As the league begins to move against its longest-tenured owner, the moment feels positively catalytic. The National Basketball Association is the sports world’s most progressive league. Its 30 teams are 30 businesses out to make money, but they do it in a game that finds its greatest popularity among the lower and middle classes and as a league with the second-highest proportion of Democratic fans. More specifically, the NBA is society’s cutting edge as far as race is concerned—it’s the league that birthed the first black head coach (Bill Russell, with due respect to football’s Fritz Pollard); first black superstar (Wilt Chamberlain); first black sneaker brand (Air Jordan); first black general manager (Wayne Embry); and first—and only—black owner (the Charlotte Bobcats are owned by Michael Jordan). Its recent surge in popularity and value has been due primarily to an unusually talented and charismatic inventory of superstars who are overwhelmingly young black men.

Over the past several years, NBA players have seized the athletic and cultural zeitgeist, in the process making a ton of money for themselves but even more for ownership, who have seen their properties appreciate at rates not normally experienced outside the top echelons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street—according to Forbes, franchise values have increased 25 percent just in the past year. This imbalance—between who is responsible for the profit and who reaps the profit—makes less sense with each passing year, and incidents like Sterling’s make it seem absurd. So this is a moment of reckoning for the league, and, since the league has always seemed to represent more than just itself on matters of race and of labor, it’s a moment of reckoning for everyone. Will Sterling be allowed to stick around just because he’s the guy who owns the team? Or will the laborers responsible for Sterling’s success get their way? To put it more bluntly: Will the moribund old white guys win another round, or will the young wealth-creators triumph?