Post by goddessoflight on Jul 8, 2007 13:35:36 GMT -5
Imus Said Publicly What Many Media Elites Say Privately
How Imus' Media Collaborators Almost Rescued Their Chief
By ISHMAEL REED
"Some of us relish the naughtiness."
--Howard Kurtz
In his 1995 book Hot Air, Howard Kurtz wrote that 'Imus' sexist homophobic, and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private. '"
"Later, host Don Imus brought up McGuirk's prior impersonations of African-American poet Maya Angelou asking, "[W]ho was that woman you used to do, the poet? . . . We used to get in all that trouble every time you'd do her. " As McGuirk launched into the impersonation, Imus said, 'I don't need any more columns. Come on. ' But Imus did not stop McGuirk, who delivered his impression in verse:
McGUIRK: Whitey plucked you from the jungle for too many years. They took away your pride, your dignity, and your spears With freedom came new woes. Into whitey's world you was rudely cast. So wake up now and go to work? You can kiss my big black ass"
George Curry, March 3, 2007
What began as a firestorm against Don Imus' remarks against the members of Rutgers women's basketball team ended, thanks to Imus' friends, who controlled a bogus "National Dialogue About Race," with a referendum on Gangsta Rap and the morals of Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.
By Monday, April 16, appearing on CNN, an all Imus buddy panel, including John Roberts, Paul Begala, and James Carville, engaged in a tribute to Imus. All that was needed were champagne glasses. On the same day John Roberts and his colleague, Wolf Blitzer, described the murder of 31 students at Virginia Tech as "the worst massacre in American history"--ignoring mass killings of blacks and Indians that had been far worse. Moreover, the fact that the shooter Cho Seung-Hui, was a fan of Guns N' Roses--he named a play, "Mr. Brownstone," after one of the band's songs--didn't inspire the 24/7 castigation of white Heavy Metal music that was dealt to Hip Hop music in the wake of Don Imus' firing.
The President of NBC News, Steve Capus, was disingenuous when he claimed that Don Imus, the shock jock, was fired solely because employees at NBC were outraged at Imus' description of the members of the Rutgers women's basketball team as "Nappy Headed Hos." That might have been part of it. But it was the multibillion dollar purchasing power of African-Americans and organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists, a more difficult target for Imus' fans than Sharpton and Jackson, that gave the African-American community its greatest victory against a racist media that have been its bane since the first slave ships arrived. Before television and radio, it was the newspapers alone that raised lynch mobs on African-Americans. In Charles Chesnutt's novels, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel's Dream (1905), the villains are newspaper men. The inflammatory coverage of one led to a lynching. The other editor caused a race riot. A book, The Betrayal of the Negro by Rayford Whittingham Logan, indicts some of the nation's most prestigious newspapers for inciting civil strife during the 20th Century, based upon malicious and false reporting.
The "National Dialogue" that MSNBC held after the Imus outburst about the Rutgers team was a telling example of this historic trend. The so-called "dialogue" was dominated mostly by white talking heads, including white women, who seem to be prospering at MSNBC, receiving as much airtime as the men. (Even so, Gloria Steinem maintained, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that white middle-class women and blacks share the same social predicament. Really? The college enrollment of white women is higher than that of both white men and blacks.) Instead of the opinions of black academic feminists like bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Sandra O'Neale, Paula Giddings, Joyce Joyce, or Sonia Sanchez being solicited to comment about Imus' remarks, Naomi Wolfe, a white feminist, whom bell hooks has criticized, spoke on behalf of black women.
It's fortunate that the money people at General Motors and Bigalow Tea, Direct TV, Ameritrade, Staples, Sprint, American Express and Proctor and Gamble, stepped in, because had they not Imus' groupies at MSNBC, like his pals, Mike Barnicle, David Gregory, Bo Dietal, the author of a vicious anti-Muslim tirade during Imus' last weeks, and Joe Scarborough, would have rescued their buddy by following their leader's talking points. (Keith Olbermann reported that Dietal was even reprimanded by rightwing fixer Dick Morris for using Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein, to make even more anti- Muslim comments.)
Imus griped that he was a victim of the African-American male culture, where, according to a man who has a lengthy record of making misogynist remarks, men mistreat women. Yet a recent SUNY study reveals a different reality: white men commit most of the assaults upon women in this country. According to the study conducted by Lois Weiss, professor of education at the University of Buffalo, and Michelle Fine, professor of social psychology in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, white women are afraid to talk about the abuse. Weiss and Fine found that 92 percent of the white women interviewed said that "serious domestic violence" had been directed against them, their mothers and/or sisters, either in their birth households or in later relationships. By comparison, 62 percent of black female subjects reported similar levels of violence in their lives. The authors of the study said that they were surprised because these were white women largely from middle class homes. On the other hand, there has been a steady reduction in the murder of black women by their husbands and boyfriends, while the murder rate of women by white men has remained about the same. One of the reasons for the falling rate of domestic abuse among blacks is that black women are more likely to retaliate. This drop in black domestic violence has been reported in The New York Times, yet the face of domestic violence in the pages of the Times continues to be painted black. Do you suppose that MSNBC will ever conduct a "National Dialogue" about white domestic violence? Maybe Newsweek? One of its writers, Evan Thomas, recently told Imus' audience that black men in the inner city enjoy beating up their women.
