http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/Imus.html
Passing the Buck and Missing the Point:
Don Imus, White Denial and Racism in America
By Tim Wise
April 15, 2007
Let us dispense with the easy stuff, shall we?
First, Don Imus's free speech rights have not been even remotely violated
as a result of his
firing, either by MSNBC or CBS Radio. The First Amendment protects us
against state oppression
or legal sanction for our words. It does not entitle everyone with an
opinion to a talk show,
let alone on a particular network. To believe or to demand otherwise would
be to say that
Imus's free speech rights outweigh the rights of his employers to
determine what messages they
will send out on their dime.
Secondly, those who are telling black folks to "get over it," when it
comes to racial slurs,
such as those offered up by Imus, are missing an im****tant point: namely,
the slurs are not
the real issue. The issue is that these slurs (be they of the
"nappy-headed ho" variety, or
the semi-psychotic string of vitriol spewed by Michael Richards a few
months back) take place
against a backdrop of systemic and institutional racism. And that
backdrop--of housing and job
discrimination, racial profiling, unequal health care access, and a media
that regularly
presents blacks in the worst possible light (think the persistent and
inaccurate re****ts of
murder and rape by African Americans in New Orleans during the Katrina
tragedy)--makes verbal
slights, even if relatively minor, take on a magnitude well beyond the
moment of their
issuance.
Those who so easily let slip dismissive cliches, such as, "sticks and
stones," have rarely
themselves been the ones for whom slurs signaled a pending or extant
campaign of oppression.
So, for those whites who seek to change the subject to slurs used
occasionally against us--
like honky or cracker--please note: it is precisely the lack of any
potent, institutional
force to back up those words, which makes them so much easier to shrug
off. But people of
color are well aware that the slurs used against them, particularly when
verbalized by whites,
are often the tip of a much larger and more destructive iceberg, beneath
which tip lies an
edifice capable of shattering op****tunities, of damaging and even
destroying lives. In truth,
even the words themselves can injure, especially the young, for whom an
insistence on the
development of thick skin seems especially heartless.
Third, and please make note of it, this is not the first time Imus had
done something like
this. In the past he's referred to black journalist Gwen Ifill as "the
cleaning lady," a
Jewish re****ter as, a "boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jewboy," and Arabs as
"ragheads."
Furthermore, he handpicked a sidekick who called Palestinians "animals" on
the air, and
suggested that Venus and Serena Williams would make fine centerfold models
for National
Geographic. Imus is a serial offender, and his contrition now, while
perhaps genuine, has been
long overdue.
So, a quick review: Imus is a racist, words can wound, and his employers
had both the right
and responsibility to fire him. But such is hardly the stuff of which
meaningful commentary is
made. So now, let us consider a few other matters as they relate to the
Imus affair: matters
that have been largely under-explored amidst the coverage of this story in
recent weeks.
White Hypocrisy, Personal Responsibility, and ****fting the Blame to Black
Folks
One thing has been made clear by the Imus incident: namely, white folks
are incapable of
blaming other whites for white racism and racist behavior. Despite all the
demands by whites
that blacks take "personal responsibility" for their lives, their
behaviors, and the problems
that often beset their communities--and especially that they stop blaming
whites for their
station in life--the fact is, we can't wait to blame someone else when we,
or one of ours,
screws up. So please note, from virtually every corner of the white media
(and from black
conservatives who are quick to let whites off the hook no matter what we
do), the conversation
has ****fted from Imus's racism to a full-scale assault on rap music and
hip-hop. In other
words, it's those black people's fault when one of ours calls them a name.
After all, they do
it themselves, and Imus can't be expected not to say "ho" if Ice Cube has
done it. At this
point, I'm halfway expecting to hear Bill O'Reilly say that white folks
wouldn't have even
heard words like nigger if it weren't for 50 Cent.
But this kind of argument is not only absurd on the face of it, even more
to the point, it's a
complete affront to the concept of "personal responsibility." It ranks
right up there with
telling your mom that "Billy did it too," back when you were ten, and
playing ball outside,
and broke your neighbor's window. As I recall, mom didn't really give a
rat's ass, and
responded by saying something about Billy, a bridge, and whether his
desire to jump off like a
damned fool would inspire similar stupidity on your part.
