I am so sick of hearing about anything in regard to shock jock Don Imus. 95% of America had no clue who Imus was before last week. His comment referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as ‘nappy headed ho’s’ was heard by a VERY small percentage of the population.
A lot worse is said on the airwaves and by rappers and rockers. Is there a double standard? For sure! Did Imus deserve to be fired from MSNBC and CBS? Most would say yes but why? I guess I was wrong and racist for buying the Nappy Roots CD four years ago. I guess I was wrong for calling my homey a ‘unskilled ho’ while balling full court back in the day. We will pay good money to hear a rapper/singer or actor call someone a ho, bitch or nappy headed ho but when it is for free on the radio everyone runs and pulls the fire alarm? I guess some things aren’t funny when you don’t pay for them.
There is a lot of stuff on TV and the radio that offends me in one way or another. What do I do? I don’t listen to him/her or it. If what is said is that bad then people will stay away, ratings will plummet, and that show or program will be canceled because ratings are king at the end of the day. When something like this happens you know the smell of money and opportunity will lure Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton into the fray. Never mind that both of them have used slurs to describe different groups and how Sharpton attacked the Duke Lacrosse players.
Jason Whitlock (African-American) of AOL Sports finally quits the masquerade to call Jackson and Sharpton onto the carpet for what they are. He refers to them as the President and Vice President of Black America. Here are some of the things Whitlock wrote in his current article.
Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.
If judged by the results they’ve produced the last 20 years, you’d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.
Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.
Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players “nappy-headed hos,” was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.
Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.
Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.
The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.
But the war? We don’t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows “nappy-headed ho’s” is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.
We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.
We don’t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn’t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn’t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn’t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.
Whitlock makes a lot of great points. Too many actually, hard to narrow them down for this post. Read the full article here. Imus shouldn’t have made the comments. However, there has been WAY too much media attention on Imus and this story. It is always funny that the biggest proponents of freedom of speech are always the first to ask for it to be taken away from someone else when something is said they don’t agree with.