3He’s talked candidly about racism
EJ told BET that racism hasn’t been a significant problem in his life. “Yeah, racism, not so much. We’ve come across little random tidbits maybe, obviously when I’m in different parts of the world and other countries, things are different because they don’t see Black people, as in African-Americans, doing what we do because in some of those other countries that I’ve visited there are a lot of Africans, or people from different parts of the world, who really don’t have what we have in this country, which is so amazing. Here [U.S.] I do not experience that much racism, I feel like that’s probably more prevalent before I was born.”
It was an arguably tone-deaf remark for the otherwise media-savvy fashionista, particularly since he was so outspoken about the Donald Sterling controversy that inadvertently ensnared his father. To recap: during a bizarre interview in 2014 with Anderson Cooper, Sterling—the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who was banned from the NBA for life for making racist remarks—said Magic “should be ashamed of himself” for contracting HIV.
“We were just so astonished at the things he was saying, and not just that he brought my dad into it, but the fact that he was being just blatantly racist. It was kind of like an ‘aha moment,’ the realization that people like that still exist,” EJ told the Daily Beast in 2014, adding, “He’s a walking joke.”