Given the remarks about women made by Imus' stable of Celtic-American commentators, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that women in Celtic-American households have a harder time than women in black households. And what about Imus' constant on air berating of his wife Deidre as a "whore" and a "moron?" Why isn't this kind of verbal battery reported domestic abuse?
Imus also set himself up as the arbiter about whom black men should date. Of course, the majority of blacks have some European heritage--my mother has Irish-American ancestors on both her mother and father's side. But black people didn't become a Creole nation as a result of black men and white women having sex. Indeed, the first deadbeat dad of an African-American household was almost certainly English, Irish, or Scots-Irish. Both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington's white slave-owning fathers had nothing to do with them. And though some black men are abusive to their families, I don't know of any who have sold their own children for profit.
Those white men and women who believe that domestic violence is a peculiarly black phenomenon must get all of their information about black life from Stephen Spielberg's film "The Color Purple," or like-minded novels. These are works of fiction? Spielberg's portrait of the book's villain, Mister, even offended the book's author, Alice Walker. When is Spielberg going to make a movie about the abuse of Jewish women in many Jewish households, both in the United States and Israel? When I first visited Israel in the year 2000, the murder of Israeli wives by Israeli husbands had become such an issue that the then prime minister Ehud Barak was compelled to comment about it. Moreover, Jewish feminists assert that the abuse of women in Jewish household is a "dark secret. " Shouldn't Spielberg expose this "dark secret" on the screen?
Moreover, while Spielberg used Alice Walker's book as an excuse to create one of the most sinister black male characters since the black actors who appeared in D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," black veterans complain that the director ignores their fighting role in his war movies.
The other talking point set forth by Imus was that his smearing of the Rutgers team was his first offense and an apology to the Rutgers should have been enough.
On March 14th, this line was parroted by Tom Foreman after yet another ignorant CNN rant about Hip Hop. Foreman complained that Imus was being punished for "a few ill chosen words"-thus obscuring the fact that Imus' firing was a culmination of KKK-type comments about Jews, blacks, Muslims and gays that extend backwards across many years. The Rutgers slur was the straw that broke the camel's back. Though Imus' defenders claim that he is an "equal opportunity abuser," his ridicule of Gays, Lesbians, and blacks, especially black men was a daily feature of his program. Yet, gays and lesbians, whose organizations have been complaining about Imus for years, weren't invited to participate in the "National Dialogue," because the networks and cable channels have found that they can make more money by promoting the "racial divide."
Don Imus' acolytes, like the former NYPD cop Bo Dietal, were all over television insisting that the Rutgers team should be the final judge of whether Imus remained on the job--young women who were not fully acquainted with Imus' resumé of past offenses against black women and who more were likely to cut him some slack. These young women might not have known that Imus called Gwen Ifill "a cleaning lady," a term which certainly wasn't inspired by rappers. The Rutgers team might not have been tuned in to Imus when he and his crew joked about the manner by which Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow, was murdered, a remark that doesn't appear in any Hip Hop song. And they might not have been listening when he and his buddy, the smarmy Bernard McGuirk laughed over an obscene parody of Maya Angelou's poetry or when Sid Rosenberg thought it clever to suggest on the Imus Show that the Williams sisters pose in The National Geographic. Though the American cognoscenti wallowed before the man, even calling him bookish, Imus was apparently ignorant of Maya Angelou's highly acclaimed body of work, even though she was President Clinton's inaugural poet.
The other Imus talking point was that it was all about Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Kill the messengers, even though the National Association of Black Journalists made the initial call for Imus' firing. Researchers at Media Matters.org, according to The Wall Street Journal, posted the transcript and clips of Imus' remarks at their website. This brought the matter to widespread attention, yet Media Matters (run by the gay former conservative David Brock, who wrote the infamous hit piece on Anita Hill) didn't receive the kind scolding accorded Sharpton and Jackson.
Frank Rich, another Imus stalwart, took another shot at Sharpton and defended his buddy Don Imus in the Sunday New York Times of April 15. Rich claimed the Rutgers basketball team and Don Imus were the only ones, during the entire episode, who weren't hypocrites! Why isn't the effort of Imus and his posse to deflect the attention from Imus to Sharpton and Rap music deemed hypocritical? Why wasn't Imus' pretending to distance himself from the man whom he hired to do "nigger jokes" considered hypocritical?
