Imus Fired
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elsol
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Actually, yes... certain people are allowed to say certain things and other people are not.
See it works like this... this country has had institutionalized racism in the past. While we like to pretend we're taking grand leaps forward, we're still racist.
Therefore so that we don't have to look at our problems, we require everyone to play along and pretend.
We can't pretend too good when white people start using racial epithets publicly. When I can't pretend, I want to kill white people... that would be bad for a lot of white people and more importantly for me.
So until I can walk into an interview and the thought "Is my skin color going to matter... maybe this guy doesn't like latinos" does NOT cross my mind... white people can't use the racial stuff like the members of that race.
It's rough I know... but I'll happily trade our racial profiles socially, politically, and economnically for the use of the n-bomb any time you want.
See it works like this... this country has had institutionalized racism in the past. While we like to pretend we're taking grand leaps forward, we're still racist.
Therefore so that we don't have to look at our problems, we require everyone to play along and pretend.
We can't pretend too good when white people start using racial epithets publicly. When I can't pretend, I want to kill white people... that would be bad for a lot of white people and more importantly for me.
So until I can walk into an interview and the thought "Is my skin color going to matter... maybe this guy doesn't like latinos" does NOT cross my mind... white people can't use the racial stuff like the members of that race.
It's rough I know... but I'll happily trade our racial profiles socially, politically, and economnically for the use of the n-bomb any time you want.
Belegon
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Grushenka said:
Jim Brown was asked about this on a local radio station...although he certainly felt Imus was at fault for his own words he also called out Jackson and particularly Sharpton as opportunistic publicity hounds who do nothing proactive for their communities, merely relish in the negative.
he mentioned how it was an unpopular point of view to have as a black man but said that he was anything but politically correct and that the comments of an already known fool were meaningless and a non-issue compared to the problems of black on black crime, the virtual disappearance of the black father as a role model for his children and the misogynistic and crime glorifying behavior of those who do claim the position of role model to young black men, especially in the music business.
I applaud him. He echoes the words from one of my own best friends. The words may be unpopular but they do seem to be accurate. So that makes two black men I greatly respect who care about Sharpton's & Jackson's attitude.
Belegon
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Two wrongs don't make a fucking right.
Racism is wrong. Judge me by the paleness of my skin and you are just as wrong as I would be to judge you by the melanin content of yours. Fucking period!
..and don't pull any of the "your ancestors did this to mine" crap. We supposedly live in a time where we are judged by who we are, not by who fathered us...
I shall not excuse bigotry in any form.
Racism is wrong. Judge me by the paleness of my skin and you are just as wrong as I would be to judge you by the melanin content of yours. Fucking period!
..and don't pull any of the "your ancestors did this to mine" crap. We supposedly live in a time where we are judged by who we are, not by who fathered us...
I shall not excuse bigotry in any form.
drksideofthemoon
West of the moon. . .
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dr_mabeuse said:
Think Jerry Spence...
Alexandra1979
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Belegon said:
"What matters, Colonel, is justice. I'll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved. I'm Kilrain, and I damn all gentlemen....."
I loved Kevin Conway as Kilrain in Gettysburg, and he has a point there....
......racism is wrong, no matter where it comes from and who suffers from it. Dr. King didn't dream of a society of reverse discrimination, but one of merit.
Huckleman2000
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Belegon said:
True enough.
But we're talking about humor here, and self-deprecation gets a pass that targeted humor generally doesn't. If you make fun of yourself first and often, you can get away with more about other people. That's just how it works. *shrug* Stern mocks himself all the time; Imus takes himself too seriously, as demonstrated by, well, everything about him, including his apologies in this.
shereads
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elsol said:
I understand the distinction, and I for one won't miss this Imus person - I was barely aware of his existence until he became the Scandal of the Week. Which illustrates one reason I don't favor censorhip as a solution. A boycott like this generates so much publicity that if even a tiny percentage of the audience side with the boycott-ee, he ends up with an expanded fan base. Where there's money to be made, there will be a forum for this guy and financial backers who don't care whom he offends. Imus hasn't been silenced, and he's not going to stop being a bigot. Neither will his fans, who will see him as a victim.
How mahy books or movies or TV programs have any of us become aware of for the first time because of negative publicity? I wouldn't have gone to see "The Life of Brian" if Bob Jones University students hadn't picketed the theater. As for Imus, if he's smarter than he seems or has a shrewd agent/publicist, he'll come out with a tell-all book while his name is still fresh in people's minds. Everyone will talk about how tasteless it is - except for the ones who'll buy it.
The fact that boycotts often backfire is not the main reason I object to censorship, though. It's that I would feel hypocritical if I favored censoring this jerk, when i've been so opposed to the same tactics used to silence people I admire.
There's only one way I know to censor offensive speech without providing publicity to the speaker: ignore him. In a free society, it's just not possible to make his fans do the same.
