Except when they are DIRECTED TOWARDS NATIVE AMERICANS - Washington "REDSKINS", Cleveland "INDIANS", "SQUAW CREEK" in Missouri on I-29 north of St. Joseph or SQUAW PARKS all over the USA!
That's ok with the likes of a MELVINA J. YOUNG!
You know … it’s hard out here for a “nappy-headed ho.”
I ought to know because I am one if you accept Don Imus’ definition: black, female, educated and accomplished. The only thing separating me from the Rutgers women’s basketball team at whom Imus slung the invective is my utter lack of athletic ability. So to be precise, I am a “game-less nappy-headed ho.”
Well played, Imus: He had a double insult against black women (ugly and sexually pathological just for being black) in that single phrase, “nappy-headed hos.” But that was just “Imus as usual.”
Imus issued the pro-forma “profound apology” (tempered with advice that we all “calm down” about “some idiot comment meant to be amusing”) and after major sponsors pulled out their 10-foot poles and pushed away from his flaming raft, he was fired by CBS and MSNBC.
Trust me. He’ll land on his feet ready to do battle beside other free-speech “martyrs” like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (fresh off calling presidential contender John Edwards a “faggot” at an official conservative forum). They say damaging and demeaning things and then hold up the “blood-stained banner” of free speech against “political correctness.”
I defend that right. Even horribly irresponsible free speech is critical to real democracy.
I’m concerned that, despite the routinely racist and misogynist wares Imus plied, he kept enough listeners in this country to make him a very wealthy man. Imus says what he says because people want him to say it.
I’m concerned about Imus’ apology and what it says about American public discourse on race and racism: Imus called his prior comments “insensitive and ill-conceived.” He got the “ill-conceived” part right. What I want to know is when did racism take on this soft-lens focus of “racial insensitivity”?
If racist ideas and statements are “insensitivity” on the part of people who employ them, that implies that racism is just “oversensitivity” on the part of those who are maligned, and not what it is — the projection of social power by the privileged.
Why are statements we clearly recognized as racist insult and even assault 20 years ago now just “racially insensitive”? Why is Imus not a racist, but a white guy who says racist stuff for a living? That’s like saying “I’m not a drug dealer. I just sell drugs to make money.”
One suspects this “casualizing” of racism caused by constant exposure to Imus and creeping acceptance explains countless Internet debates about whether Michael Richards’ “nigger tirade” and Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic rant were racist, or even reflective of these men’s characters?
Why soften racism to make it something else? Like acceptable.
The Star’s own Jason Whitlock let Imus off the hook by arguing that gangsta rap is a bigger threat to black women than the fact that Imus routinely beams these ideas into millions of households on a daily basis. I don’t disagree with Whitlock about gangsta rap and misogyny. But we are talking about two nickels in the same dime here.
It all adds up.
Some will argue that Imus’ statements were “just words.” Words, however, don’t just describe reality, they create it. Social ideas shape social relations and ultimately social policy.
That taut phrase “nappy-headed hos” transmits a host of derogatory racial meanings. “Nappy-headed hos” are “crime-committing, welfare-sucking, baby-daddy-having social problems” and drains on our national moral and economic resources.
So it’s hard out here for a ho. Especially when you’re not.