Why wasn't Imus condemned for his attempt to transfer the blame of misogyny to black men instead of apologizing for his own verbal abuse of women? Frank Rich, who provided intellectual heft to the Imus show, was a former theater critic at The New York Times. Rich was the one who condemned the late August Wilson's proposal for a Black Nationalist theater. I asked him in an email how he could criticize August Wilson's black Nationalism, but cooperate with Imus' crude yahoo bubba White Nationalism. Rich didn't respond.
After this cowardly display by Imus' defenders--Rich, Bill Maher, and James Carville, et al.--how can they claim moral superiority to the men who are the targets of their relentless barbs, George Bush and Dick Cheney? (Vice President Cheney and his wife Lynne also appeared on the Imus show). Neither Cheney nor Bush ever called a black person a "nappy headed ho" or referred to black men as "gorillas." Not on national television, at least.
NBC reporter David Gregory who, like a prize poodle, used to appear on Imus' show and receive pats on the head for engaging in testy exchanges with White House press briefers, ran a television marathon during which he defended Imus and castigated Gangsta Rap.
MSNBC allowed Imus' pals and regulars, like Gregory and Joe Scarborough, to moderate panels where they prosecuted Imus' critics, even though they were Imus' collaborators. One night, Imus' buddy, a screaming Joe Scarborough, totally lost it when he accused a puzzled Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com, of enjoying Hip Hop music. (Yes, this is the same Joan Walsh, a TV "progressive," who agreed with writer Stanley Crouch that an Albany jury was right when they acquitted the NYPD cops who shot the unarmed Amadou Diallo 44 times.) Gregory, whose slimy role in this affair I believe violated basic journalistic ethics, and Scarbourogh were among this faux cowboy's posse, and the cable networks allowed other Imus groupies to fan out across a number of shows for the purpose of defending their boss. Instead of treating their audience to a non-stop interrogation of Imus critics, the networks should have convened panels to examine the role their own pundits played in the enabling of Imus. The list of Imus enablers is a long and star-studded one, including: the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, who has set himself up a the country's ombudsman for morality, Tom Friedman and Frank Rich; others are James Carville, and his wife, Mary Matalin, Craig Crawford, Tom Browkaw, Brian Williams, Jeff Greenfield, Bo Deital, Tom Oliphant, Imus' sidekick, Charles McCord, and others who tolerated his and McGuirk's crude skinhead tirades against blacks Jews, gays and lesbians for years. These journalists should be given the same scrutiny as Imus. Instead, Imus' groupies were allowed to dominate a bogus, one sided "National Dialogue about Race." Didn't Douglas Brinkley, the historian know better than to enable Imus? The New Yorker's David Remnick? The Presidential historian, Michael Beschloss? Michel Martin, after mentioning Imus' guests who went on his show to plug their books and pretending to have no knowledge of what was what on the show, asked, "Who's the Ho?"
Bill Maher, who appeared on one of Imus' last shows, even after his bigoted put-down of the Rutgers team, pretended that Imus' remark was his only offense, a kind of misdemeanor for which a simple apology was enough. Maher, and some Admiral who appeared on the same show, assured Imus that their negroes supported the shock jock. Maher contends that blacks are more homophobic than members of other ethnic groups, which only means he hasn't examined the homophobic attitudes of other ethnic groups.
MSNBC then brought in some members of their African-American bench to endorse the talking points set down by Imus. John Ridley and Niger Innis certified the posse's line that Black Culture was responsible for Imus' problems! Both men made ad homoniem attacks on Jackson and Sharpton. Ridley was described as a screenwriter and commentator. His essay, "The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger," a piece clotted with the usual tough love generalizations and stereotypes, was considered so offensive that author Jill Nelson, whose book Involuntary Slavery is a scathing indictment of racism in the newsroom at The Washington Post, and others, called for a boycott of Esquire where the article appeared.
Ariana Huffington, another former conservative turned television liberal, apparently hasn't noticed her black sisters' outrage; she has provided John Ridley with a platform at The Huffington Post. Joe Scarborough and the producers who brought Ridley on their show probably enjoyed the article. They probably thought it to be provocative.
Maybe the Pulitzer committee will award Ridley a prize next year, as they did Cynthia Tucker, columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who got one this year for calling black men "bestial" and "idle" and for regularly criticizing black leaders and personalities. While The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is rough on the brothers and sisters, their attitude toward whites is like that of the other media. They treat them like children. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution bowdlerized a story about how thousands of blacks were chased from American cities through mob action in the early part of the 20th Century. The judgment at the paper was that this unpleasant news might hurt the feelings of their white readers. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a history. This is, after all, the newspaper that endorsed President Rutherford B. Hayes's withdrawal of Union troops from the South, an action that left blacks to the tender mercies of white terrorism. The paper also praised D'Nish D'souza's screed "The End of Racism," a book so racist that its publication prompted two black conservatives to resign from the American Enterprise Institute, one of D'souza's main patrons.
