Heritage

Michael Jordan says was racist in book

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Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan and his partner Yvette Prieto at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2011. Photo/FILE

Basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan says in a new book that he considered himself a racist growing up.

In the book, entitled Michael Jordan: The Life by author Roland Lazenby, the five-time National Basketball Association most valuable player and current owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, says that as a teenager he was “against all white people.”

Excerpts of the book published on Wednesday by the New York Post include Jordan describing how growing up in North Carolina during the 1970s, where he said the Klu Klux Klan thrived, helped shape his views on racism.

In one instance, Jordan recalls a school girl calling him the n-word. “So I threw a soda at her,” Jordan says in the book. “I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people.”

It was after that incident that Jordan’s mother convinced him that he could not go through life consumed by racial hatred.

Jordan, who went on to win six NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls, recently spoke out against racist remarks by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who has since been banned for life by the NBA and could be forced to sell the team.

“As an owner, I’m obviously disgusted that a fellow team owner could hold such sickening and offensive views,” Jordan said in a statement last month. “As a former player, I’m completely outraged.

“I am appalled that this type of ignorance still exists within our country and at the highest levels of our sport. In a league where the majority of players are African-American, we cannot and must not tolerate discrimination at any level.”

Meanwhile, Canadian author and environmentalist Farley Mowat, a fervent and sometimes controversial writer who sold some 17 million books, has died, Canadian media reports. He was 92. Mowat’s work introduced millions of readers to the Canadian north, a vast, sparsely populated region few writers had previously explored in depth.

He also campaigned for the need to protect wildlife and strongly opposed over-development by humans.

“I feel sorry for us because not only are we a bad animal, but we’re most inevitably a doomed animal. Every species dies out. But our doom is here and now,” he told an interviewer in 1998.

“He was obviously a passionate Canadian who shaped a lot of my generation growing up with his books, and he will be sorely missed,” said Justin Trudeau, the 42-year-old leader of Canada’s opposition Liberal Party. Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, was a friend of Mowat.

Mowat, who served as an officer in Italy in World War Two, came to prominence in 1952 with his first book, People of the Deer. It described the travails of an Inuit tribe battling starvation and government indifference in Canada’s Arctic.

The book sparked interest in the north, and Mowat built on his fame with Never Cry Wolf in 1963, in which he tried to dispel the image of the wolf as a killing machine responsible for the decline in the caribou population.
Reuters