By seeking to ****ft blame for Imus's comments, or those of Michael
Richards, or whomever, onto
black folks, white America has shown our duplicity to be something over
which we have no
shame. Of course, we've been doing it a long time. Witness the way that
whites are quick to
point out--whenever the issue of slavery is raised--that "blacks in Africa
sold other blacks
into bondage," as if that would make blacks every bit as culpable as the
folks whose wealth
was built by the slave system; as if Europeans had only come to Africa for
the weather, and
had been coerced into the transatlantic slave trade. Or consider the way
that whites blame
indigenous people for the mass death they experienced after the invasion
of the Americas, by
saying, with no sense of misgiving, "Well, it wasn't our fault, I mean,
they mostly died of
disease," as if native folk would have contracted these diseases short of
the desire by whites
to conquer the planet for our own aggrandizement. Or consider the way that
whites seek to
rationalize racial profiling, by arguing that since blacks have higher
crime rates, individual
and perfectly innocent blacks really can't complain when cops target them,
and should instead
blame their own for the way blacks get viewed, and treated; same thing
with Arabs and
terrorism. It's their fault, in other words, personal responsibility be
damned.
Rap has been an especially useful scapegoat, such that whenever whites act
out in a racist way
we seem quick to blame rap. In fact, sometimes, when whites commit
violence we blame rap too,
as with the two school shooters in Jonesboro, Arkansas in the late 90s,
who were re****ted to
love rap music, as if that would explain their decision to ambush their
classmates. When
whites throw "ghetto" parties on college campuses, which denigrate the
humanity of persons
living in this nation's poorest and most marginalized communities, they
routinely claim to be
merely mimicking what they've seen on MTV. Snoop Dogg made 'em do it, see?
Or perhaps it was
Jay-Z, or Biggie, or 'Pac. Odd how the Sopranos never get blamed when
white folks kill
someone, nor the Saw movie trilogy, or, for that matter (since we're on
the subject of music),
Johnny Cash, who sang about shooting a man in Reno "just to watch him
die." Hell, Johnny even
sang that song in a prison to a bunch of inmates, with no apparent concern
for inciting
violence on their part.
And speaking of Cash, the rush to blame rap is especially intriguing given
the history of
violent themes in country music--a genre that is never blamed whenever
some white, NASCAR
lover commits murder. Consider country legend ****ter Wagoner, whose song
"Cold Hard Facts of
Life," tells of a man who kills his wife for cheating on him. Or better
still, "The First Mrs.
Jones," in which Wagoner's protagonist, speaking to his new wife--who has
just left him--tells
her how he stalked and murdered his former betrothed, after which killing
he buried her body
parts in the woods. In other words, unless the "second Mrs. Jones" comes
back to him, she's
going to join the first one, pu****ng up daisies in the forest. If Young
Buck dropped a song
like this, white America would be screaming about how he was encouraging
violence against
women. But for Wagoner, a revered member of the Country Music Hall of
Fame, no such concern
attaches. He's just "telling a story."
Then there's Johnny Paycheck's classic, "Pardon Me, I've Got Someone to
Kill," or Jimmy
Rodgers who sang, "If you don't want to smell my smoke, don't monkey with
my gun," or several
of the violent ditties recorded by Spade Cooley in the 1950s: a man who
didn't just sing of
violence, but also practiced what he preached, by beating his wife to
death in front of their
teenage daughter in 1961. That rap is viewed so much more negatively than
any other genre of
music--so many of which have had their fair share of disturbing, violent
and ***ist imagery--
attests to the racialized way in which danger has come to be understood.
Only a fool could
think race wasn't the primary reason for the double standard. In fact,
research has found that
when lyrics with violent themes are presented to whites in a focus group,
as being rap lyrics,
the participants respond far more negatively than when the same lyrics are
presented as the
lyrics they actually are: from a folk song, sung by whites.
