Imus crosses the boundary
Funny, but I never saw the hullabaloo over Don Imus’ offensive remarks coming. Nor am I sure exactly what’s been accomplished with him gone. For the time being, anyway. Does anybody doubt that the “I-Man,” as talk radio’s AM drive-time misanthrope likes being called, will resurface on a different network peddling his peculiar blend of news, sports, insider media gossip, satire and buffoonery? If only, I suspect, to prove that he can.
There’s no doubt Imus’ nasty crack about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was brutally offensive in ways nobody really talked about. Maybe because the actual insult didn’t precisely fit anybody’s script in the ensuing melodrama — neither Imus’ nor those who demanded his firing. Here’s how it went:
IMUS: “So, I watched the basketball game last night between — a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women’s final.”
SID ROSENBERG: “Yeah, Tennessee won last night — seventh championship for (Tennessee coach) Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.”
IMUS: “That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and — “
BERNARD McGUIRK: “Some hard-core hos.”
IMUS: “That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — whoo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.”
McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing. The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie …”
MCCORD: “‘Do the Right Thing.'”
ROSENBERG: “It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers; they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.”
Actually, they got the movie wrong. The 1988 Spike Lee film satirizing a feud between “Jigaboos” and “Wannabes,” light-skinned social climbers at a black college in the South, was “School Daze.” Like most of Lee’s films, it sparked much controversy in the black community. Three colleges expelled the production company from their campuses during shooting. One of its big production numbers was called “Straight and Nappy.”
The Rutgers girls weren’t being mocked for being black. Most of the Tennessee players were African-Americans, too. Worse, they were being lampooned for being, to Imus’ liver-spotted New York wiseacres, unattractive and masculine.
A long-ago graduate of Rutgers — The State University, I’d watched some of the game, read about the slur, figured most New Jersey people had thicker skins than that. My freshman dorm was like one of those World War II platoons in the movies — mostly first-generation college kids from every ethnic group imaginable. Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Polish, Russian; everything but Hispanics, of whom New Jersey had very few in those days.
Ethnic insults are a New York/New Jersey artform. My brother used to have a routine where he’d outline who did what on a New Jersey construction job — Mexican laborers, Irish plumber, Polish roofer, Brazilian floor men, Jewish lawyer, etc. He’d close in a loud stage whisper for his Italian partner’s benefit something about not doing business with “Guidos” at all.
To me, everything that needed saying about the episode was contained in a letter to The New York Times by Lisa Wilson, a self-described “white, prudish suburban woman” from Yarmouth, Maine.
“When I saw the young women of Rutgers,” she wrote, “I was shamed as I have never been shamed before. I suddenly saw my very real contribution to our racial divide. Indifference. I’d been willing to dismiss the denigration of African-Americans and women because it’s become common and because it suited me. And I learned the true meaning of grace and courage from those young women.”
So should we all. As for Imus, satire’s impossible without giving offense. These ritual banishments only provoke resentment. I’d bring him back, assuming he can find any sponsors.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at [email protected].