It is the wee small hours of a Thursday morning and I have a miserable cold. Because I am not feeling well and because of other factors, also beyond my control, I did not write anything for The Wave Wednesday. It is a demonstration of my strict discipline (as well as Andre’s insistence that I meet deadlines) that I write something every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday — come rain or come shine; come hell or high water; in sickness or in health. (Like being married!) 

So, to make up for my failure to write Wednesday, and to show what a martinet I am to my craft, I hereby write one of my occasional interactive communiques.

First, I want to congratulate the U.S. Department of Justice for getting a record $2.7 million settlement from that slime ball Donald T. Sterling for his having discriminated against Blacks and Latinos in his Wilshire area apartment buildings. I’ve written news stories about Sterling’s blatant racism against Blacks and Latinos for several years and I reported it in The Wave when the Justice Department filed suit against Sterling and his wife three years ago for violating the federal Fair Housing Act.

The mainstream media didn’t pay much attention to reports going back to 2003 that Sterling — who owns the Clippers basketball team, by the way — was buying up occupied apartment buildings and throwing out Blacks, Latinos and families with children and replacing them with Koreans, the ethnic group he preferred. He was so blatant with his bias that he added the word “Korean” to his buildings’ names, which resulted in an earlier lawsuit against him, which was settled four years ago.

Neither did the mainstream media report about the racial slurs and indignities Blacks and Latinos suffered from Sterling. He said Blacks stunk and they stank-up his apartments, and that Latinos did nothing but lay around his apartments drinking and playing loud music all day. And he employs no Blacks in his businesses (except for the basketball team).

I last wrote about Sterling some three or four months ago when the Los Angeles NAACP and the Black Business Associaition honored this horrible man. I expressed outrage and disbelief that those two venerable Black organizations would scrape way, way down in the cesspool of bigots and come up with equality’s anti-Christ as a person who should be honored for anything.

Skip Cooper, president of the BBA, did not return my call for an explanation of his organization’s nauseating licking of Sterling’s boots when I was writing the story. But I ran into Skip at a subsequent event and he avoided talking to me about him and Sterling entirely. Disgusting! Then two NAACP officials tried to explain why they had chosen to give Sterling their “Outstanding Achievement Award,” the highest honor the chapter bestows on anybody. Their reasoning made no sense whatsoever.

Even without them coming out and saying so, I am convinced that, in exchange for money, both the NAACP and the BBA tried to help Sterling clean up his image before the federal suit against him went to court. And if those organizations did not get at least a million dollars each from Sterling, then they sold themselves and us for only 30 pieces of silver and they ought to be ashamed.

Sterling is an extremely bad piece of work about whom the mainstream media is selective in its reportage because he promotes himself as a charitable guy by spending a lot of money buying big colorful ads in their newspapers. But that’s all right, because I and the agents of justice and goodwill have our back.