Imus
It seems that every couple of months now we have some minor celebrity standing up and braying out some racist crap at the top of his jackass lungs. This time it is Don Imus. Hopefully he will be the last for at least a year, but I’m not getting my hopes up. In today’s public discourse it seems that the jackasses feel obligated to bray. Hell, half of them are getting paid by Fox to bray.
Here is what he said:
IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and –
McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.
IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.
McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.
…ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.
Now, it’s not enough that he was just a sh!!heel to a group of girls who should be on top of the world right now with a fabulous accomplishment. It’s not enough that he is insulting their looks when he himself looks like a stand-in for the Cryptkeeper. (Or better yet, check this out. That’s hitting the nail on the head.) It’s that he has to be a racist jackass about it and then he and his buddies (and others) have to sit around and make up excuses for it.
I’m going to go over this again just to be sure I’ve made my point.
When you do/say racist things, that makes you a racist. Period. Like Chris Rock says, “What do you have to do, shoot Medgar Evers?”
Some might say that that is an awful tight line to hold to, that one slip like that shouldn’t a racist make. It does. Just like one fling makes you an adulterer and one punch makes you a child abuser.
The line needs to be tight, the standards very stringent. America burnt it’s karma on this subject long ago. There are too many tragedies, too many injustices and too many humiliations to let any more go. This is not an envelope that can be pushed. In fact this envelope needs to be sealed tight and mailed off.
So should Imus be fired? Yes.
Should he be shunned by others? Yes.
Is he a racist? Yes.
Should everyone with a show be held to this standard? Yes.
Does that include black people? Yes.
It really pisses me off when other jackasses start braying on about how “rappers say things like that why can’t he?” Nice strawman, dude. Bad behavior doesn’t excuse other bad behavior. And if you believe that line of thought so much, rappers use the word “n***er”, too. Would it have been okay for him to call them that? I didn’t think so.
In fact, stop with the angry rich white guy crap, right now. O’Reilly, Hannity, Gibson, et al. just STFU. I know you guys have it tough, what with all the brown people oppressing you with their desire for something resembling simple human dignity, but you are cordially invited to STFU and keep it shut. I know it’s not gonna happen, though. Jackasses are built to bray.
April 13th, 2007 at 11:54 am
This is all tabloid fodder. His fans are just as much to blame. To me it’s a distraction from really important matters that affect minorities such as a lack of health care. His politics are more harmful than this racist humor.
How ironic that Michael Richards apologized to Jessie Jackson. I was waiting for him to say “I’m sorry I said the N word and by the way, I was born and raised in *Hymmietown”
* A reference to Jackson’s anti-Semetic remark in recorded in
1984
As I jew you would think I would call Jackson a “jackass” as you put it but he is not on my list of hated people. Jesus said “Let he who is without sin cast the fist stone”. Good advice! I can not imagine Martin Luther King calling anyone a “jackass” or a “sh!!heel” if he was alive and blogging. It’s not dignified and it is stooping to the Imus mentality. You can say you don’t like it and that’s fine but hate always breeds more hate.
April 14th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Did you just quote Chris Rock in an anti-racism blog? Did you mean to quote Carlos Mencia?
April 15th, 2007 at 8:03 am
Aaron- I agree that this is not his worst offense by far, but you get them with what you can. Al Capone and tax evasion sort of thing.
Jesse Jackson himself is a distraction from really important matters. He hasn’t done anything of import or significance for civil rights in decades.
I completely agree with you about Dr. King. He would definitely not have used those words to describe Imus. That doesn’t, however, mean that I don’t still think they are completely appropriate.
There is a big difference between calling someone a name because they are black, white, jewish, catholic, whatever and because they are simply behaving badly. The first is inappropriate because you are calling them names based on characteristics that may not even be applicable to those individuals, they are based on terms of degradation for an entire group. The second, however, is a set of adjectives based on specific, verifiable information. So that makes Imus irrefutably a sh!!heel.
Ryan- HA. That’s funny. And depsite the faults of the messenger, the quote is still appropos.
April 18th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Imus has been obnoxious and mysoginist for decades. Demeaning the success of the wonderful Rutgers team is inexcusable.
Though I truly wonder how much Imus’ anti war stance contributed to the bru-ha-ha and firings, I’m glad he’s finally paying the price for his ignorance. He does some wonderful work, but he says some hateful things. It’s not up to us to find the balance — it’s up to him.