Ouch!. This soapbox has splinters.
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H
hmmnmm
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Those who were offended must have had great admiration for Imus. They surely spent their valuable time glued to his next utterance. Such a remark coming from such an honorable moral character surely devastated them, just when they thought they'd discovered a voice they could trust.
Imus is long-overdue for retirement and Sharpton needs a swift army-boot kick in the nuts - at the least.
Imus is long-overdue for retirement and Sharpton needs a swift army-boot kick in the nuts - at the least.
elsol
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shereads said:
Racist scumbag with access to an audience of millions... but we simply ignore him.
Okay... I can ignore problems with the best of them.
(Though I notice you have a tough time ignoring R.R... and he's got an audience of one. *poke*poke*)
Huckleman2000
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S-Des
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Jenny, you'll just never understand....Only white people are capable of being bigoted. When someone else says something hateful or racist, that's....well it's....um....I'm not sure what it is, but it can't be bigoted like us.Jenny_Jackson said:
Imus isn't a racist. He considers himself an insider with the hip hop/gangsta rap crowd (he's very tight with Suge Knight). It's the kind of comment you hear constantly if you listen to that type of music. The biggest difference (which somehow gets missed by most commentators) is that he made it about specific people, not about women in general. Although misogyny is destructive to our culture (IMHO), the comparison of his comments to rap songs doesn't hold up because they don't single out individuals to ridicule (usually). Imus is a scumbag anyway and deserved to lose his job, but critical comments from Sharpton & Jackson (two of the biggest race baiters in history) are just ridiculous.
cloudy
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S-Des said:Jenny, you'll just never understand....Only white people are capable of being bigoted. When someone else says something hateful or racist, that's....well it's....um....I'm not sure what it is, but it can't be bigoted like us.
I know you aren't really this stupid. You're certainly doing yourself a disservice, no matter what reason you have for posting something so trite.
People of color know better than anyone else that race bias exists among everybody.
If you're just trying to impress upon others what an ass you're capable of being, congrats. You succeeded.
(btw: you're way behind the times. That argument was old ten years ago)
cloudy
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I've never listened to the guy, but I'm absolutely amazed he hasn't gotten fired before now - here's just a sample:
On blacks:
"William Cohen, the Mandingo deal." (Former Defense Secretary Cohen's wife is African-American.)
"Wasn't in a woodpile, was he?" (Responding to news that former black militant H. Rap Brown, subsequently known as Abdullah Al-Amin, was found hiding in a shed in Alabama after exchanging gunfire with police. Imus is here alluding to the expression "nigger in the woodpile.")
"Knuckle-dragging moron." (Description of basketball player Patrick Ewing.)
"Chest-thumping pimps." (Description of the New York Knicks.)
"A cleaning lady." (Reference to journalist Gwen Ifill, possibly out of pique that she wouldn't appear on his show. "I certainly don't know any black journalists who will," she wrote in the April 10 New York Times. The Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page used to appear, but after he made Imus pledge not to make offensive comments in the future, he was never asked back.)
On Jews:
"I remember when I first had [the Blind Boys of Alabama] on a few years ago, how the Jewish management at whatever, whoever we work for, CBS, or whatever it is, were bitching at me about it. […] I tried to put it in terms that these money-grubbing bastards could understand."
"Boner-nosed … beanie-wearing Jewboy." (Description of Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, a frequent guest.)
On women:
"That buck-tooth witch Satan, Hillary Clinton." […] "I never admitted it when I went down there and got in all that big jam, insulting Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan. Did I? Did I ever say I was sorry for that?"
On Native Americans:
"The guy from F-Troop, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell." (This is a reference to the zany Indian characters on the 1960s TV sitcom F-Troop. They had names like "Roaring Chicken," "Crazy Cat," and "Chief Wild Eagle.")
On Japanese:
"Old Kabuki's in a coma and the market's going up. […] How old is the boy? The battery's running down on that boy." (Reference to Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who died the following week.)
On gays:
"I didn't know that Allan Bloom was coming in from the back end." (The homosexuality of the author of The Closing of the American Mind became widely known when Saul Bellow published Ravelstein, a novel whose protagonist was based on Bloom, who by then was deceased.)
"The enormously attractive [NBC political correspondent] Chip Reid, I can say without being accused of being some limp-wristed 'mo."
On the handicapped:
"Janet Reno's having a press conference. Ms. Reno, of course, has Parkinson's disease, has a noticeable tremor. […] I don't know how she gets that lipstick on (laughter) looking like a rodeo clown."
On blacks:
"William Cohen, the Mandingo deal." (Former Defense Secretary Cohen's wife is African-American.)
"Wasn't in a woodpile, was he?" (Responding to news that former black militant H. Rap Brown, subsequently known as Abdullah Al-Amin, was found hiding in a shed in Alabama after exchanging gunfire with police. Imus is here alluding to the expression "nigger in the woodpile.")
