[Peace-discuss] Imus

[John W.]

Hutchinson left out one ingredient: the idiots in our society who listen to 
Imus and his ilk, and who vote for the politicians who give their tacit 
approval to racial stereotyping.




At 10:52 AM 4/10/2007, David Green wrote:


>
>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 
><http://www.blacknews.com/>BlackNews.com, an author of 
><http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1881032167/counterpunchmaga>The 
>Disappearance of Black Leadership and 
><http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684836572/counterpunchmaga>The 
>Assassination of the Black Male Image.
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