I hate it when things move so fast that I can't claim credit for my best navel gazing.
Before I could get it out of my journal and into the blog, it may be coming true that the next target of outrage over Don Imus's ugly-hip remarks about the Rutgers women will be the primary source of commercially acceptable misogyny and racial self-hatred : the hip-hop culture industry.
Starting with Black Entertainment Television, according to a post by Roy Johnson in his excellent Ballers, Gamers and Scoundrels sports blog. (Ok, Earl Ofari Hutchinson also beat us both to it. Check it here.)
Quick, before I discover any more fresh belly button lint, here are my three basic points about the Imus vs. the Rutgers women flap.
- It puts a salty finger right in the old black hair wound, especially for women. Since the 90's we've acted as though technology and fashion had ended the trauma of black hair in a white world. We have black blondes, yards of braids and locks and everybody sporting un-be-weaveable hair. But, in one short nasty sentence, this white guy in a cowboy hat got right under our collective wig of shame.
- It brings us even closer to a showdown about the rot that ghettoized popular culture has caused. Racist or not, Imus was doing his version of what almost every white public personality (comedians, anchors, talking hed hosts) does to some extent to signal they're hip or funny or even outrageous. He went ghetto. Some do it with deliberate self-parody that puts most of the joke on them. Others do it with cold- blooded intent to appear hard-core. They let the chips fall where they may depending on who they're trying to impress. But after Imus I think the stakes are now too high for the average wannabe hipster to risk their careers on something they really don't get. (right, Michael Richards??)
- Credit must go to the amazing nobility, discipline and leadership of Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer in representing her charges. And credit also to the untiring efforts of the womens NCAA and WNBA to present their athletes in the squeakiest of squeaky clean lights. It has been said that if you’re black you have to be twice as good to get half as much. Same for women ballers (of all colors) only they must be three times as good. They play their hearts out, keep their public noses clean, and they try real hard to look good—even ladylike—in their on-court appearance. The Rutgers women have the hearts of anyone who watched the women's tourney last month. No matter which team you favored, the Rutgers and Tennessee finalists represented the collective hope of all the fans of the still under-loved women's game.
Oh yessssss, Imus picked the wrong sisters, at the wrong time, to mess with.
But the wrong time for Imus may prove exactly the right time for the rest of us who agree with Roy Johnson that the iMuss moment should be:
...a time when our collective consciousness simply said, Enough. No longer would the language of hate be tolerated. No longer will the words we’ve become desensitived to be tolerated.
Not from Imus.
Not from anyone.
Enough.