"Knuckle-dragging moron." (Description of basketball player Patrick Ewing.)
"Chest-thumping pimps." (Description of the New York Knicks.)
"A cleaning lady." (Reference to journalist Gwen Ifill, possibly out of pique that she wouldn't appear on his show. "I certainly don't know any black journalists who will," she wrote in the April 10 New York Times. The Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page used to appear, but after he made Imus pledge not to make offensive comments in the future, he was never asked back.)
On Jews:
"I remember when I first had [the Blind Boys of Alabama] on a few years ago, how the Jewish management at whatever, whoever we work for, CBS, or whatever it is, were bitching at me about it. […] I tried to put it in terms that these money-grubbing bastards could understand."
"Boner-nosed … beanie-wearing Jewboy." (Description of Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, a frequent guest.)
On women:
"That buck-tooth witch Satan, Hillary Clinton." […] "I never admitted it when I went down there and got in all that big jam, insulting Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan. Did I? Did I ever say I was sorry for that?"
On Native Americans:
"The guy from F-Troop, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell." (This is a reference to the zany Indian characters on the 1960s TV sitcom F-Troop. They had names like "Roaring Chicken," "Crazy Cat," and "Chief Wild Eagle.")
On Japanese:
"Old Kabuki's in a coma and the market's going up. […] How old is the boy? The battery's running down on that boy." (Reference to Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who died the following week.)
On gays:
"I didn't know that Allan Bloom was coming in from the back end." (The homosexuality of the author of The Closing of the American Mind became widely known when Saul Bellow published Ravelstein, a novel whose protagonist was based on Bloom, who by then was deceased.)
"The enormously attractive [NBC political correspondent] Chip Reid, I can say without being accused of being some limp-wristed 'mo."
On the handicapped:
"Janet Reno's having a press conference. Ms. Reno, of course, has Parkinson's disease, has a noticeable tremor. […] I don't know how she gets that lipstick on (laughter) looking like a rodeo clown."
Pure
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belegon quoting a friend
he mentioned how it was an unpopular point of view to have as a black man but said that he was anything but politically correct and that the comments of an already known fool were meaningless and a non-issue compared to the problems of black on black crime, the virtual disappearance of the black father as a role model for his children and the misogynistic and crime glorifying behavior of those who do claim the position of role model to young black men, especially in the music business.
there's something to this point. the PC-speech movement, is 75% a distraction from real injustice, and a kind of hypocrisy in pretending to be fair and unbiased. it makes people think--and look like-- they're virtuous if they clean up their language---i remember decades back when some racists would make a point of say "a colored gentleman" instead of n****.
of all the unjust things that happened to black people during this debate--like babies dying from lack of healthcare--, the really important ones are mostly unmentioned and certainly unaddressed.
he mentioned how it was an unpopular point of view to have as a black man but said that he was anything but politically correct and that the comments of an already known fool were meaningless and a non-issue compared to the problems of black on black crime, the virtual disappearance of the black father as a role model for his children and the misogynistic and crime glorifying behavior of those who do claim the position of role model to young black men, especially in the music business.
there's something to this point. the PC-speech movement, is 75% a distraction from real injustice, and a kind of hypocrisy in pretending to be fair and unbiased. it makes people think--and look like-- they're virtuous if they clean up their language---i remember decades back when some racists would make a point of say "a colored gentleman" instead of n****.
of all the unjust things that happened to black people during this debate--like babies dying from lack of healthcare--, the really important ones are mostly unmentioned and certainly unaddressed.
cantdog
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Well, one thing at a time, pure. The Imus thing is more important than it looks. I'd like to see the 700 Club go next. We tolerate all this twenty-four hour a day hate speech at considerable peril. In case no one's noticed, there's quite a large fascist movement in this country.
mikey2much
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He was a cheerleader for lynch mobs
Well said Stella. I was trapped on Long Island for three days after 9/11 and you should have heard him then. I was amazed at what he got away with. Somebody reported that kids were dancing in the streets in Patersion N.J. and he went nuts saying they should be shot or else they would grow up to attack us someday. He was awful and I am glad to see the last of him.
mike
Stella_Omega said:Yes, he is. Except that he hit a big ol' nerve with this one- calling a group of young, hard-working, promising, scholarly women- oh, and did I say young? "nappy-headed ho's" just isn't going to make you many friends of any stripe.
Cutting your own throat is an occupational hazard when you make your living by knife-edge humor.
Well said Stella. I was trapped on Long Island for three days after 9/11 and you should have heard him then. I was amazed at what he got away with. Somebody reported that kids were dancing in the streets in Patersion N.J. and he went nuts saying they should be shot or else they would grow up to attack us someday. He was awful and I am glad to see the last of him.
mike
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