt with a more fixed absolute? What if we looked at this through the lens of the Washington Redskins name and the team’s (sigh) owner, Dan Snyder? (As a point of trivia, it should be noted that Snyder shares the same initials as Sterling — my friend Mark says they should switch teams and save on monogramming — and those happen to be the letters in Michael Jackson’s “D.S.,” a song he wrote and recorded at the height of his paranoid persecution complex, which resulted in some underrated music. You could easily change the name in the chorus: “Don Sterling is a cold man.” Sterling also shares some of his name with a Mad Men character; in last week’s episode, the ancient Bert Cooper walked into reception and saw Dawn’s pretty black face behind the desk and told Joan, her supervisor, that he’d prefer to have a white face out in front. This is the culture of tradition that, in the audio recording, Sterling swears he isn’t capable of changing.) 

Anyway, for me, the Redskins present a more astounding example of the intersections of race, power, history, and ownership. Sterling has no defense for all the things he said — no moral defense, anyway; although we haven’t spent enough time on his nauseating but perversely touching “it’s part of my culture to own” assertion to Stiviano. He sounds resigned to fulfill the “destiny” his whiteness affords. Snyder can barely concede that anything’s wrong, and the longer he continues to throw money at a problem that needs none, the more reprehensible he permits himself to become. I don’t like the phrase “How does [insert pronoun] sleep at night” — who cares! But here I truly do wonder: How? How? How, Rembert: How?

Browne: I have to assume he sleeps at night because he has people to confide in who share his beliefs. Not wanting black people in your arena, feeling as if racism is the culture and that’s the end of it — that’s a tough fight to spearhead alone. I have to imagine it’s pretty lonely to be that one Klan member in a town, which is why it makes sense to move near your boys. Because when you’re among like-minded individuals who can brainwash each other, I’m sure sleep is quite easy. So yes, that Legion of Doom–like “they” Sterling continuously evokes (referring to the calls he gets about the blacks on Stiviano’s Instagram) are probably the ones who not only keep Sterling at ease, but will potentially keep him thinking that he’s still in the right.

You know things are messed up when the sight of a fellow sports team owner on a mobile app can drive Sterling up the wall, simply because the person is black. It’s fascinating, because so many things pertaining to race are often linked with class, regionalism, occupation, and a number of other demographic characteristics. This is one of those rare times when you’re dealing with a pure racist. That, for me, is the grandest takeaway. It doesn’t matter if you’re a normal civilian or a Hall of Famer worth more than $700 million. That common denominator of black is just too much for Donald Sterling to handle. And, as he told Stiviano, following her apology for her skin complexion, it’s not the skin color. It’s what that blackness represents in the culture that matters. And how it should stay that way. And that questioning that shows some kind of idiocy about how the world works.

I’m done. Let’s give this guy his scarlet letter and then watch as Magic Johnson buys the Clippers, an event that could potentially be the greatest middle finger of recent memory.