Don Imus [is gone] in the Morning

On the April 4 edition of MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning, host Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, which is comprised of eight African-American women and two white players, as “nappy-headed hos” immediately after the show’s executive producer, Bernard McGuirk, called the team “hard-core hos.” Later, former Imus sports announcer Sid Rosenberg, who was filling in for sportscaster Chris Carlin, said: “The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the [National Basketball Association’s] Toronto Raptors.”

As of today, CBS Radio and MSNBC announced they are both suspending Don Imus’ morning talk show for two weeks beginning next Monday.

This piece of news came from Media Matters at the height of the Don Imus comment controversy. Don Imus has served his public apology, calling the remarks he and fellow journalists McGuirk and Rosenberg as “insensitive and ill-conceived.” He has been busy going the rounds of interviews in publicly expressing his apologies to every high profile show he can get into.

This, however, does not absolve Imus of his deed. Reading through the outrage mostly coming from the African American community and from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), what they are generally protesting against was Don’s use of “Black slang” in describing the Rutger women’s basketball players as “nappy headed hos”.

Beyond Imus’ references to the African American hairstyles of the Rutger women’s basketball team, Sid Rosenberg also described the whole team as looking like the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, which is a reference to the muscled appearance of the female athletes. Watching the video clip of the show Imus in the Morning from MSNBC, audiences can clearly discern the derogatory meanings from the words Imus, McGuirk and Rosenberg were using.

Don Imus is a public personality and has a responsibility to uphold moral and ethical practices in the media, one of which is to always show respect to your subject. His show’s suspension is a reaction of the two networks trying to wash their hands of Imus in the face of the public clamor calling for Imus’ termination as a talk show host.

What is remarkable though is that many Black men use the term “hos” to refer to Black women. And the term “nappy head” isn’t as racially degrading as it should be. African American hair is sometimes referred to as nappy head. However, coming from a strongly opinionated white guy, these terms do not carry over well to the larger majority of blacks in mainstream media.

It is clear that there is a double standard when it comes to political correctness. It was ok for Black men to make derogatory remarks on all women in general, but it will never be ok for white men to do so. If we are to remove any representation of gender and racial discrimination in media communications shouldn’t we start with how women are referred to and treated in hip hop videos and in the lyrics of hip hop music? What’s more all media should stop putting female images in sexually oriented ads and mixing the concept of femininity with sex.

Cleaning up the airwaves of the likes of Don Imus is not a complete solution to the problem. The sexualization of women is a social malaise. Don’s sympathizers might cry freedom of speech but everyone knows there is no absolute freedom anywhere.

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