Thank you, Don Imus. You\u2019ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Exactly.<\/p>\n
William Raspberry wrote an excellent column about 15 years ago, officially consigning the petty racism of name-calling to the “Pathetic, Ignore” bin (and I’d love <\/em>to find that article online somewhere).\u00a0 Long story short: anyone who thinks that ignorant morons calling black people naughty names is teh biggest problem facing blacks in America today – or even an important one – is deluded.\u00a0<\/p>\nThank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it\u2019s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.<\/p>\n
The bigots win again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The only question I have; which bigots?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jackson and Sharpton, who believe Blacks in America deserve no better from their “leadership” to wallow in the sort of petty victimhood afforded by a statement as dumb (dumb!) as Imus’?<\/p>\n
Or the casual, de facto <\/em>bigots who control so much of African-American culture in America:<\/p>\nWhile we\u2019re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I\u2019m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent\u2019s or Snoop Dogg\u2019s or Young Jeezy\u2019s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If the\u00a0misogyny and self-loathing in hip-hop were to be directed<\/strike> self-directed at any other ethnic group, psychologists would queue up around the figurative block to try to find the cause of such a cultural dissociation.<\/p>\nI ain\u2019t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don\u2019t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.<\/p>\n
It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.<\/p>\n
Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The thesis – that mainstream black culture has become Black America’s worst enemy?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There is nothing quite as depressing as watching the various “Apollo” comedy specials and tours.\u00a0 And while Chapelle is funny (in the same way that “Borat” was funny – in a way that I kind of didn’t like myself <\/em>for finding funny, in many ways), you watch it knowing that behind all comedy is some form of pain or another – and the sense that the “pain” behind the likes of Chapelle and the less-tony black comic community is self-hatred.<\/p>\nSomehow, we\u2019re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers\u2019 wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.<\/p>\n
But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Worse than a distraction; it’s going to give some of the lesser lights of the “civil rights movement” a sense they’ve “won” something, while the real problems just grind on and on.<\/p>\n
And those real problems, more and more, drive Mercedes and wear lots o’ bling:<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t listen or watch Imus\u2019 show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it\u2019s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they\u2019re suckers for pursuing education and that they\u2019re selling out their race if they do?<\/p>\n
…No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There\u2019s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n
And ask yourself; with Imus gone but Fitty Cent and Snoop Dogg still acting out a stereotype more corrosive than Stepin’ Fetchit (because nobody seriously aspired to be <\/em>Mr. Fetchit, while a generation of kids now use the word “pimp” as an adjective of approval), what’s really changed?<\/p>\n\u00a0UPDATE:\u00a0 Flash at Centrisity adds 2,000-odd words to the subject<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I never cared much for Imus.\u00a0 I can’t say that I’ve listened to him more than a half a dozen times, ever; he never really took off in the Twin Cities (Pointless disclosure: Salem Radio engaged Imus for the morning shift at the re-tooled AM1570 within the past couple of weeks).\u00a0 I’ve always found his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,4,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-media","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}