Don Imus is not the Issue, and neither is Jesse or Al
I am so sick of hearing about anything in regard to shock jock Don Imus. 95% of America had no clue who Imus was before last week. His comment referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as ‘nappy headed ho’s’ was heard by a VERY small percentage of the population.
A lot worse is said on the airwaves and by rappers and rockers. Is there a double standard? For sure! Did Imus deserve to be fired from MSNBC and CBS? Most would say yes but why? I guess I was wrong and racist for buying the Nappy Roots CD four years ago. I guess I was wrong for calling my homey a ‘unskilled ho’ while balling full court back in the day. We will pay good money to hear a rapper/singer or actor call someone a ho, bitch or nappy headed ho but when it is for free on the radio everyone runs and pulls the fire alarm? I guess some things aren’t funny when you don’t pay for them.
There is a lot of stuff on TV and the radio that offends me in one way or another. What do I do? I don’t listen to him/her or it. If what is said is that bad then people will stay away, ratings will plummet, and that show or program will be canceled because ratings are king at the end of the day. When something like this happens you know the smell of money and opportunity will lure Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton into the fray. Never mind that both of them have used slurs to describe different groups and how Sharpton attacked the Duke Lacrosse players.
Jason Whitlock (African-American) of AOL Sports finally quits the masquerade to call Jackson and Sharpton onto the carpet for what they are. He refers to them as the President and Vice President of Black America. Here are some of the things Whitlock wrote in his current article.
Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.
If judged by the results they’ve produced the last 20 years, you’d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.
Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.
Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players “nappy-headed hos,” was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.
Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.
Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.
The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.
But the war? We don’t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows “nappy-headed ho’s� is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.
We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.
We don’t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn’t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn’t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn’t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.
Whitlock makes a lot of great points. Too many actually, hard to narrow them down for this post. Read the full article here. Imus shouldn’t have made the comments. However, there has been WAY too much media attention on Imus and this story. It is always funny that the biggest proponents of freedom of speech are always the first to ask for it to be taken away from someone else when something is said they don’t agree with.
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Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.

EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!! Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have ruined lives without even a second thought (ie the boys from Duke) or an appology on their part. Now if they want to clean up the lanuage used to against the races ALL RACES they need not target just one disk jockey they need to target every record label that allows the so-called artist to use that language. And why is it that it is ok for someone of the same race to use that language against eachother in jest or not but the minute someone outside of the race uses it sirens go off? Also if say a black shock jock uses a racial slur towards the white community who is going to scream for their firing and fight for the rights of the white community?
We have come to a time when people of all colors and creeds come together and respect eachother and let by gones be by gones. The mistakes of the ignorance of long ago have been hashed and re-hashed and yes we must learn from them but to continue to make people pay for things they had no control of breeds a new form of ignorance. We now have to learn that respect for ourselves and eachother no matter the race, creed, or disablity is what should be at hand. We need to be concerned with the divisions that are in this country in this time, if people haven’t noticed our nation is a mess and we are worried about a so-called shock jock that used a term that yes he should not have used but it used by others who have never been sanctioned in anyway. We have sports figures who our children look up to doing things illegal and immoral but that is not a problem for Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson because they are not an outright ‘attack’ on our children. I think they need to be looking at how to fix some things inside the community as well how to ruin the lives of those outside the community.
We have be seeing in my opinion a reverse racism although I think that is not possible because racism defined is the nation that one’s own ethnic stock is superior and the discrimination or prejudice based on racism. So there can not be this so called reverse racism or reverse discrimination call it what it is plain and simple.
Am I proud of my ‘ethnic stock’? Sure why not but they are no better than anyone else. I want to be judged on my own merits not who my parents or grandparents are or the color of my skin or what part of the world my family came from over hundred and fifty to two hundrend years ago. I have worked hard to be the person I am.