We've come to expect the grandstanding from the Sharptons and Jacksons when offensive racial comments are uttered by celebrities. After all, they make a living feeding on the outrage, and extracting the groveling apology from the perpetrator du jour. And the media just lap it up, for days on end. But John McWhorter says all the attention given to a few words is a distraction from the many real, chronic problems affecting black society. Here's a sample:
Imus hosts a radio show and a lot of people listen to it. During a few seconds last week he said something tacky. The show went on, as did life. Black people continued to constitute most new AIDS cases, black men continued to come out of prison unsupervised. And we're supposed to be most interested in Imus saying "nappy-headed ho's"?What creates that hypersensitivity is a poor racial self-image. Where, after all, did Imus pick up the very terminology he used? Rap music and the language young black people use themselves on the street to refer to one another.
What Imus said is lowdown indeed, but so is the way blacks refer to each other. And life goes on.
Street theater is not strength. It saps energy better put to other uses.
UPDATE 4/12: Jason Whitlock is another black writer lamenting the overblown focus on the words of a celebrity hack:
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.Posted by dan at April 10, 2007 12:28 PMThe 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.