[Peace-discuss] Imus

[Karen Medina]

Imus' statements were horrible! And claiming that it was said as a joke does not make it any less horrible. 

-karen medina

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 08:52:00 -0700 (PDT)
>From: David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>  
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] Imus  
>To: Discuss Courtwatch <discuss at lists.communitycourtwatch.org>, Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>
>                   And Why He Won't Be
>
>                 Why Imus Should Be Fired
>
>   By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON
>   The reaction was swift and justifiably angry to
>   shock jock Don Imus's latest racist crack that the
>   Rutgers women's basketball players were nappy headed
>   'hos' (An even more curious characterization given
>   Imus's trademark floppy mop). Imus didn't step over
>   the line of racial incorrectness he obliterated it.
>   He straddled the repentance line with his kind of,
>   sort of, apology in which he did not say "I" only
>   "we." The careful phrasing turned the "apology" into
>   generic pabulum and was tantamount to personal
>   absolution.
>    
>   But even if Imus had made a sincere bare-the-chest
>   heartfelt apology it wouldn't amount to much. That's
>   the standard ploy that shock jocks, GOP big wigs,
>   and assorted public personalities employ when they
>   get caught with their racial pants down. On a few
>   occasions the offenders have been reprimanded,
>   suspended, and even dumped. However that's rare.
>   Imus's act has been syndicated on dozens of stations
>   for more than a decade by MSNBC. Though the network
>   gently distanced itself from Imus, it won't likely
>   show him the broadcast door.
>    
>   There are two reasons why. And they tell much about
>   why loudmouths such as Imus can prattle off foul
>   remarks about gays, blacks, Latinos Asians, Muslims,
>   and women and skip away with a caressing hand slap.
>   The first reason is that these guys ramp up ratings
>   and that makes the station's cash registers jingle.
>   Since January, Imus's MSNBC show has drawn an
>   average of more than 350,000 viewers. Nielson Media
>   Research says that's a leap of nearly 40 percent
>   over the same period in 2006.
>    
>   The other reason it's virtually impossible to
>   permanently muzzle Imus and others that talk race
>   trash is the sphinx like silence of top politicians,
>   broadcast industry leaders, and corporate sponsors.
>   GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney and former
>   Democratic presidential contender John Kerry
>   bantered with Imus on his show in recent weeks. Yet,
>   Romney hasn't uttered a word condemning Imus's bile.
>   And Kerry issued a tepid statement through a
>   spokeswoman in which he merely branded it "a stupid
>   comment" and praised him for owning up to it.
>    
>   While Kerry and Romney are two of the better known
>   politicians to recently cackle with and at Imus's
>   digs on the show, a steady parade of politicians and
>   personalities have trooped to Imus's microphones
>   over the years. And not all of them, as Kerry and
>   Romney showed, are hard-line GOP conservatives.
>   Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain leaped over
>   each other to get a spot with Imus. And we haven't a
>   heard a peep from any of them about his remarks.
>    
>   The problem of the silence or perfunctory belated
>   criticism by higher ups to racial taunts surfaced a
>   few years ago following then Senate Majority leader
>   designate Trent Lott's veiled tout of segregation.
>   It touched off a furor, and ultimately Lott stepped
>   down from the post, but it took nearly a week for
>   Bush to make a stumbling, and weak sounding
>   disavowal of him. The silence from top politicians
>   and industry leaders to public racism was even more
>   deafening a couple of years ago when former Reagan
>   Secretary of Education William Bennett made his
>   weird taunt that aborting black babies could reduce
>   crime. Even as calls were made from the usual
>   circles almost always blacks and liberal Democrats
>   for an apology, or his firing from his syndicated
>   national radio show, neither Bush or any other top
>   GOP leader said a mumbling word about Bennett.
>   There's another reason for their silence. The last
>   two decades many Americans have become much too
>   comfortable using code language to bash and
>   denigrate blacks. In the 1970s, the vocabulary of
>   covert racially loaded terms included terms such as
>   "law and order," "crime in the streets," "permissive
>   society," "welfare cheats," "subculture of
>   violence," "subculture of poverty," "culturally
>   deprived" and "lack of family values" seeped into
>   the American lexicon about blacks. Some politicians
>   seeking to exploit white racial fears routinely
>   tossed about these terms.
>    
>   In the 1980s new terms such as "crime prone," "war
>   zone," "gang infested," "crack plagued," "drug
>   turfs," "drug zombies," "violence scarred," "ghetto
>   outcasts" and "ghetto poverty syndrome" were shoved
>   into public discourse. These were covert racial code
>   terms for blacks and they further reinforced the
>   negative image of young black males as dope dealers,
>   drive by shooters, and educational cripples. And the
>   image of young black women as a dysfunctional
>   collection of B's and "hos," welfare queens, and
>   baby makers. The Rutgers cage ladies attend a solid
>   academic institution, worked hard to get to the top
>   of the basketball heap, and have not posed
>   discipline problems, yet the vile racial typecasting
>   still made them fair game for ridicule.
>    
>   The Reverend Al Sharpton, the National Association
>   of Black Journalists and a handful of sports
>   columnists will continue to loudly demand that MSNBC
>   and radio stations give Imus the ax, and they
>   should. But they won't. There's simply too much
>   money in racial trash talk, and too much silence
>   from the higher ups that send a tacit signal
>   condoning it. That silence is Imus's ultimate trump
>   card.
>    
>   Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for
>   BlackNews.com, an author of The Disappearance of
>   Black Leadership and The Assassination of the Black
>   Male Image.