(AllHipHop News) While 51 year old Michael Jordan did not approve of Donald Sterling’s racist comments, a younger Michael Jordan might have been more understanding. According to an excerpt from an upcoming biography Michael Jordan: The Life, Jordan admitted to once considering himself a racist and being against all white people.
One part of the the biography, written by Roland Lazenby, has Jordan recall an altercation he had with a White classmate while attending Emsley A. Laney High School back in 1977. According to Jordan, the girl called Jordan the N-word and Jordan’s retaliation got the future Hall of Famer suspended:
So I threw a soda at her. I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people.
Lazenby spoke on the presence of the Klu Klux Klan in North Carolina during the years Jordan attended Emsley A. Laney High School. Lazenby informed Sports Illustrated that Jordan’s hatred for White people could be a byproduct of the monopolizing influence of the KKK over his hometown and a history of racism:
As I started looking at newspapers back in this era when I was putting together [Michael’s great-grandfather] Dawson Jordan’s life, the Klan was like a chamber of commerce. It bought the uniforms for ball teams, it put Bibles in all the schools. It may well have ended up being a chamber of commerce if not for all the violence it was perpetrating, too. A lot of the context just wasn’t possible to put it in a basketball book. A lot of it ended up being cut.
Michael Jordan: The Life is available now.