But blaming rap is not only conveniently op****tunistic, and intellectually
dishonest, given
all the pandering about personal responsibility. It also ignores the
reasons why rap music
sometimes--though not as uniformly as some seem to believe--peddles images
of violence, or
lyrics that are ***ist. After all, if eighty percent of all rap music
purchases are made by
whites (and that is the conventional wisdom), then white consumers must be
responding, via
their purchases, to an already held impression of black people. Without
such a pre-existing
mental schema firmly in place, the images of blacks as gangstas, pimps,
dealers and "hos"
wouldn't resonate nearly so much as to make possible billions of dollars
of sales annually. In
other words, perhaps whites need to consider the possibility that the thug
image has been
marketable, and thus created a financial incentive for black artists to
play to that trope
because these images com****t with the negative things that much of white
America believes
about blacks in the first place. Things which they believed, it should be
noted, long before
Cool Herc threw his first house party in the Bronx.
If white folks were interested in buying CDs by rap artists who sang about
radical social
transformation and community uplift--and yes there are many, many such
artists out there--then
that's the music that would be churned out in larger numbers. But white
consumers aren't, by
and large, looking to buy songs about overthrowing the system from which
we benefit. White
boys in the stale and lifeless 'burbs would rather listen to songs about
guns and drugs, and
being a thug, through which music they can live a more exciting life, if
only in their
fantasies. So in the ultimate irony, it is white buyers who make that kind
of rap profitable,
but instead of asking for any responsibility from them, we blame the
artists for doing what
they're supposed to do in a capitalist system, which is respond to market
demand, no matter
the social consequences. Naturally, of course, it isn't capitalism that
gets the blame--a
thoroughly European creation that has brought misery to millions, as did
state socialism
(another issue from the womb of Europe)--but rather, the black folks who
have taken the bait
offered by the market system. Even better is to read Cal Thomas's column
from this week, in
which he blamed liberal values and permissiveness for the coarseness of
rap music, rather than
the values trumpeted by the right, like profit-making.
Sticking Our "Buts" in Where They Don't Belong
In addition to trying to ****ft the blame for white racism onto black
folks, we whites seem to
be congenitally incapable of simply condemning racism, and after such
condemnation, ending the
sentence with a period. No indeed, after each condemnation it appears as
though we are
compelled to offer a comma, followed by a semi-exculpatory clause, which
minimizes or outright
nullifies the force of the condemnation itself.
As in, "Yes, what Imus said was horrible, and mean-spirited" (and
sometimes we'll even admit,
racist, although several were unable to verbalize this word), "but he does
wonderful charity
work," or runs "a camp for kids with cancer."
As in, "Yes, what Michael Richards said was awful and racist, but he was
heckled and just lost
control" (actually, witnesses say he started in on black audience members
before they had said
anything to him, so this excuse is not only flimsy, in any event, it's
also a lie).
As in, "Yes, Mel Gibson was wrong to say those things, but he'd been
drinking."
As in, "Yes, those white officers who shot Amadou Diallo were wrong, but
it's tough being a
cop in a dangerous neighborhood."
As in, "Yes, the founding fathers mostly owned slaves and were racists,
but they were just
products of their time and can't be judged by the standards of today"--an
argument that is
thoroughly offensive, since, after all, admonitions against theft and
murder (both of which
were implicated in the slave system) have been around for thousands of
years. Not to mention,
the idea that "everyone felt that way back then" is false: the slaves
certainly didn't, and
neither did white abolitionists.
Or, my favorite, as regards the Imus matter: "Yeah, Imus was wrong to say
what he said, but
the people criticizing him, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, are even
worse." One has to
wonder what white folks would do if Jackson and Sharpton weren't around;
who would we have to
divert attention from our own biases? Attacking these two is the default
position of white
America whenever one of ours does something wrong: "Well what about
Jackson? What about
Sharpton?" This is then followed by a reminder of the former's "Hymietown"
statement, and the
latter's involvement in the Tawana Brawley affair.
