Donald Sterling is a racist.

On a side note, he also owns the Los Angeles Clippers.

You wouldn’t think a person who owns an incredibly successful professional basketball team that only has two white players on the roster would be a long-time, horrendous racist.

But, remarkably, that exists in the world we live in.

For the comments he made during a phone call recorded without his knowledge, Sterling has been banned for life from the NBA and fined $2.5 million by the league commissioner. Since, about every celebrity you can name — including Michael Jordan, Oprah and President Barack Obama — has taken to the Internet to express their disgust.

If you ask me, this old bigot deserves every ounce of lash-back he’s getting. But what this situation is making less obvious is the fact that every bigot deserves a reaction like this — not just the rich and powerful ones.

It’s easy for some to forgive Sterling’s generation for their laughably backward attitudes surrounding some ideas most of us young people find obvious — such as the universal right to love who you want, worship what you want and, frankly, exist as a human being without being hated and feared without reason.

People call racists and homophobes “traditional” or claim it’s “just how that generation was raised.” But we’re not talking about vegetables or automobiles; we’re dealing with real people made absolutely no different than those doing the talking.

It’s one thing to grow up not liking mushrooms even though you maybe don’t even remember trying one. You just get that uncomfortable feeling in your gut, and you’re happy to avoid mushrooms for good.

But when you extend that logic to something so deep, something that so profoundly affects not only you but every other human being you share this planet with, there is absolutely no reason for you to not spend more time and energy getting over that uncomfortable feeling to make sure your automatic annoyance is well founded.

The arrogance one must posses to assume — based entirely on loose, undirected comments overheard from parents about other cultures — that you are superior, that associating with outsiders brings down your image, that your disgust when meeting your daughter’s Hispanic friend or gay basketball coach is acceptable, is at a level so nightmarishly inflated I’m surprised it doesn’t implode the person who dares to feel it.

Add extreme wealth into the mix, and you’d think the planet would have sucked itself into a black hole by now.

That must be why it’s so hard to remedy if somebody doesn’t get it. How could you teach something so obvious?

I’m not sure that fining Sterling however many millions of dollars helps anybody, but I certainly respect the NBA’s decision to kick him out of the league; it’s their club, and they don’t have to put up with people who take themselves so seriously, so I’m glad he got the boot.

Unfortunately for all of us, he’ll probably die before seeing that all his money and self-entitlement won’t protect him from death, and, worse, it never made him happy while alive.

 Will Beaton is the Editor-in-Chief at The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].