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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Is there someting going on with Don Imus??
Posted by Jill | 7:29 PM
I kid, of course. This evening I received an e-mail from Scott that referenced his post about the Don Imus Fracas.

I haven't weighed in on all this, mostly because I really don't care about Don Imus. I haven't listened to his show in years and I've thought for a long time that it's shameful the way everyone in the Washington Hackocracy (and that includes government AND punditry) sucks up to him. I think he's misogynistic, racist, and a generally Angry White Old Man, and while I give him credit for his charitable work, work of which one is reminded every time one drives down Summit Avenue in Hackensack past the children's wing of Hackensack University Medical Center that bears his name, that doesn't mean he's not an ass. And frankly, I've been more concerned with the early destruction of Air America Radio under the Green Regime.

I'm as big a free speech advocate as anyone, but the fact that you have a right to free speech doesn't give you a right to be paid millions of dollars and be given a platform for your worst instincts. And it seems to me that guys like Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek were banished to Media Invisibility for comments far less derogatory.

Forget for a minute how ludicrous a sixty-something white guy sounds trying to sound like black rappers. Has this man never heard of the "It's OK to knock your own team" rule? I'm not excusing the kind of disgusting, misogynistic lyrics that one hears in hip-hop culture, but it's unseemly for a man in his seventh decade saying such things about a bunch of nineteen-year-old girls.

It's been appalling to see a bunch of white giys wondering just what the fuss is about calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's". I'd like to see how Imus would react if someone called him a saggy-scrotal pencil-dick. Of course, if it were a member of the Washington Hackocracy that seems to want to liine up and kiss his ring, at least we'd be talking about people playing on the same field, so to speak; two equals in terms of being able to get a message out. But this is a sixty-something white guy using not one but two pejoratives -- one racial, one sexual, to describe a bunch of teenaged girls that he doesn't even know.

If you want to know why this isn't something that black women can and should just "shrug off", don't ask me. Ask Pam, who knows of what she speaks:


This isn’t about School Daze and socio-political commentary; this is about Imus and Co. demeaning those women using a common racist denigration of hair texture — nothing more needs to be telegraphed — kinky hair=bad, ugly, animalistic, straight hair=good, attractive. And to top it off, those nappy-headed gals at Rutgers are therefore ‘hos as well. Nice.

And people wonder why so many black women have a complex about their hair, gooping it up with nasty lye relaxers, frying their scalp with hot combs? The self-loathing is so culturally ingrained, so pathological, and it’s reinforced by the messages like the ones Imus and friends are having a great laugh over. It’s toxic and ignorant. From my post, The politics of hair (again):

I am old enough to experience the “pleasure” of the thermal hot comb — you rested it over the gas flame of the stove to heat it up. Then the grease was carefully applied to your hair and that comb sizzled through the kinks till it was bone straight, hissing as you prayed the comb didn’t touch your scalp — inevitably you got scalp burns because the “stylist” f*cked up. [By the way, the “stylist” for most folks was usually a relative, but in my case, everyone in my family had straight hair, so my mom had to take me to a salon till she figured out what to do.]

Once the chemical relaxer came into vogue it was the same problem with a different twist, it became a watch-the-clock endeavor to see how long you could leave the vile-smelling chemicals on to achieve maximum straightness before your scalp started to peel, burn and get open sores. Anything for that damn straight hair.



Substitute the word "fat" for "nappy-headed" and "pig" for "ho's" and THEN I can relate.

Which of course brings us back to Air America and Lionel, and I have to wonder if Mark Green is now wondering about the "special brand of humor" that Lionel brings to the progressive network and when the other shoe is going to drop. I wonder if that "special brand of humor" is going to be continuing to refer to Rachel Maddow as a "thick necked lesbian" and the next overweight woman in the news as a "fat pig."

Context is everything, and this is hardly the context into which you want to bring a guy with a track record of hateful remarks about women into a progressive radio network.

Grab your popcorn, folks. It's going to be interesting.

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