But even if one accepts the standard white critique of Jackson and
Sharpton, the argument
nonetheless amounts to a colossal failure to apply "personal
responsibility" logic to oneself
and one's community. It is yet another attempt by whites to change the
subject. Not to
mention, both men's past foibles exacted a price from them as well, from
which it took several
years to recover. It's not as if they received a free pass, and to be
sure, had either man had
a radio show at the time, there is no doubt that they too would have been
canned by their
employers for making racist, or anti-Semitic comments. Twenty-three years
later, Jackson's
comments about New York still haunt him, and no doubt had an impact on his
political career,
for example. As with Jackson and Sharpton, Imus should be able to redeem
himself over time, to
be sure. But as with both men, he shouldn't expect redemption to happen
immediately, and
without first paying a price.
And truthfully, to say that Sharpton and Jackson are more offensive than
Imus is almost
incomprehensible. On the one hand you have two men who have spent their
entire adult lives in
the struggle for equal rights. On the other, you have a talk show host
whose career has been
about offending people and pu****ng the boundaries of good taste. A man who
told 60 minutes in
1998 that he hired his co-host, specifically to tell "nigger jokes." A man
who calls tennis
star Amelie Mauresmo a "big lesbo" on air. A man whose contribution to the
world amounts to
shocking people in morning drive time. Hardly comparable to registering
voters, fighting for
civil rights, running empowerment organizations that seek to build
community unity, or any of
the other endeavors in which Jackson and Sharpton have been involved.
But here's the bigger truth: if white folks are tired of seeing Jackson
and Sharpton out front
whenever white racism rears its ugly head, there's an easy way to solve
that problem. Namely,
all we have to do is do the work ourselves! If whites were willing to
stand up and
unapologetically, and without equivocation, condemn the racism in our
community--following the
lead of grass-roots folks of color with names far less known than the two
men in question--
perhaps Jackson and Sharpton wouldn't have to be the ones leading the
rally. Maybe they could
take a break. Maybe they could get a much-needed and earned vacation. But
that's the problem:
most whites do nothing in the face of racism. Most of us don't speak up,
don't talk back,
don't challenge family, friends, colleagues, or anyone else when they
engage is racist actions
or merely tell racist jokes. We sit back and remain largely silent, or
condemn but only with
caveats included. No wonder black leaders like Jackson and Sharpton end up
being the visible
faces of resistance: we aren't showing up at all, so what are they
supposed to do?
At the end of the day, it is white silence and collaboration that has
always made racism--
whether of the personal or institutional type--possible. If whites had, in
larger numbers,
joined with folks of color to challenge white supremacy, there is no way
that such a system
could have been maintained. There is no way that racist persons would be
able to spew their
venom without fear of reprisal, in most cases. They would know that such
verbiage, or racist
actions would be met forcefully, and that those engaging in such things
would be ostracized.
But white silence and inaction has given strength to the racists, whether
on radio or in
cor****ate offices, or government positions, or police uniforms; it has
emboldened them to act
out, since they have long had little reason to believe anything would
happen. Slaveowners
would have been powerless had the whites who didn't own slaves stood up to
them and challenged
their evil; so too with segregationists, those who lynched thousands of
blacks from the late
1800s to the early 60s, and those who engage in discrimination today. The
silent and passive
collaborators with injustice are just as bad as those who do the deed, and
have always been
such. And too often, those folks have been us
Only when whites decide to connect with the alternative tradition of
resistance, as opposed to
collaboration, will things change. Only when we choose to take our place
in the line--however
much longer it should be--of antiracist white allies, will we be in a
position to lecture
folks of color on how they come at the issue. And even then, we'll have
far more to learn than
to teach in that regard. But until that time, and for however long white
folks decide to
remain on the sidelines in this struggle, our entitlement to say much of
anything sideways to
the Jacksons or Sharptons of the world will remain virtually non-existent.
Pay some dues, and
then maybe you can talk. Until then, shut it down.
And Yet, the Bigger Issue: Missing the Systemic Forest for the Individual
Trees
But perhaps the biggest problem with the coverage of this one man's
racism, is the way in
which the media rushes to cover individual acts of bigotry, a la Imus or
Michael Richards,
while largely ignoring the larger issue, and evidence of widespread
systemic racism in health
care, criminal justice, education or employment.
