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The Final Word on Imus

From Mike S. at No Nanny State:

If the black community wants his head on a stick, they need to clean their own house first. They need to be asking for the resignation of the CEO of the BET network for the music they play. They need to make very public attacks and sustained boycotts on the record companies that produce this crap. Women are regularly described as, “ho’s” and “bitches” and “niggers” and portrayed as sluts, grinding themselves into the groins of these rap singers.

Pft… Now now, Mike S. it’s only fun when you get to blame whitey for all your problems!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 8:23 am and is filed under Hypocrites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 8 Comments

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    • v
    For the record, there are any number of white musicians who also talk about "my humps" or "shaking that ass." Sex sells in music, regardless of color. Hell, sex sells in the entertainment industry in general, between music, movies, even comedy routines. As a general rule, these are known and recognized as fiction. They're "acts" or "bits." Sure, they may play to stereotypes, but it's still an act.

    So a comedian or musician might talk about hos and bitches, niggers and sluts. Young women might accept jobs dancing in music videos, where they bump and grind in slow motion. These are all choices that they make. Musician is safe from any slander lawsuits by keeping the hostility vague -- he'll talk about women in general, not any specific woman. And the dancers in the videos chose to participate in the misogyny. You never see them complain about being paraded around like trophies -- it's their choice, their lifestyle, their explicit agreement to play that particular game.

    The Rugters basketball team aren't entertainers or dancers. Hell, they're not even professionals. They're college kids. Teenagers, some of 'em still. THESE PARTICULAR WOMEN are NOT "regularly ... portrayed as sluts." In fact, the vast MAJORITY of black women are not, any more than you could say that every white girl is a slut who shows her tits for "Girls Gone Wild" videos. Some do, obviously. Imus might even be able to generalize that white girls on spring break are slutty. Just watch a little MTV and you can confirm that. But if he said that the Tennessee women's basketball team looked like "slutty trailer trash," you can bet there'd be outrage about that, too.
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    • v
    I think what Mike is saying is more toward the "if you want to get to the root of the problem, it ain't Don Imus" line of thinking.

    What he said was stupid. That being said, entirely too big a deal is being made about the racial implications, and other stuff from people who claim to want to be protecting the "black community."

    Well, the "black community" has problems. Illegitimate children with baby daddy drama, poverty, crime, underemployment, and so on are not caused by Don Imus calling some basketball players nappy headed hos.

    What seems to happen is that once someone says something that can be pegged as racist, we have a procession of events. First blackoutrage, then blackanger, then blackdespair, followed by black-this-is-why-we're-here.

    If the "black community" wants to focus on Don Imus, I'm certainly not going to stop them. I couldn't care less.

    But if they expended as much energy on solving their problems as they do on going after a 60+ year old shock jock, they wouldn't have the afforementioned "community" problems.
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    • v
    Fair enough. But by that argument, there's a lot of work to be done in the white community, too. The white community has many of the same problems that you've described above -- poverty, crime, deadbeat dads, lack of education -- and they, too, use the entertainment industry as a means of temporarily escaping from that despair. If white men spent less time watching porn on the intertubes (or watching scantily clad women getting dismembered at the movies, or getting drunk at NASCAR events) and more time solving the problems in their communities, then the world would be a better place.
    • ^
    • v
    There's nowhere near the glorification of materialism, sex, and violence outside of the black community. There's a ton of work to be done in the black community, and it needs to start by booting out the race baiters and focusing on the actual issues.

    Don Imus isn't the problem.

    When Don Imus is gone, the problem won't have gone away.

    And if the words are offensive, they should be offensive no matter whose mouth they come out of.

    End of story.
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    • v
    We'll have to disagree completely on this one. One needs look no further than the wall-to-wall coverage (and recent exploitation of) Anna Nicole Smith. Sex, drugs, materialism, all wrapped up in the life of one white woman. There's SO much celebrity glorification in this country -- along with movies targeted to young suburban males that glorify violence (how GD successful is the SAW franchise) -- that it's patently false to state that "there’s nowhere near the glorification of materialism, sex, and violence outside of the black community."

    And I'd also suggest that even though Don Imus OBVIOUSLY isn't the root of all problems in the black community, it's silly to think you shouldn't do anything about him. This isn't a zero sum game. This isn't an "either or" choice.

    Do I think he should have been fired? Dunno. He's made millions over the years with the same basic shtick, and is this any more offensive than anything else? Again, I haven't listened to him enough to even care.

    But you can address THIS particular issue even though OTHER larger issues haven't yet been tackled. Consider this low-hanging fruit. An easy task to cross off the list before you get moving on the harder challenges described in Mike's post.
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    • v
    I absolutely disagree. It is 100% a zero-sum game.

    Take a look at what riles up the "black community."

    A 60+ year old shock jock making some off-color remark.

    They're expending energy there to the exclusion of expending it anywhere else. Period.

    If that isn't a perfect example of a zero-sum game, I don't know what is.

    The average black guy on the street just works hard, goes home to his kids, and so on, but it isn't the average guy running the show in the "community" right now.
    • ^
    • v
    Following that logic, the "black community" shouldn't have been so upset -- shouldn't have expended so much energy -- when some woman nobody had ever heard of before got arrested for sitting in a clearly marked "Whites Only" section of a bus.

    Tip of the iceberg, Vinny. You have to start somewhere.
    • ^
    • v
    Tip of the iceberg, Vinny. You have to start somewhere.


    Bullshit. This isn't the beginning of a trend. It starts and ends here.
 

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