All Imus, All Day
Hey folks,
Happy Friday to you. Yesterday was all Imus, all day. The lastest news is CBS has officially fired him. According to CBS -CBS Fires Don Imus Over Racial Slur
(CBS/AP) CBS announced Thursday that it has fired Don Imus from his radio program, following a week of uproar over the radio host's derogatory comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team.
"There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society," CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said in announcing the decision
One of those discussions took place at noon today with a coalition of leaders from the civil rights and women's movements, who said it was time for Imus to go, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes.
It goes on to tell you what you most likely already know. He makes them a lot of money, it’s a hit to them, and So on. Then they report.
Sumner Redstone, chairman of the CBS Corp. board and its chief stockholder, told Newsweek that he had expected Moonves to "do the right thing," although it wasn't clear what he thought that was.
Break.
The news came down in the middle of Imus' Radiothon, which has raised more than $40 million since 1990 for good causes. The Radiothon had raised more than $1.3 million Thursday before Imus learned that he lost his job.
"This may be our last Radiothon, so we need to raise about $100 million," Imus cracked at the start of the event.
So he did some good going out. But this is not new for CBS. According to THEM,
Bob Grant, a popular New York radio host, was put off the air for calling the African-American mayor at the time a "washroom attendant." And Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder lost his CBS job on NFL football pre-game telecasts by saying black athletes were superior to white athletes.
Remember this for later.
"We promise to come into this meeting with an open heart and open mind," said C. Vivian Stringer, Rutgers' coach.
Sheila Johnson, owner of the WNBA's Washington Mystics and, with her ex-husband Robert, co-founder of BET, called Imus' comments reprehensible in an interview with The Associated Press. She said she had called Moonves to urge that CBS cut all ties with the veteran radio star, and was worried that what he said could hurt women's sports.
"I think what Imus has done has put a cloud over what we've tried to do in promoting women's athletics," she said.
Now for the reason I told you to remember what they said. This is a GREAT opinion piece in Washington Post -A Needed Conversation by Sally Jenkins.
I don't want Don Imus fired. Instead, I want him to buy season tickets to Rutgers women's basketball and sit in the front row wearing a sweat shirt with a big letter R on it at every home game.
It serves no purpose to call for Imus's job; that's mere harsh vengeance and we've had enough undue harshness. If you shut down Imus's show, silence him, the conversation ends there. What's needed in the Rutgers-Imus affair, and on the subjects of racism and sexism in general, is not silence but talk, lots of it, and what's needed in women's basketball is a promoter. I know just the guy for the job.
When Essence Carson took the microphone to speak for the Rutgers team, you saw Imus's problem and why it hasn't gone away. In comparison with that blameless face and voice, his slur seemed tangibly, specifically abhorrent, and you felt it all over again. How could any intelligent person conjure such verbiage as "nappy-headed hos" in the first place, much less apply it to such a nice kid? Carson and the Scarlet Knights didn't lecture, they didn't say that injustice is what happens when you treat someone as an abstraction, a stranger, an "other." Instead, they simply demonstrated the point by introducing themselves, one by one, and made clear that the central sin and fallacy in any -ism, whether racism or sexism, is that it fails to take into account the individual qualities of an Essence Carson.
As Heather Zurich said, "What hurts the most about this situation is that Mr. Imus knows not one of us personally."
This really is a great piece folks. You HAVE to click the link and read it in total.
Here are more excerpts. Ms Sally Jenkins wrote;
To their credit, the Rutgers players seem to feel that it's no more right to paint Imus with a broad brush than it was to paint them with one. Imus seems sincerely ashamed of mouthing such unpardonable garbage, and it's legitimately hard to categorize him as an out-and-out racist. While I don't particularly know him, I've been on his show, and I listened to him champion Harold E. Ford Jr. during his run for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and bitterly decry the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina. He's a shock-satirist who takes verbal baseball swings at piñata-size personalities for their pretensions, often as not powerful white people.
But regardless of what anyone thinks of Imus, you don't cure prejudice by curbing speech. Clearly, as a society we've made the uneasy decision that censorship is more dangerous than sensitivity, otherwise Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh wouldn't get work. Words are hurtful, but for the most part they're inactive. Censorship is an action. As columnist John Leo succinctly put it, "No insults means no free speech."
This is what I’m telling you. I brought this up here first. She concludes this.
The truth is, the fallout from the Imus controversy is the most publicity the women's game ever has gotten. Some of the male sports columnists who weighed in this week annually neglect the women's Final Four, and most of them failed to witness a single game in which Rutgers played.
So how is the Rutgers team better served? By demanding Imus be fired, or by converting him into an ally and employing his powerful voice and platform? By silencing his microphone, or by engaging him in sustained and badly needed conversation about race and gender? By refusing his contrition, or by suggesting that he come and watch, close-up and firsthand, and get to know them and the game they love? Preferably, wearing a scarlet sweat shirt.
