Women Seem Wicked When You're Unwanted

Well, that's that.

When I started planning to write an update today on Imus, I figured we would be waiting a few more days on CBS... and that, all things being equal, Imus' importance to the CBS bottom line (NBC having indicated he didn't do much for MSNBC's) would mitigate his behavior and probably keep in place on the radio.  And I had a whole argument ready about how radio is different, the demographics are different, and what he does could still work, just not on television (and that Bernie McGuirk may be the real problem).

Oh well.

I think a couple of instructive things have come out of this mess... if one can look past what are doubtless a lot of dopey, thumb-sucking pieces on the way by windy pundits with little to add.  This is not about the media as a whole, gangsta rap is really a whole other discussion, and this isn't a "high tech lynching" or any one of several other bombastic metaphors. (And even more emphatically, Imus hugging kids with cancer isn't the point, either.)

But the things that stand out to me:

1. This is generational.  Over and over, it's become clear in the past week that college kids didn't know much about Imus, who he was, or why he'd done what he did.  That says volumes to me that the shtick he's been selling - the tell-it-like-it-is ethnic New Yorker with a tin ear for social niceties has run its course.  This was a tired man doing a tired act who couldn't see that the world had changed. And nothing embodied that more than the graceful, elegant women of Rutgers Basketball, who didn't sound angry, or partisan... just bewildered, and rather hurt.  I think it's why many of us - the ones familiar with Imus - missed the import of this story when it broke.  It was, indeed, what he's always done.  There's just not the place for it there once was.
2. This is about women, and it's about race... but not the way many people think it is.  If I have to listen to another all male (and often very white panel) expound on what happened... I'll tear out my hair. What struck me today, and on previous days, was that women got this... and black women in particular, got it a lot (even the sense that Oprah, as I predicted, did her Moment of National Healing, it worked because she knew her connection to these women was palpable). The reason this isn't about rap music and hip-hop culture is because, at least in part, there's a demonstrable difference for a black woman in being called a whore by a white man. And again, it goes back to those poised, confident, educated women of Rutgers.  It used to be that jokes with easy, casual stereotypes worked because things fit the stereptypes.  And now we know they don't (again, generational), and it complicates how we find things funny, and it changes what we find appalling.  Calling this "censorship" and worse misses the point.  As do people like Michelle Malkin (again) focused on a world of Hip-Hop and Gangsta that's already changed, already started internalizing the message that not every woman is a freak or a ho, and that it hurts black women to say as much (or show as much by draping music videos with buxom girls barely covered by handkerchiefs).  As much as I think there's still work to do in rap and hip-hop, many pontificators just don't know what they're lookng at, or what they're talking about. It's possible to have a vibrant, sexy black woman without calling her a whore.  And our culture does not, still, know how to handle these complexities.

As I said last time, this race stuff makes me uncomfortable... but it's not all bad.  At work the past couple of days, I've really noticed the black women who come into the store - to a woman, they are classy, elegant women. with professional lives surely similar to the other women who come in on their way to work in the morning.  And as I waited on them, I thought of what Don Imus said, of what it meant, and how damn hurtful it must be to know that someone could say that about a woman like you (or in my case, a woman like me - I'm sisterhood like that).  Don Imus is gone, and he should be. It's amazing it took us so long to see that... or, if I think of my customers and what they go through... probably not so surprising, really.  Just another example of what you put up with unti someone finally acts. It's about damn time.

Comments

[Leigh]

What's so "complex" about a "sexy, vibrant, black woman" not being called a whore?

I agree there's all kinds of power dynamics going on here - sexism, racism, ageism - with a white man referring to young college women this way; it's pretty disgraceful. But is he really done? Is he not going to just move to another venue like so many others have? And, the thing I find puzzling is how he keeps admitting how out of line he was and acting like a disgraced hero (whether it's an act or actually humiliating to look in the mirror in the midst of all this) and yet there's all this outrage from others as if he was somehow wronged....

As for something finally being done, this is such the tip of an iceberg of deeper discussions needed in this country that it's frustrating to see how much becomes of these episodes.

The generational piece is totally intriguing...when boomers flame out...

[Jennifer]

This is a beautiful piece of writing with well thought points and concepts that have made me think in a new way which is wonderful. However, I do not understand and don't ever expect to-why is there a difference between a black man calling a black woman names and a white man calling her names? So many people seem to believe this and please...plug in any race or ethnicity you want here. If another Jewish person called me by derrogatory Jewish names-that be acceptable? Whereas if a Christian person did it it would be wrong? Who made up that rule?