“What’s an Imus?”
[This was a soundoff in response to the terrible comments said by Don Imus on a countrywide broadcast earlier this year.]
Well I’ll admit, like Autumn, I wasn’t too informed about who Don Imus was. When one of my friends came up to me a few days ago and said, “Didya hear what Imus said?” my immediate response was, “What’s an Imus?” It wasn’t until later that day when I turned on the television that I was introduced to the scary old dude. As a 30-plus year vet of the business, I would never think that he could have made such a HUGE mistake. I understand that he was hired to be a controversial figure on the show, but he took a hop skip and a jump too far over the line.
Because I myself am a female basketball player, I can understand where Imus would get his original comment that the Rutgers team was “tough”, because I’ve played against girls like that, and trust me it isn’t fun. However, I would never dream of going as far as Imus did. It could partially be because it would sound plain dumb coming from a skinny white girl, but mostly because you just plain don’t say things like that. On the drive home from my basketball tournament in Richmond this weekend, I listened to an African American woman that had called into one of the local radio shows that was discussing it. She was trying to impress on the white show host that when any black woman is called “nappy” the hurt it causes is intangible to the white male. She also brought up the point about the music industry, in particular the rap industry. She made the point that most of the albums with explicit lyrics were being purchased by white teenagers. She saw this as one of the major problems of society. I will agree with her to some extent that when adolescents hear a black rapper singing about “Hoe’s” and “Bitches” they think that it makes them entitled to do just that. But I draw the line when she completely blamed the incident on this.
I understand the Don Imus was fired because of this very extreme slip up, but I’m having a bit of a hard time understanding it. I hear black men on the radio everyday saying things of the same nature, or worse, but they still rake in more money in a year than I probably will in a lifetime. I think these issues cause a bit of a double standard in our society, and in some ways I think that could be worse than the comment itself. When you fire a white man for something a black man gets away with saying I won’t stand behind it. Imus slipped up, but he also has an unalienable right to speech and firing him won’t take that away from him.
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article “What’s an Imus?”, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.