So by now, pretty much everyone knows what Imus said, which is fine, so
far as it goes. But
why has there been no news coverage of the recent re****t that complaints
of housing
discrimination, including race-based complaints, are at an all-time high,
and where is the
outrage?
Why no coverage of the new re****t from the United Church of Christ,
indicating persons of
color are far more likely to live in neighborhoods where hazardous waste
sites are placed, and
that the typical host neighborhood for such sites has twice as many people
of color as the
typical neighborhood without such a site? And where is the outrage over
this kind of
environmental racism?
Where is the coverage of the recent study, which found that less access to
high quality health
care is the primary reason for higher prostate cancer death rates for
black men, relative to
white men? And how many have heard that according to research published in
the American
Journal of Public Health, nearly 900,000 blacks died from 1991 to 2000,
who wouldn't have died
had they had access to health care that was equal to that received by
whites: roughly 90,000
African Americans each year? And where is the outrage over racial
disparity in health care?
Where is the media fanfare about the recently updated research from Melvin
Oliver and Thomas
Shapiro, to the effect that the racial wealth gap between whites and
blacks has remained huge,
even as income gaps have fallen? Oliver and Shapiro re****t that even among
college-educated
black couples with middle class incomes, their wealth disadvantage
relative to similar whites
remains massive: on average, these African American couples have less than
one-fourth the net
worth of their white counterparts. In large measure, the wealth gap can be
traced to policies
that historically restricted black asset ac***ulation and gave whites
significant head starts
in the same area, yet their findings have been re****ted in virtually no
white-owned media
outlets.
Or what about the research from Vanderbilt University, which finds that
light-skinned
immigrants to the U.S. have incomes that are significantly higher than
those of immigrants who
are otherwise similar--in terms of experience, education and skill
levels--but who have darker
skin. According to the research, which adds to a long line of data
suggesting the role of
colorism in the playing out of white supremacy, being one shade lighter
than another immigrant
is as beneficial to a person's income as an entire additional year of
schooling. But where has
the coverage been on this issue, and where is the outrage?
In other words, perhaps the biggest problem with the Imus coverage is the
way that even
liberal commentary on the subject has tended to reinforce the notion that
racism is a one-on-
one kind of thing, an interpersonal problem, or a character flaw, for
which the easy solution
is banishment from the airwaves, or perhaps several sessions of
counseling.
So long as the bigger problem of institutional injustice remains off the
radar screens of the
media however, even victories against personal bias will remain largely
irrelevant. And this
is so because it is that larger racial inequity that so often contributes
to personal bias in
the first place, by giving the impression to weak-minded individuals that
those on the bottom
of the social and economic structure must have something wrong with them,
or else they'd be
doing better. That is what our society encourages us to believe, after
all. Until we get a
handle on racism as a social phenomenon, we'll be unlikely to make lasting
progress on ending
it as a personal one, whether for Imus, or anyone else.
--
DR
Hell awaits - exert brevity
Ta mere suce des bites en enfer!
http://www.luminist.org/archives/wpp.htm
-------------------------------
The sad world of Grizzlie Antagonist:
"And that reality is that women don't like men and women don't like
physical interaction with men and have no real drive or desire to
engage in the act for its own sake."
<1131214186.187324.187470@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
"Women hate men; women hate ***; women hate male ***uality. And with
specific regard to the issue of ***, women regard *****es as grotesque
hairy monstrosities."
<rnajrvc3rg8bar8b38ntrlrponofh9efu2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
"Women are always trying to turn men gay. Women hate men; women hate
***; women hate male ***uality.
Every time a woman turns a man gay, she giggles and says, "Got another
one".
Every time a woman watches a gay man make unwanted ***ual advances
towards a straight man, she giggles and says to the straight man, "Now
you know how it feels".
Every time a woman DOES that, she's acknowledging that women have the
same horror about *** in general that straight men have about gay ***
- i.e., they don't like it and wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Women hate men; women hate ***; women hate male ***uality."
<u9g4c1ptrq1pjrlp6ensberf84bfaun3k4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
|