I left her a comment. "Simply GREAT article." It is. Check it out. This is now becoming bigger than just Imus. We have this growing trend of people trying to examine why Imus said what he said. More and more people pointed out the double standard..We get this from Newsday -It's more than just Imus, by Shaun Powell, a Sports Columnist.
In retrospect, outraged people shouldn't have united and screamed "blank you" to Don Imus the last few days. No, instead, we should've stuck out our hand and said, "Thank you."
Mr. Powell is saying that he "woke society the hell up." open discussion and dialogs. Mr. Powell wrote,
I'm not sure if the last few days will serve as a watershed moment for this MTV, middle-finger, screw-you generation. Probably not, according to my hunch. A short time from now, the hysteria will turn to vapor, folks will settle back into their routines, somebody will pump up the volume on the latest poison produced by hip-hop while Al Sharpton and the other racial ambulance chasers will find other guilt-ridden white folks to shake for fame and cash. In five minutes, the entire episode of Imus and his strange idea of humor will be older than his hairstyle. Lessons learned will be lessons forgotten.
I wish I were wrong about that last part. But I doubt it, because any minute now, black people will resume calling themselves bitches and hos and the N-word and in the ultimate sign of hypocrisy, neither Rutgers nor anyone else will call a news conference about that.
Hey folks,
Happy Friday to you. Yesterday was all Imus, all day. The lastest news is CBS has officially fired him. According to CBS -CBS Fires Don Imus Over Racial Slur(CBS/AP) CBS announced Thursday that it has fired Don Imus from his radio program, following a week of uproar over the radio host's derogatory comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team.
"There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society," CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said in announcing the decision
One of those discussions took place at noon today with a coalition of leaders from the civil rights and women's movements, who said it was time for Imus to go, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes.
It goes on to tell you what you most likely already know. He makes them a lot of money, it’s a hit to them, and So on. Then they report.
Sumner Redstone, chairman of the CBS Corp. board and its chief stockholder, told Newsweek that he had expected Moonves to "do the right thing," although it wasn't clear what he thought that was.
Break.
The news came down in the middle of Imus' Radiothon, which has raised more than $40 million since 1990 for good causes. The Radiothon had raised more than $1.3 million Thursday before Imus learned that he lost his job.
"This may be our last Radiothon, so we need to raise about $100 million," Imus cracked at the start of the event.
So he did some good going out. But this is not new for CBS. According to THEM,
Bob Grant, a popular New York radio host, was put off the air for calling the African-American mayor at the time a "washroom attendant." And Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder lost his CBS job on NFL football pre-game telecasts by saying black athletes were superior to white athletes.
Remember this for later.
"We promise to come into this meeting with an open heart and open mind," said C. Vivian Stringer, Rutgers' coach.
Sheila Johnson, owner of the WNBA's Washington Mystics and, with her ex-husband Robert, co-founder of BET, called Imus' comments reprehensible in an interview with The Associated Press. She said she had called Moonves to urge that CBS cut all ties with the veteran radio star, and was worried that what he said could hurt women's sports.
"I think what Imus has done has put a cloud over what we've tried to do in promoting women's athletics," she said.
Now for the reason I told you to remember what they said. This is a GREAT opinion piece in Washington Post -A Needed Conversation by Sally Jenkins.
I don't want Don Imus fired. Instead, I want him to buy season tickets to Rutgers women's basketball and sit in the front row wearing a sweat shirt with a big letter R on it at every home game.
It serves no purpose to call for Imus's job; that's mere harsh vengeance and we've had enough undue harshness. If you shut down Imus's show, silence him, the conversation ends there. What's needed in the Rutgers-Imus affair, and on the subjects of racism and sexism in general, is not silence but talk, lots of it, and what's needed in women's basketball is a promoter. I know just the guy for the job.
When Essence Carson took the microphone to speak for the Rutgers team, you saw Imus's problem and why it hasn't gone away. In comparison with that blameless face and voice, his slur seemed tangibly, specifically abhorrent, and you felt it all over again. How could any intelligent person conjure such verbiage as "nappy-headed hos" in the first place, much less apply it to such a nice kid? Carson and the Scarlet Knights didn't lecture, they didn't say that injustice is what happens when you treat someone as an abstraction, a stranger, an "other." Instead, they simply demonstrated the point by introducing themselves, one by one, and made clear that the central sin and fallacy in any -ism, whether racism or sexism, is that it fails to take into account the individual qualities of an Essence Carson.
As Heather Zurich said, "What hurts the most about this situation is that Mr. Imus knows not one of us personally."
This really is a great piece folks. You HAVE to click the link and read it in total.