Cynthia Tucker wouldn't be the first black tough love merchant to receive a prize from the white men at the Pulitzers. They gave one to Janet Cooke, the former Washington Post fabulist, who concocted a story about black parents supplying an eight year old with drugs. That year, the token black members of the Pulitzer Committee tried to warn the men who controlled the prizes that her story was a phony; they were overruled.
This year the Pulitzer Committee cited Ms. Tucker's "courage," which implies that the black community is of such monolithic opinion that it takes guts to criticize its leaders and culture when that's all we get from the media and their journalistic mind doubles, those mercenaries and overseers who have an editorial whip ready to flog the underclass blacks in the field. Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper's, said of one Colored Mind Double: "He says what we say in private. "
Another black guest, Steve Perry, author of a book called Man Up, blamed Imus' problems on the content of the Rutgers basketball team's iPods!!
Rarely mentioned during this "National Dialogue" about race was Bernard McGuirk, who was hired by Imus to do "nigger jokes. "
McGuirk's ugly tirades about gays, lesbians, blacks and
women, far exceeded insensitive remarks that Jackson and Sharpton have made in the past. Jesse Jackson is still being hounded for his "Hymietown" remark, for which he repeated apologized. Yet former Secretary of State James Baker, who once snarled "Fuck the Jews," according to former Mayor Ed Koch, is still considered a statesman.
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, an Imus all-star, swooned that being in the presence of Billy Graham must be like being in the presence of God. When Meecham was peddling his interview with Billy Graham by saying such things as, "He is what God looks like--white hair, blue eyes." Of course, this is the same Rev. Graham who once confided to Richard Nixon in the Oval Office that the Jews were satanic and owned the media. (Also, according to The H.R. Haldeman Diaries, Graham agreed to Nixon's request that he, Graham, select a black leader. The media and the establishment select black leaders and when these leaders mess up blacks are called upon to criticize selections they hadn't made in the first place.)
I emailed "Noah" at Rabbi Michael Lerner's Tikkun magazine. Rabbi Lerner had picketed Cornel West for joining Minister Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March. " I asked whether Lerner was going protest Imus' anti-Semitism. No answer.
Bernard McGuirk is the one who preceded Imus' comments about the Rutgers team with a description of them as "hardcore hos." He's the one who constantly smeared black athletes as monkeys, gorillas and "knuckle draggers." McGuirk's the one who called Lindsay Davenport, the tennis champion, "a big dyke," with no prompting from Snoop Dogg. He's the one who led Imus' crew in ridiculing the features of a black woman who had launched a sexual harassment suit against Isaiah Thomas, the coach of the New York Knicks.
At Tom Paine.com writer Philip Nobile has chronicled many other other outrages on the Imus Show dating to 2000. TomPaine.com published an ad in he New York Times and even bought time on the Imus show to raise the issue of the sewage spewing from Imus and his crew.
In an article on May 16, 2000, Nobile wrote,
"Just about anything goes-from saying that [African-American former basketball player] Larry Johnson ruined [white female TV news personality] Willow Bay for white men, to asking the borough president of the Bronx if he felt 'like the mayor of Mogadishu.' Epithets like 'brillohead,' 'dark meat,' 'dingos,' 'mandingos,' and 'Uncle Ben' are okay on Imus."
And though it was an insult about black women that got Imus fired, black men were ridiculed on the show daily. Often it was about their mythical sexual prowess, which extended to jokes about Deidre Imus in bed with black sexual partners. When Deidre Imus said that Harold Ford would make a good president, McGuirk chimed in, "Yeah, and you can be his first lady." McGuirk seemed to have a pathological obsession with the alleged sexual gifts of black men, returning to the subject time and time again.
When New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin confused the word "cavalry" with "calvary," a common error, McGuirk seized upon the verbal slip to cast the Mayor as an illiterate. Using an old plantation dialect to imitate the Mayor, McGuirk ridiculed Nagin mercilessly. In one scene, he had the Mayor in bed with a white prostitute only to have Nagin's family show up. McGuirk had Nagin say, "It was all right, because we wasn't doing nothin'"--a remark that Imus and his crew found hilarious. In another scene Imus and his crew were in stitches as McGuirk had Nagin searching for his dead mother, after the floods of Katrina. When Imus complained about Marcia Clark and Chris Darden "blowing" the O. J. Simpson case, McGuirk interjected, "They blew each other, too"--referring to Darden and Clark vacationing together in San Francisco. McGuirk's sexual obsession harkens back to the old Confederate fear of miscegenation. McGuirk is the son of Irish immigrants. It was an Irish immigrant named David Goodman Croly, who, according to Harvard Professor Werner Sollors, coined the term "miscegenation" and who perpetrated "the Great Miscegenation Hoax of 1863." Croly was the author of a phony pamphlet that exposed a plan by Lincoln's party to invade northern bedrooms with black women. Lincoln was forced to defend the party against the charge.
