I-man, fall guy

The controversy surrounding the comments made by talk radio relic Don Imus have had opportunistic media outlets like CNN and Fox News buzzing for nearly a week.
In the wake of the University of Tennessee’s victory over Rutgers in the NCAA women’s basketball national championship game, Imus referred to Rutgers players on-air as “some nappy-headed hoes.”
It was a classless crack at the appearance of the Rutgers team—the inference was that they looked masculine and unkempt.
The racially-charged remark earned for the radio veteran of 39 years a two week suspension—a decision he did not appeal—and finally a letter of termination from CBS’ brass.
Does the punishment fit the crime? Probably not.
It was a stupid mistake, a failed attempt at humor, and certainly warrants some degree of censure; it was bad form all the way around, but I don’t think it rises to the level of an offense worthy of dismissal.
It’s out-of-bounds humor, but I think it’s also more than that.
To my way of thinking, the call by many in this country for Imus to lose his job rings hollow.
His comments were cheap and nasty to say the very least, but I believe they also reflect a popular acceptance of a culture that tolerates this type of defamatory speech as a matter of course.
In short, the hip-hop culture is the prevailing entertainment culture in this country right now and incidents like this are becoming more and more common.
The language of the hip-hop culture is vile, plain and simple.
Several weeks back, I visited Grand Blanc East middle school for a junior high basketball game. During the break between the 7th and 8th grade games, the crowd was entertained by—you guessed it—hip-hop music.
I remember one song in particular was chock-full of obscenities including terms like the infamous “n-word” and the aforementioned “hoes.” All this for an overwhelmingly white audience in a gym filled with kids who would certainly be sent to the principal’s office for using such language during the school day.
If these students cannot yet spell hypocrisy, they should certainly know what it means.
This sort of destructive language is being increasingly popularized and tolerated.
Why aren’t Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson pressuring Def Jam or Bad Boy Records? These are the labels that consistently churn-out music that is defamatory toward women and black women especially.
The tragedy that the Imus controversy points up is just that, tragic. We have given racism and bigotry a free pass in the hip-hop culture for far too long and now we want to stand back and feign genuine outrage about it?
My first brush with the term “ho” as shorthand for “woman” was in junior high school. My teacher was none other than acclaimed west coast rapper Dr. Dre.
Most people under the age of 40 have probably never heard of Don Imus before this controversy came to the fore.
What may ultimately cost Imus his job earned Grammys for rap “artists” like Eminem and Ludacris—names we know and celebrate.
The sexist, racist, homophobic, gutter speech practiced by so many has been regularized in our popular culture and what are we going to do about it?
The hip-hop culture in America is Vaudevillian at its core. It reinforces many of the most noxious stereotypes about African-Americans, catering to ill-conceived notions about race that already exist among many people of every stripe in this country.
That, far beyond anything that Don Imus could say about a basketball game that almost no one watched, is truly despicable.