Here are more excerpts. Ms Sally Jenkins wrote;
To their credit, the Rutgers players seem to feel that it's no more right to paint Imus with a broad brush than it was to paint them with one. Imus seems sincerely ashamed of mouthing such unpardonable garbage, and it's legitimately hard to categorize him as an out-and-out racist. While I don't particularly know him, I've been on his show, and I listened to him champion Harold E. Ford Jr. during his run for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and bitterly decry the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina. He's a shock-satirist who takes verbal baseball swings at piñata-size personalities for their pretensions, often as not powerful white people.
But regardless of what anyone thinks of Imus, you don't cure prejudice by curbing speech. Clearly, as a society we've made the uneasy decision that censorship is more dangerous than sensitivity, otherwise Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh wouldn't get work. Words are hurtful, but for the most part they're inactive. Censorship is an action. As columnist John Leo succinctly put it, "No insults means no free speech."
This is what I’m telling you. I brought this up here first. She concludes this.
The truth is, the fallout from the Imus controversy is the most publicity the women's game ever has gotten. Some of the male sports columnists who weighed in this week annually neglect the women's Final Four, and most of them failed to witness a single game in which Rutgers played.
So how is the Rutgers team better served? By demanding Imus be fired, or by converting him into an ally and employing his powerful voice and platform? By silencing his microphone, or by engaging him in sustained and badly needed conversation about race and gender? By refusing his contrition, or by suggesting that he come and watch, close-up and firsthand, and get to know them and the game they love? Preferably, wearing a scarlet sweat shirt.
I left her a comment. "Simply GREAT article." It is. Check it out. This is now becoming bigger than just Imus. We have this growing trend of people trying to examine why Imus said what he said. More and more people pointed out the double standard..We get this from Newsday -It's more than just Imus, by Shaun Powell, a Sports Columnist.
In retrospect, outraged people shouldn't have united and screamed "blank you" to Don Imus the last few days. No, instead, we should've stuck out our hand and said, "Thank you."
Mr. Powell is saying that he "woke society the hell up." open discussion and dialogs. Mr. Powell wrote,
I'm not sure if the last few days will serve as a watershed moment for this MTV, middle-finger, screw-you generation. Probably not, according to my hunch. A short time from now, the hysteria will turn to vapor, folks will settle back into their routines, somebody will pump up the volume on the latest poison produced by hip-hop while Al Sharpton and the other racial ambulance chasers will find other guilt-ridden white folks to shake for fame and cash. In five minutes, the entire episode of Imus and his strange idea of humor will be older than his hairstyle. Lessons learned will be lessons forgotten.
I wish I were wrong about that last part. But I doubt it, because any minute now, black people will resume calling themselves bitches and hos and the N-word and in the ultimate sign of hypocrisy, neither Rutgers nor anyone else will call a news conference about that.
Because when we really get to the root of the problem, this isn't about Imus. This is about a culture we -- meaning black folks -- created and condoned and packaged for white power brokers to sell and shock jocks like Imus to exploit. Can we talk?
Tell me: Where did an old white guy like Imus learn the word "ho"?
Was that always part of his vocabulary? Or did he borrow it from Jay-Z and Dave Chappelle and Snoop Dogg?
{Laughing} I love the way he put this. But he is right. Do you think Al Sharpton will protest The music companies? Call for Snoop Dogg to be banned from preforming? Nope. Mr. Powell goes on to also point out the money and fame thing. He writes,
What really disappointed me about that exhausting Rutgers news conference, which was slyly used as a recruiting pitch by Stringer, was the absence of the truth and the lack of backbone and courage. Black women had the perfect opportunity to lash out at their most dangerous oppressors -- black men -- and yet they kept the focus on a white guy.
It was a tremendous letdown for me, personally and professionally. I wanted Stringer, and especially her players, many of whom listen to rap and hip-hop, to take Nelly to task. Or BET. Or MTV. Or the gangsta culture that is suffocating our kids. They had the ear and eye of the nation trained upon them, and yet these women didn't get to the point and the root of the matter. They danced around it, and I guess I should've known better, because black people still refuse to lash out against those black people who are doing harm to us all.
Honestly, I wasn't holding my breath for Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, a pair of phony and self-appointed leaders, because they have their agendas and financial stakes. I was hoping 10 young women, who have nothing on the line, who are members of a young culture, would train their attention to within the race, name names and say enough is enough. But they didn't, and I was crushed.
He ends with this.
Black folks, for whatever reason, can be their own worst enemy. The last several days, the media had us believe it was Don Imus. But deep down, we know better.