Cont Part II
How Imus' Media Collaborators Almost Rescued Their Chief
By ISHMAEL REED
"Some of us relish the naughtiness."
--Howard Kurtz
In his 1995 book Hot Air, Howard Kurtz wrote that 'Imus' sexist homophobic, and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private. '"
"Later, host Don Imus brought up McGuirk's prior impersonations of African-American poet Maya Angelou asking, "[W]ho was that woman you used to do, the poet? . . . We used to get in all that trouble every time you'd do her. " As McGuirk launched into the impersonation, Imus said, 'I don't need any more columns. Come on. ' But Imus did not stop McGuirk, who delivered his impression in verse:
McGUIRK: Whitey plucked you from the jungle for too many years. They took away your pride, your dignity, and your spears With freedom came new woes. Into whitey's world you was rudely cast. So wake up now and go to work? You can kiss my big black ass"
George Curry, March 3, 2007
What began as a firestorm against Don Imus' remarks against the members of Rutgers women's basketball team ended, thanks to Imus' friends, who controlled a bogus "National Dialogue About Race," with a referendum on Gangsta Rap and the morals of Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.
By Monday, April 16, appearing on CNN, an all Imus buddy panel, including John Roberts, Paul Begala, and James Carville, engaged in a tribute to Imus. All that was needed were champagne glasses. On the same day John Roberts and his colleague, Wolf Blitzer, described the murder of 31 students at Virginia Tech as "the worst massacre in American history"--ignoring mass killings of blacks and Indians that had been far worse. Moreover, the fact that the shooter Cho Seung-Hui, was a fan of Guns N' Roses--he named a play, "Mr. Brownstone," after one of the band's songs--didn't inspire the 24/7 castigation of white Heavy Metal music that was dealt to Hip Hop music in the wake of Don Imus' firing.
The President of NBC News, Steve Capus, was disingenuous when he claimed that Don Imus, the shock jock, was fired solely because employees at NBC were outraged at Imus' description of the members of the Rutgers women's basketball team as "Nappy Headed Hos." That might have been part of it. But it was the multibillion dollar purchasing power of African-Americans and organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists, a more difficult target for Imus' fans than Sharpton and Jackson, that gave the African-American community its greatest victory against a racist media that have been its bane since the first slave ships arrived. Before television and radio, it was the newspapers alone that raised lynch mobs on African-Americans. In Charles Chesnutt's novels, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel's Dream (1905), the villains are newspaper men. The inflammatory coverage of one led to a lynching. The other editor caused a race riot. A book, The Betrayal of the Negro by Rayford Whittingham Logan, indicts some of the nation's most prestigious newspapers for inciting civil strife during the 20th Century, based upon malicious and false reporting.
The "National Dialogue" that MSNBC held after the Imus outburst about the Rutgers team was a telling example of this historic trend. The so-called "dialogue" was dominated mostly by white talking heads, including white women, who seem to be prospering at MSNBC, receiving as much airtime as the men. (Even so, Gloria Steinem maintained, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that white middle-class women and blacks share the same social predicament. Really? The college enrollment of white women is higher than that of both white men and blacks.) Instead of the opinions of black academic feminists like bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Sandra O'Neale, Paula Giddings, Joyce Joyce, or Sonia Sanchez being solicited to comment about Imus' remarks, Naomi Wolfe, a white feminist, whom bell hooks has criticized, spoke on behalf of black women.
It's fortunate that the money people at General Motors and Bigalow Tea, Direct TV, Ameritrade, Staples, Sprint, American Express and Proctor and Gamble, stepped in, because had they not Imus' groupies at MSNBC, like his pals, Mike Barnicle, David Gregory, Bo Dietal, the author of a vicious anti-Muslim tirade during Imus' last weeks, and Joe Scarborough, would have rescued their buddy by following their leader's talking points. (Keith Olbermann reported that Dietal was even reprimanded by rightwing fixer Dick Morris for using Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein, to make even more anti- Muslim comments.)
Imus griped that he was a victim of the African-American male culture, where, according to a man who has a lengthy record of making misogynist remarks, men mistreat women. Yet a recent SUNY study reveals a different reality: white men commit most of the assaults upon women in this country. According to the study conducted by Lois Weiss, professor of education at the University of Buffalo, and Michelle Fine, professor of social psychology in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, white women are afraid to talk about the abuse. Weiss and Fine found that 92 percent of the white women interviewed said that "serious domestic violence" had been directed against them, their mothers and/or sisters, either in their birth households or in later relationships. By comparison, 62 percent of black female subjects reported similar levels of violence in their lives. The authors of the study said that they were surprised because these were white women largely from middle class homes. On the other hand, there has been a steady reduction in the murder of black women by their husbands and boyfriends, while the murder rate of women by white men has remained about the same. One of the reasons for the falling rate of domestic abuse among blacks is that black women are more likely to retaliate. This drop in black domestic violence has been reported in The New York Times, yet the face of domestic violence in the pages of the Times continues to be painted black. Do you suppose that MSNBC will ever conduct a "National Dialogue" about white domestic violence? Maybe Newsweek? One of its writers, Evan Thomas, recently told Imus' audience that black men in the inner city enjoy beating up their women.
