Double Feauture: Don Imus & The Duke Case

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Since two topics have piqued my interest at this time, I have decided to discuss them both, so here goes;

Don Imus Gets Fired from CBS for Using Hip-Hop Language

Radio shock0jock Don Imus has been known for saying some outrageous things throughout his career as a New York-based radio talk show host. However, Imus has been fired from his job at CBS over a remark that he made about the women's college basketball team at Rutgers, whom he referred to as: "nappy-headed hos" Now, for those of you who aren't down with the brotha' language, a "ho" is the African-American slang term for a woman, and it can be found sprinkled all over the Black culture, and all over hip-hop, the Black "music".

Now, even with the fact that Don Imus has been in the business of rubbing people the wrong way for a while, if not outright insulting them...and I certainly don't agree with going out of your way to insult someone (which Liberalistas seem to claim he did), two points have been raised by this incident...

First, the issue of whom to apologize to for this sort of thing. I have heard arguments on both sides of this issue. On the one hand, there was Ann Coulter, who on FOX News said that Imus should stop spologizing to Liberalista Black :leaders" such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, an instead, apologize to the Rutgers womens basketball team itself. When asked what the difference was between what she proposed for Imus, and the actions she herself took in relation to some of the widows of the 9/11 wictims, Coulter replied that in the case of the "Jersey Gals", these were people who had stepped out onto the public stage and started making public statements supporting a contender in the race for President. The Rutgers girls simply played a game of basketball. On the other hand, a co-worker said that anyone who puts on a uniform and plays a sport is putting themselves out ther as a role model, and thereby putting themselves out in the arena of ideas to be supported and praised, or laughed at and ridiculed.

It might be narrow of me, but I tend to support Ann's view of the matter, simply because of the relative importance of the figures involved. If the "Jersey Gals" or any other peacenik group decides to support a Presidental candidate, that is much more important to me and you and the rest of the country than a group of innocent girls playing a basketball game. In the case of the former, if they are playing on the public stage, you can as a journalist, or editor, call them of things ON THAT STAGE. This is the very basis of the entire blogging atmosphere, where public people make public statements and then other people get to make similarly public comments back. In this arena, if you get bashed back for something you said, you either take the heat, or get out of the kitchen. Girls playing basketball simply are not in this league.

Imus should apologize directly to the team, and leave it at that.

However, the second point is a bit more interesting. Why is it that a White guy gets canned for calling Black women "nappy-headed hos", but Black rappers get away with the same kind of language, on the very same radio netowrk that carries Imus' show? Where is Jackson and Sharpton with the moral outrage? If nothing else, this incident again exposes the hypocrisy fo the Liberalista Black "leadership" in this country. They should either denounce and condemn *all* uses of words such as "nigga" and "ho", and start attaching real stigmas to the kind of ghetto society that has given rise to the absolute trash that makes up most of the ghetto Black "culture", or they should keep their stupid mouths shut.

There is something strange about a society where one culture continually condemns another part of that culture for using demeaning terms about them (and rightly so), but then uses those same terms within their own culture as terms of endearment.

African-Americans will tell us that they use the term "nigga" because they came from the slave culture and they use it as a way to "own" the term...to make it theirs. The next time an African-American uses that term, ask him or her where the "owning of the language" was in the 1800s, when the N word first got its use. If the African-American doesn't kill you for asking such a question, please report back to me on their response.

To wrap up this item, Don Imus was to go to the mansion of the governor of New Jersye to meet with the team from Rutgers, and apparently the team showed up. There has been no news about whether the meeting went forward however, because while on his way there, the governor of the state of New Jersey was in an auto accident, and is listed as critical but stable in an area hospital.

The Duke Boys Are Innocent - I Hope They SUE!

I have been waiting for this day for a LONG time, the day when justice would finally be served to the three DUke University lacrosse players who were falsely accused of raping an African-American woman.

However, despite the woman's confused and changing stories about the events on the night in question, despite her obviously altered mental state because of whatever she drank at the party that she went to, despite all of the bungles that the original prosecutor in the case made, it has taken about a YEAR for the accused in this case to be declared innocent.

The charges against the Duke men have been dropped, and their lawyers have not ruled out the possibility of a lawsuit against a number of people, including perhaps the district attorney who so flubbed up this case that a jury of two-year olds would have dismissed the case, as well as the city that allowed this farce of a case to continue forward.

What you have coming out of this is not the story of a Bloack woman raped by three White men at a frat party, but rather the story of three men who have had their names dragged through the mud for at least several months while the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, used the case to get himself re-elected, and then simply strung the case along for as long as he could. If I were involve, either as the men themselves, or as their lawyers, within five minutes of the state attorney general's announcement of the dismissal of the charges, I would have announced that I was filing a lawsuit against both Nifong, and the city of Durham.

The other angle again comes back to the response of the Black community, both in Durham itself, and in the nation as a whole. In Durham, the community there was disappointed that the case didn't go forward, citing it as yet another example of where White guys have gotten away with raping Black women, and saying that the outcome would have been different had the situation been reversed. While the case might be made somewhere, to insist on continuing the prosecution of someone who has been proven to be innocent would be an extreme miscarriage of justice. Let's say that such a prosecution went forward and got a conviction...that case could be immediately appealed, and overturned on those very grounds, and then the list of people being sued would be a lot longer. The problem here is that African-Americans have become too used to playing the role of the victim, even when they don't deserve it. The accuser in this case has no story that she can back up, and to put ANYONE through the wrenching spectacle of a trial just to soothe racial issues is audacious as it is stupid.

However, we are not done. While Mike Nifong called the Duke men hooligans, and while the press reports referred to them as "worse than Hitler", where was the Black "leadership" on this issue? Did they stand on the side of waiting until the facts were heard, or did they leap into the case, immediately taking the side of the accuser, the victim of a horrible assault against both her womanhood and her race.

I'd be willing to bet it was the second option, knowing the modus operandi of the Black "leaders" such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. If these men in fact jumped to the defense of the accuser without allowing the justice system time to come to the right conslusion, then they owe the Duke men a huge apology. To not do so contributes more to the public slander and farce that this case became.

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John B.
Blogger Guy