Just Ask Bill Cosby. Still with me folks? One last one. I said Wednesday and yesterday, what he said was egregious, sexist, and racist, But does this mean that we need to censor and infringe upon free speech for all? No. This one from TIME Magazine -The Imus Fallout: Who Can Say What? By James Poniewozik
Say this for Don Imus: the man knows how to turn an economical phrase. When the radio shock jock described the Rutgers women's basketball team, on the April 4 Imus in the Morning, as "nappy-headed hos," he packed so many layers of offense into the statement that it was like a perfect little diamond of insult. There was a racial element, a gender element and even a class element (the joke implied that the Scarlet Knights were thuggish and ghetto compared with the Tennessee Lady Vols).
Imus was a famous, rich, old white man picking on a bunch of young, mostly black college women. So it seemed pretty cut-and-dried that his bosses at CBS Radio would suspend his show — half frat party, half political salon for the Beltway elite — for two weeks, and that MSNBC would cancel the TV simulcast. And that Imus would plan to meet with the students he offended. Case closed, justice served, lesson —possibly — learned. Move on.
Now fired.
But a reasonable person could ask, What was the big deal? And I don't mean the lots-of-black-rappers-say-"hos" argument, though we'll get to that. Rather, I mean, what celebrity isn't slurring some group nowadays?
I exaggerate slightly. But our culture has experienced an almost psychotic outburst of -isms in the past year. Michael Richards and "nigger." Isaiah Washington and "faggot." Senator George Allen and "macaca." Mel Gibson and "f__ing Jews."
But we also live in a culture in which racially and sexually edgy material is often — legitimately — considered brilliant comment, even art. Last year's most critically praised comedy, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, won Sacha Baron Cohen a Golden Globe for playing a Kazakh journalist who calls Alan Keyes a "genuine chocolate face" and asks a gun-shop owner to suggest a good piece for killing a Jew. Quentin Tarantino has made a career borrowing tropes from blaxploitation movies. In the critics-favorite sitcom The Sarah Silverman Program, the star sleeps with God, who is African American and who she assumes is "God's black friend." And the current season of South Park opened with an episode about a Michael Richards-esque controversy erupting when a character blurts the word niggers on Wheel of Fortune. (He answers a puzzle — N-GGERS — for which the clue is "People who annoy you"; the correct answer is "naggers.")
This is not to say that Borat made Imus do it or to make excuses for Imus. Even in the midst of his apology tour last week, Imus did enough of that for himself, citing his charity work, his support of black Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr., even his booking the black singing group Blind Boys of Alabama on his show. (He didn't mention how, last fall, he groused about persuading the "money grubbing" "Jewish management" to okay the booking.)
But in the middle of his stunning medley of sneer, apology and rationalization, Imus asked a pretty good question: "This phrase that I use, it originated in the black community. That didn't give me a right to use it, but that's where it originated. Who calls who that and why? We need to know that. I need to know that."
So let's ask.
Imus crossed a line, boorishly, creepily, paleolithically. But where is that line nowadays? In a way, the question is an outgrowth of something healthy in our society: the assumption that there is a diverse audience that is willing to talk about previously taboo social distinctions more openly, frankly and daringly than before. It used to be assumed that people were free to joke about their own kind (with some license for black comedians to talk about how white people dance). Crossing those lines was the province of the occasional "socially conscious artist," like Dick Gregory or Lenny Bruce, who was explicit about his goals: in Bruce's words, to repeat "'niggerniggernigger' until the word [didn't] mean anything anymore."
Now, however, we live in a mash-up world, where people — especially young people — feel free to borrow one another's cultural signifiers. In a now classic episode of Chappelle's Show, comic Dave Chappelle plays a blind, black white supremacist who inadvertently calls a carload of rap-listening white boys "niggers." The kids' reaction: "Did he just call us niggers? Awesome!" The country is, at least, more pop-culturally integrated — one nation under Jessica Alba, J. Lo and Harold & Kumar — and with that comes greater comfort in talking about differences.
OK now that you are on your second cup of coffee, my third {Smile} I’ll end with this. This article, by Mr. Poniewozik, goes on for about another three or four pages. You get his point though. If we are going to censor one, why not all. Is Imus an idiot? Yes. Was what he said wrong? YES! Should he be fired? Well, I think I will join with Ms. Sally Jenkins. This could have been handled much better. They could have turned this BIG negative into a possible positive. Since we basically killed him via his free speech, I guess the rappers, comedians, most of the Far Left Looney fringe, Hollywood, TV, and everyone else, should be next.
Maybe the firing was a good thing. Maybe it WILL get dialog started. But what I fear is that all this did was embolden people like Jackson and Sharpton to just go after any and every, WAIT, make that any and every WHITE folks they want to. They are now even more delusional. Rush, Hannity, Druge, and anyone else they disagree with, look out. Make that double for Ann Coulter.
Peter
Sources:
CBS -CBS Fires Don Imus Over Racial Slur
Washington Post -A Needed Conversation
Newsday -It's more than just Imus
TIME Magazine -The Imus Fallout: Who Can Say What?
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