Given the remarks about women made by Imus' stable of Celtic-American commentators, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that women in Celtic-American households have a harder time than women in black households. And what about Imus' constant on air berating of his wife Deidre as a "whore" and a "moron?" Why isn't this kind of verbal battery reported domestic abuse?
Imus also set himself up as the arbiter about whom black men should date. Of course, the majority of blacks have some European heritage--my mother has Irish-American ancestors on both her mother and father's side. But black people didn't become a Creole nation as a result of black men and white women having sex. Indeed, the first deadbeat dad of an African-American household was almost certainly English, Irish, or Scots-Irish. Both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington's white slave-owning fathers had nothing to do with them. And though some black men are abusive to their families, I don't know of any who have sold their own children for profit.
Those white men and women who believe that domestic violence is a peculiarly black phenomenon must get all of their information about black life from Stephen Spielberg's film "The Color Purple," or like-minded novels. These are works of fiction? Spielberg's portrait of the book's villain, Mister, even offended the book's author, Alice Walker. When is Spielberg going to make a movie about the abuse of Jewish women in many Jewish households, both in the United States and Israel? When I first visited Israel in the year 2000, the murder of Israeli wives by Israeli husbands had become such an issue that the then prime minister Ehud Barak was compelled to comment about it. Moreover, Jewish feminists assert that the abuse of women in Jewish household is a "dark secret. " Shouldn't Spielberg expose this "dark secret" on the screen?
Moreover, while Spielberg used Alice Walker's book as an excuse to create one of the most sinister black male characters since the black actors who appeared in D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," black veterans complain that the director ignores their fighting role in his war movies.
The other talking point set forth by Imus was that his smearing of the Rutgers team was his first offense and an apology to the Rutgers should have been enough.
On March 14th, this line was parroted by Tom Foreman after yet another ignorant CNN rant about Hip Hop. Foreman complained that Imus was being punished for "a few ill chosen words"-thus obscuring the fact that Imus' firing was a culmination of KKK-type comments about Jews, blacks, Muslims and gays that extend backwards across many years. The Rutgers slur was the straw that broke the camel's back. Though Imus' defenders claim that he is an "equal opportunity abuser," his ridicule of Gays, Lesbians, and blacks, especially black men was a daily feature of his program. Yet, gays and lesbians, whose organizations have been complaining about Imus for years, weren't invited to participate in the "National Dialogue," because the networks and cable channels have found that they can make more money by promoting the "racial divide."
Don Imus' acolytes, like the former NYPD cop Bo Dietal, were all over television insisting that the Rutgers team should be the final judge of whether Imus remained on the job--young women who were not fully acquainted with Imus' resumé of past offenses against black women and who more were likely to cut him some slack. These young women might not have known that Imus called Gwen Ifill "a cleaning lady," a term which certainly wasn't inspired by rappers. The Rutgers team might not have been tuned in to Imus when he and his crew joked about the manner by which Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow, was murdered, a remark that doesn't appear in any Hip Hop song. And they might not have been listening when he and his buddy, the smarmy Bernard McGuirk laughed over an obscene parody of Maya Angelou's poetry or when Sid Rosenberg thought it clever to suggest on the Imus Show that the Williams sisters pose in The National Geographic. Though the American cognoscenti wallowed before the man, even calling him bookish, Imus was apparently ignorant of Maya Angelou's highly acclaimed body of work, even though she was President Clinton's inaugural poet.
The other Imus talking point was that it was all about Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Kill the messengers, even though the National Association of Black Journalists made the initial call for Imus' firing. Researchers at Media Matters.org, according to The Wall Street Journal, posted the transcript and clips of Imus' remarks at their website. This brought the matter to widespread attention, yet Media Matters (run by the gay former conservative David Brock, who wrote the infamous hit piece on Anita Hill) didn't receive the kind scolding accorded Sharpton and Jackson.
Frank Rich, another Imus stalwart, took another shot at Sharpton and defended his buddy Don Imus in the Sunday New York Times of April 15. Rich claimed the Rutgers basketball team and Don Imus were the only ones, during the entire episode, who weren't hypocrites! Why isn't the effort of Imus and his posse to deflect the attention from Imus to Sharpton and Rap music deemed hypocritical? Why wasn't Imus' pretending to distance himself from the man whom he hired to do "nigger jokes" considered hypocritical?
