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Commentary: Why Imus Won't Go
Despite the protests and apologies, shock jocks like Don Imus thrive
because there is too much money in race trash talk and the political
leaders tacitly condone it
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
LOS
ANGELES - Apr 09, 2007 - The reaction was swift and justifiably angry to
the latest racist crack from shock jock Don Imus 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 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 guys like Imus ramp up ratings and that makes the
station’s cash registers jingle. Since January, his MSNBC show has drawn
an average of more than 350,000 viewers. Nielsen 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 who 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. And Kerry issued a
tepid statement through a spokeswoman in which he merely branded it “a
stupid comment” and praised Imus for owning up to it.
While Kerry and Romney are two of the better known politicians to
recently chuckle with Imus on the show, a steady parade of politicians
and personalities have trooped to his 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 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-incoming Senate Majority Leader 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 President
Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education William Bennett made his weird
taunt that aborting black babies could reduce crime. Even as protests
were made from the usual circles, almost always blacks and liberal
Democrats, neither Bush nor any other top GOP leader said a mumbling
word about Bennett.
There’s another reason for their silence. Over 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 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 the ultimate trump card of Don Imus.
Also of Interest
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political
analyst. His new book, The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a
Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage
Press and Hispanic Economics New York), in English and Spanish will be
out in October. |
