The controversy surrounding Los Angeles Clippers' owner Donald Sterling, his racist comments, denials and subsequent explanations and apologies points to an interesting aspect of our human character.We are programmed to deny things. Or attempt to. Take aging for example. Is your hair turning gray? Dye it and deny it. Thinning? Comb it over. No one will notice. Sterling told his ex-girlfriend that she shouldn’t bring black people as her guests to Clippers games, but denied that his comments were racist. No one has done more for blacks, he said in an interview with Anderson Cooper. Because he is an NBA team owner, he awards black men with huge sums of money. Black men like Magic Johnson have not done nearly as much for their own race as Sterling has done, he said.It is not uncommon for racists and bigots to deny their racism and bigotry. Indeed, according to authors Ajit Varki and Danny Brower in their book, Denial: Self-deception, False Beliefs, and the Origin of the Human Mind, it is not uncommon for all of us to be in denial because that ability to deny is the key to our success as a species. We deny our own mortality while being fully conscious that we are mortal. That incredible contradiction allows us to go forward, Varki and Brower say. In order to develop intellectually and socially we must develop self awareness; that includes awareness of our mortality. But in order not to become paralysed by the idea of our inevitable death, we must at the same time deny that mortality. Otherwise we would just give up. Sterling refuses to give up. He possesses the capacity to deny what is obvious to everyone else around him. My cousin Curtis (not his real name) was like that. One of several black sheep in the family, Curtis was caught inside a pharmacy at 2 a.m. with burglary tools. He denied the crow bar, glass cutter, lock picks and balaclava were his. When he appeared before a judge, he denied that he had even been in the pharmacy. When the judge asked him why he would have signed a statement denying that the tools he was found with were his if he hadn’t even been there, he replied that he had never made such a statement. It was all a conspiracy, he said. The police were out to get him because of his comments to the press about police brutality the last time he was arrested. And besides, the court had no jurisdiction because he wasn’t a Canadian, he was a Freeman. “I deny your authority over me,” he said to the judge and demanded immediate release.The judge denied his demand; Curtis got six months.