Why wasn't Imus condemned for his attempt to transfer the blame of misogyny to black men instead of apologizing for his own verbal abuse of women? Frank Rich, who provided intellectual heft to the Imus show, was a former theater critic at The New York Times. Rich was the one who condemned the late August Wilson's proposal for a Black Nationalist theater. I asked him in an email how he could criticize August Wilson's black Nationalism, but cooperate with Imus' crude yahoo bubba White Nationalism. Rich didn't respond.
After this cowardly display by Imus' defenders--Rich, Bill Maher, and James Carville, et al.--how can they claim moral superiority to the men who are the targets of their relentless barbs, George Bush and Dick Cheney? (Vice President Cheney and his wife Lynne also appeared on the Imus show). Neither Cheney nor Bush ever called a black person a "nappy headed ho" or referred to black men as "gorillas." Not on national television, at least.
NBC reporter David Gregory who, like a prize poodle, used to appear on Imus' show and receive pats on the head for engaging in testy exchanges with White House press briefers, ran a television marathon during which he defended Imus and castigated Gangsta Rap.
MSNBC allowed Imus' pals and regulars, like Gregory and Joe Scarborough, to moderate panels where they prosecuted Imus' critics, even though they were Imus' collaborators. One night, Imus' buddy, a screaming Joe Scarborough, totally lost it when he accused a puzzled Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com, of enjoying Hip Hop music. (Yes, this is the same Joan Walsh, a TV "progressive," who agreed with writer Stanley Crouch that an Albany jury was right when they acquitted the NYPD cops who shot the unarmed Amadou Diallo 44 times.) Gregory, whose slimy role in this affair I believe violated basic journalistic ethics, and Scarbourogh were among this faux cowboy's posse, and the cable networks allowed other Imus groupies to fan out across a number of shows for the purpose of defending their boss. Instead of treating their audience to a non-stop interrogation of Imus critics, the networks should have convened panels to examine the role their own pundits played in the enabling of Imus. The list of Imus enablers is a long and star-studded one, including: the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, who has set himself up a the country's ombudsman for morality, Tom Friedman and Frank Rich; others are James Carville, and his wife, Mary Matalin, Craig Crawford, Tom Browkaw, Brian Williams, Jeff Greenfield, Bo Deital, Tom Oliphant, Imus' sidekick, Charles McCord, and others who tolerated his and McGuirk's crude skinhead tirades against blacks Jews, gays and lesbians for years. These journalists should be given the same scrutiny as Imus. Instead, Imus' groupies were allowed to dominate a bogus, one sided "National Dialogue about Race." Didn't Douglas Brinkley, the historian know better than to enable Imus? The New Yorker's David Remnick? The Presidential historian, Michael Beschloss? Michel Martin, after mentioning Imus' guests who went on his show to plug their books and pretending to have no knowledge of what was what on the show, asked, "Who's the Ho?"
Bill Maher, who appeared on one of Imus' last shows, even after his bigoted put-down of the Rutgers team, pretended that Imus' remark was his only offense, a kind of misdemeanor for which a simple apology was enough. Maher, and some Admiral who appeared on the same show, assured Imus that their negroes supported the shock jock. Maher contends that blacks are more homophobic than members of other ethnic groups, which only means he hasn't examined the homophobic attitudes of other ethnic groups.
MSNBC then brought in some members of their African-American bench to endorse the talking points set down by Imus. John Ridley and Niger Innis certified the posse's line that Black Culture was responsible for Imus' problems! Both men made ad homoniem attacks on Jackson and Sharpton. Ridley was described as a screenwriter and commentator. His essay, "The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger," a piece clotted with the usual tough love generalizations and stereotypes, was considered so offensive that author Jill Nelson, whose book Involuntary Slavery is a scathing indictment of racism in the newsroom at The Washington Post, and others, called for a boycott of Esquire where the article appeared.
Ariana Huffington, another former conservative turned television liberal, apparently hasn't noticed her black sisters' outrage; she has provided John Ridley with a platform at The Huffington Post. Joe Scarborough and the producers who brought Ridley on their show probably enjoyed the article. They probably thought it to be provocative.
Maybe the Pulitzer committee will award Ridley a prize next year, as they did Cynthia Tucker, columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who got one this year for calling black men "bestial" and "idle" and for regularly criticizing black leaders and personalities. While The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is rough on the brothers and sisters, their attitude toward whites is like that of the other media. They treat them like children. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution bowdlerized a story about how thousands of blacks were chased from American cities through mob action in the early part of the 20th Century. The judgment at the paper was that this unpleasant news might hurt the feelings of their white readers. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a history. This is, after all, the newspaper that endorsed President Rutherford B. Hayes's withdrawal of Union troops from the South, an action that left blacks to the tender mercies of white terrorism. The paper also praised D'Nish D'souza's screed "The End of Racism," a book so racist that its publication prompted two black conservatives to resign from the American Enterprise Institute, one of D'souza's main patrons.
