nappy-headed hoes
Music: My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: The Filthiest Show in Town (2007)
The rage on morning television this week is Don Imus' racist statement on his daily radio (and television simulcast) program, that the women of Rutger's successful basketball team were a bunch of "nappy-headed hoes." Despite his insistence on context, the statement is hard to describe as anything but racist: "What I did was make a stupid, idiotic mistake in a comedy context,” said Imus. But the context was disbelief and incredulousness; Imus was observing a television clip and said “that’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos." His producer responded, "some hardcore hos" [sic]. “That’s some nappy-headed hos there," replied Imus, "I’m going to tell you that."
In various public apologies Imus has insisted that he is a good person who went "over the line." CBS and NBC/Universal has suspended Imus for two weeks as the jockey makes a tour of apologies, often in dialogue with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who are calling for Imus' head.
Watching what some journalists have termed the "dialogue on race" last night and this morning is painful: newspaper columnists debated whether Imus should be fired on the Lehrer News Hour, while James Carville offered an apologia for Imus on the Today show this morning. No matter how you slice it, though, Imus' comment was many things in addition to racist: the remarks about tattoos, looking rough, and nappy are also claims about (low) class and femininity (that is, they are not proper women), and so on. Ultimately the comment is dehumanizing, and so it's a little troubling to me that race has been singled out of host of –isms encapsulated by "nappy-headed hoes."
I say "troubling," but not surprising: it makes perfect sense that the "dialogue on race" is transformed to a monologue for the interests of dollars-a-second television spots. If anything, timed-air is an amplify-to-reduce agency, turning the most complex, systemic ideological issues into, well, one man's racism. That Sharpton called for Imus' immediate firing and for others to adopt the posture of righteous indignation is a televisual logic. The dehumanization of capitalism shifts the momo-monster of isms to another spinning car, when we should underscore, as bell hooks has done, that dehumanism is the name for a singular structure of which racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of Other-hate are constantly moving parts. Televisual news and radio cannot permit dialectical thinking.
Although I recognize the trouble with Imus' mouth---that he has an audience of millions, that he bears some responsibility since he uses what the FCC still defines as a public resource, and so on---I have some sympathy with his claim "it's not me, it's my culture." Like many radio personalities, Imus is a switchboard: what comes out of his mouth are scripts writ large. When he says "nappy-headed hoes" is a demeaning comment that originated among African American males, he is right in the sense that no one "owns" the sentiment. The distinction to be made here is one of responsibility: all of us are responsible for the ideologies we, however unwittingly, promote. I didn't say what Imus said, nor did most of the readers of this blog, but that does not mean that we didn't immediately recognize what he meant. Recognizing what he meant implicates all of us in meaning; "we" are responsible. That's why firing Imus is the wrong idea; it just makes the dialogue---and our burden---go away.