White men can’t Joke

Don Imus

Fired and disgraced radio host Don Imus has taken his sophomoric brand of comedy over the fringe of social acceptability. Imus told producer Bernard Mc Guirk in reference to the women’s Basketball team from Rutgers, "That's some rough girls from Rutgers," he continued “Man, they got tattoos…” However the phase that cost Imus his job was the exclamation, “…That’s some nappy-headed hos there I’m going to tell you that”

In the film White men can’t Jump Wesley Snipes’ character Sydney Dean and Woody Harrelson’s character Billy Hoyle use the racial stereotype that blacks are superior to whites in basketball to play a big money con on the unsuspecting. Billy Hoyle, Harrelson’s character was an extraordinary basketball talent who first feinted basketball ineptness and then for the final set up couldn’t miss with his killer shot!

Don Imus of Imus in the Morning radio fame used racial stereotyping for years to point at the often outlandish but true to life self-stereotyping that we have all come to accept from the media. So why is he out of a job?

Bad taste? Yes! Racist, misogynist or sexism? No! According to title 11 Intercollegiate athletics policy of equality and fairness in athletics women are to be funded equally to men in college sports. Meaning that men and women are to be treated the same.

And in addition to codes that demand equally treatment of the sexes in sports it seems that women have taken on the persona of men from crossovers moves on the basketball court to their tattooed bodies women emulate men in their play of the sport.

Imus was wrong in emulating rap culture which by the way is misogynist and sexist in the way it demeaning portrays females as gyrating booty shaking scantily clad eye candy. Not to mention that Rappers all too frequently referred to women as bitches and hos.

Women themselves commonly refer to one another as bitch and ho but that’s another story.

What Imus did was two fold, he took a verbal picture a snap shot, if you will, of the American culture. A culture that encourages women to be tattooed Manish sportspersons and at the same time he showed us a culture that has become boorishly crude in the way we speak about and to one another.

The fact of the matter is, we didn’t like what we heard when Imus shot back a picture of ourselves through his white wanna-be hip-hop lens of a broadcast mic, and instead of dialoguing about where we’ve gone wrong by encouraging females to be thuggish Alan Iverson wanna-bes and instead of speaking about why we allow our culture to pimp eager young voluptuous “pump it hotties” and “girls gone wild” we got mad and did the easy thing we blame a white man for calling this all to our attention and then we collectively got him fired so we could go back to business as usual and forget about it.

However, millions of consumers can’t be wrong. We buy the videos we purchased the rap music, we go to the movies and we support the tattoo wearing hard playing sweaty gym rats that just happen to be girls by buying tickets to their basketball games.

But what we absolutely can not allow is some wrinklely old white guy, even if he is a liberal, to say what he sees in our culture no that is too shocking to revolting, to repulsing!

We won’t do the hard work and examine whether what Imus said had any validity no we simply shot the messenger.
Understand this is not an apology for the loathsome kind of social characterization that Imus trafficked in however let’s be clear, what Imus said was a picture of what is out there. It’s real as Snoop Dog’s next joint! (CD)

The question is what are we going to do to fire the purveyors of social denegation?

Are we at least willing to talk about it? Or are we happy with the reality that there are nappy-headed hos in the world and people who are willing to exploit and call them that, but we just prefer not talk about it.

Where Imus when wrong is that he didn’t call President Bush a nappy-headed ho, he would still have his job and probably Al Sharpten’s and Jesse Jackson’s blessing.

At any rate you’ all would have nodded your collective heads and agreed, “Yeah President Bush is a nappy-headed ho who lied us into war and caused the devastation of Katrina and Rita. Right on Imus!

What a sick culture!