Cynthia Tucker wouldn't be the first black tough love merchant to receive a prize from the white men at the Pulitzers. They gave one to Janet Cooke, the former Washington Post fabulist, who concocted a story about black parents supplying an eight year old with drugs. That year, the token black members of the Pulitzer Committee tried to warn the men who controlled the prizes that her story was a phony; they were overruled.
This year the Pulitzer Committee cited Ms. Tucker's "courage," which implies that the black community is of such monolithic opinion that it takes guts to criticize its leaders and culture when that's all we get from the media and their journalistic mind doubles, those mercenaries and overseers who have an editorial whip ready to flog the underclass blacks in the field. Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper's, said of one Colored Mind Double: "He says what we say in private. "
Another black guest, Steve Perry, author of a book called Man Up, blamed Imus' problems on the content of the Rutgers basketball team's iPods!!
Rarely mentioned during this "National Dialogue" about race was Bernard McGuirk, who was hired by Imus to do "nigger jokes. "
McGuirk's ugly tirades about gays, lesbians, blacks and
women, far exceeded insensitive remarks that Jackson and Sharpton have made in the past. Jesse Jackson is still being hounded for his "Hymietown" remark, for which he repeated apologized. Yet former Secretary of State James Baker, who once snarled "Fuck the Jews," according to former Mayor Ed Koch, is still considered a statesman.
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, an Imus all-star, swooned that being in the presence of Billy Graham must be like being in the presence of God. When Meecham was peddling his interview with Billy Graham by saying such things as, "He is what God looks like--white hair, blue eyes." Of course, this is the same Rev. Graham who once confided to Richard Nixon in the Oval Office that the Jews were satanic and owned the media. (Also, according to The H.R. Haldeman Diaries, Graham agreed to Nixon's request that he, Graham, select a black leader. The media and the establishment select black leaders and when these leaders mess up blacks are called upon to criticize selections they hadn't made in the first place.)
I emailed "Noah" at Rabbi Michael Lerner's Tikkun magazine. Rabbi Lerner had picketed Cornel West for joining Minister Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March. " I asked whether Lerner was going protest Imus' anti-Semitism. No answer.
Bernard McGuirk is the one who preceded Imus' comments about the Rutgers team with a description of them as "hardcore hos." He's the one who constantly smeared black athletes as monkeys, gorillas and "knuckle draggers." McGuirk's the one who called Lindsay Davenport, the tennis champion, "a big dyke," with no prompting from Snoop Dogg. He's the one who led Imus' crew in ridiculing the features of a black woman who had launched a sexual harassment suit against Isaiah Thomas, the coach of the New York Knicks.
At Tom Paine.com writer Philip Nobile has chronicled many other other outrages on the Imus Show dating to 2000. TomPaine.com published an ad in he New York Times and even bought time on the Imus show to raise the issue of the sewage spewing from Imus and his crew.
In an article on May 16, 2000, Nobile wrote,
"Just about anything goes-from saying that [African-American former basketball player] Larry Johnson ruined [white female TV news personality] Willow Bay for white men, to asking the borough president of the Bronx if he felt 'like the mayor of Mogadishu.' Epithets like 'brillohead,' 'dark meat,' 'dingos,' 'mandingos,' and 'Uncle Ben' are okay on Imus."
And though it was an insult about black women that got Imus fired, black men were ridiculed on the show daily. Often it was about their mythical sexual prowess, which extended to jokes about Deidre Imus in bed with black sexual partners. When Deidre Imus said that Harold Ford would make a good president, McGuirk chimed in, "Yeah, and you can be his first lady." McGuirk seemed to have a pathological obsession with the alleged sexual gifts of black men, returning to the subject time and time again.
When New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin confused the word "cavalry" with "calvary," a common error, McGuirk seized upon the verbal slip to cast the Mayor as an illiterate. Using an old plantation dialect to imitate the Mayor, McGuirk ridiculed Nagin mercilessly. In one scene, he had the Mayor in bed with a white prostitute only to have Nagin's family show up. McGuirk had Nagin say, "It was all right, because we wasn't doing nothin'"--a remark that Imus and his crew found hilarious. In another scene Imus and his crew were in stitches as McGuirk had Nagin searching for his dead mother, after the floods of Katrina. When Imus complained about Marcia Clark and Chris Darden "blowing" the O. J. Simpson case, McGuirk interjected, "They blew each other, too"--referring to Darden and Clark vacationing together in San Francisco. McGuirk's sexual obsession harkens back to the old Confederate fear of miscegenation. McGuirk is the son of Irish immigrants. It was an Irish immigrant named David Goodman Croly, who, according to Harvard Professor Werner Sollors, coined the term "miscegenation" and who perpetrated "the Great Miscegenation Hoax of 1863." Croly was the author of a phony pamphlet that exposed a plan by Lincoln's party to invade northern bedrooms with black women. Lincoln was forced to defend the party against the charge.
Cont Part II