In The End, Imus Doesn't Matter

Let us imagine ourselves several weeks or months in the future. Don Imus will be an all but forgotten figure. But the daily degradation of women, especially black women, will still be a daily occurrence over the airwaves. Visualize yourself far enough into the future and it will be time for next year's Grammy Awards. Ho's, bitches and their booties will be the dominant subject matter of rap music, just has they have been for decades now.

The damage done by this constant barrage of media disparagement on young black women in incalculable. Beyond that, the main buyers of rap music are not young black men, who are only 12% of the population, but young white men and boys. Only by selling to them can the hip hop industry achieve its billions of dollars of income. What are these white boys to believe about how to relate to women, especially black women. Ask any black woman and she will be able to recount daily affronts, both large and small.

Many are noticing this reality and hoping to use the Imus matter as a springboard for a broader discussion that will hopefully return civility and politeness as the norm, rather than the exception. One such writer is Jason Whitlock, writing for the Kansas City Star.

Whitlock is, in my view, too hard on Vivian Stringer. As I've written below, I think she deserves much credit. He is, on the other hand, appropriately rough on the Revs. Sharpton and Jackson:

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.