Imus, Hip Hop, and America

I am watching the Rutgers press conference over Don Imus’ comment. In case you were asleep, he called the Rutgers girls’ basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” Now he has been suspended from his radio broadcast and is the center of a national controversy. But I believe the controversy isn’t about Don Imus, it’s about our own failure as a nation to come to grips with the tension between diversity and economics. We get the culture the advertisers pay for.

Please. America. Just ignore Don Imus and go on. It’s no big whoop. He’s a 65-year-old guy who is doing what he is paid to do. If we don’t make a big deal of it (and it may be too late), it will not permanently scar these women, who have grown up on basketball courts where trash talk goes on all the time. It will not stop them from playing basketball or getting college degrees. It’s not a case of actual racism, like we had when I was growing up, where the victims are denied equality of opportunity. It’s just a tasteless offhand comment. Let’s go on to solve the real problems of sex and violence in our popular culture, and where they have led us as a nation. These women were lovely at the press conference, and they clearly are destined for good lives.

I watch Don Imus almost every day. He’s known as a shock jock, and he’s paid for that by the stations that hire him. I think he was even paying the girls an off-hand compliment, saying they were tough at the Final Four. Now, if he is let go, I think it will be a great betrayal of a man who was hired and rehired with a history of these kinds of remarks–because this stuff boosts ratings. Everyone in broadcasting and popular culture has been complicit in this. Now will they all be complicit in pretending they never heard him talk before? That they didn’t know what they were sponsoring?

Before I go on, let me say that I have some credibility in this area. I am a trained linguist, former English teacher and analyst of popular culture on the college level, and former foster parent. My father was one of the people who broke down the color barriers in Las Vegas so the black entertainers he managed could sleep in the places where they entertained.

I was also a woman in an all-male workplace. Believe me, I heard plenty. Anti-Semitic, misogynistic, unpleasant disrespectful remarks.

But I always felt that performance wins, over all, and I simply performed to the best of my ability. And so did these women at Rutgers.

I’m listening to the Rutgers coach argue that Don Imus should not be forgiven, on behalf of all women. She is asking if adults aren’t responsible for the nurturing of these young women.

Where was this coach twenty years ago, when the era of hip-hop began? I’ve been hearing the word “ho” endlessly in every song for two decades. The same corporate executives who signed the rappers and allowed them to publish and play music that reviled women can’t turn around now and fire Don Imus. It’s the same with the word “niggah,” which is in common use among black men to refer to their friends. Watch movies, or television, and you hear this language repeatedly. It’s the 21st century “urban” culture.

We have all been complicit in the use of this kind of language toward women and minorities. We pick it up from the popular culture. We buy the music and sing the songs, attend the concerts and buy the urban hip hop clothing for our teenagers when they ask for it. We white suburban people emulate the black culture with its offhanded disrespect for women. We tacitly allow this to happen, and before we fire one Don Imus, perhaps we ought to re-vamp the entire society. Let’s enlist him as an agent of change; it could be his form of community service.

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