It Was Only The Radio

2007-04-10 - 11:01 a.m.

Busy busy night at work last night.

It's Spring Break for some schools. Some take it the week before Easter, some the week after. So we still have a lot of people coming in.

Next week will be quieter. I hope.

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Still more commentary about the Imus situation, this time from Neil Boortz:

First of all ... I don't listen to the show. I've tried. I just don't get it. Apparently Imus called the Rutgers woman's basketball team a bunch of "nappy headed hos." Not good. Stupid even. But correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Stevie Wonder have some song in which he referred to himself as a "nappy headed little boy"? And is it not true that you can hear black women referred to as "hos" on virtually any urban hip hop station on any given day? Stevie Wonder is black, as are the rappers who denigrate black women with abandon. They're allowed. The real issue here is that the words were spoken by someone-not-black.
...
Al Sharpton is a liar and a bigot. He falsely accused Steven Pagones of rape and mutilation in the Tawana Brawley matter. He's never apologized. He incited murder at Freddie's Fashion Mart in Harlem while loudly denouncing white interlopers. No apology. Do you remember the Crown Heights Riot in New York? That's where Al Sharpton whipped a crowd into a four-day riot on rumors that a Jewish ambulance had failed to treat a young black at the scene of a disturbance after a car accident. There was Sharpton referring to "diamond merchants" shedding the "blood of innocent babies." Diamond merchants? Code word for Jews. Apology? None. And this is the man that that fool John Kerry calls the moral compass of the Democrat Party? And now what? Imus goes to Sharpton to apologize? And excuse me, but didn't I hear the words "Hymie Town" from Jesse Jackson?

As an African American man I stand by the spiritual principle of removing the beam from one's own eye before complaining about the splinter in another's. When we as African Americans treat with equal disdain, the multi-billion dollar hip hop garbage we allow our children to create, purchase, and listen to, perhaps we will have real credibility on issues such as Don Imus. I find it incredulous that we are planning boycotts and marches and such wailing and gnashing of teeth over a solitary old fart who is hardly emulating echoes of the past but that which you can hear on any given day thumping from any young person's car even while watching TV in the furthest room from the road. Imus is a white man who satirizes darkness of every shade. He is a mirror of our own shortcomings. Reflect on that before you go after his head. Because outside of the outrageous and oft stupid things he says on his show, the man does put his money in some of the same places he satirizes. This is the racial opportunism that has diluted true civil rights issues for the past several decades. It's all about the money. If it wasn't, those same preachers could have used the same energy to shut down the poisonous music evolution that started this cross cultural laissez-faire blackness that has now come home to roost.

Just something to think about. I'm not out to change anyone's mind. I doubt that I will. It's a very polarizing issue.

From the Boortz article: "Racism is the belief in the inherent genetic superiority of one race over another." By that definition, I am a racist: I believe in the genetic superiority of the human race. The human race is the best of all the races on this planet. Anything else is ethnicity, and really doesn't matter. We're ALL the same race. That's what SHOULD matter.

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One final item about race:

Saw a billboard awhile ago that showed a black boy, a white girl, and an Asian boy. They were in a group hug, all smiling broadly.

The caption said: "Nobody is born a racist."

Groovy.

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Shower's free.

Be seeing you.

Smed - 2007-04-10 14:27:12 - http://smedindy.diaryland.com
The issue with playing the 'hip hop' card is that many people who love hip hop aren't minorities, and many people who loathe the 'gangsta' rap and all of that image are minorities. Sharpton himself has called for that crap to get off of the air. To me, Sharpton has always been an opportunist to the extreme. However, the issue to me isn't 'nappy' or what Steve Wonder called himself, it's that the tone of the words 'nappy headed' implied something and 'ho' also delivered. So Imus and his minions were way way way way off base.

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Dave - 2007-04-10 15:10:06 -
Smed, the point that I'm trying to make is this: With all his baggage, Sharpton has no right to be screaming. Yes, Imus was wrong. I don't listen to him, but from what I understand Imus is this way toward EVERYONE. He's insulted all ethnicities (I believe he called someone of Arab descent "raghead", and called a Jewish man a "boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jew boy") and there hasn't been this level of protest. Sharpton spoke out against the rap artists? News to me. Never heard anything about it. Imus, a white man, said something that rap artists regularly say. That's what's unforgivable - a white man said it. If Imus had been black, NOTHING would have been said. If "nappy-headed hos" is such a racist derogatory term, then why isn't there just as much outrage when it's said by a black man?

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Unknown Merchant - 2007-04-11 06:24:50 -
No one is born racist; it's taught by us. But, on the other point, you're right: we're all racist in thinking the HUMAN race is the best race. Comments about out part of ecology and "being one within nature" aside, I can live with your kind of racism just fine; it infers we're all the same across the board, and that's the only thing we need to teach our kids.

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