The Washington Informer: Opinions/Editorials

If the camera-chasing Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot eventually force Don Imus off the air, they will lose all their credibility.

After Doug “Greaseman” Tract, Howard Cossell, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder and Michael Richards all went down, if Imus is allowed to resume broadcasting, even after whatever suspensions may be applied by MSNBC.com, his cable TV host or by CBS, which owns his New York host radio station, the Rev. Jackson’s and the Rev. Sharpton’s salt will have lost all of its savor, and they might as well hang it up.

Of course, the racists, and their Black sidekicks who think Mr. Imus’s disgusting reference to Black female athletes as whores was funny, will all be angry that political correctness will appear to be running amok. But that’s the price we’ll have to pay.

Having said that, when will our chattering class look in our own cultural mirror? How did such expressions as “nappy-headed” and “hoes” and worse enter the common American vernacular?

Black entertainers taught such expressions to ordinary Americans.

For example, as long as there has been an American Kennel Club – the gold standard for dog breeding and show dogs – the expression “bitch” has been used to refer to female dogs. But “our” entertainers are the ones who applied such language to Black female humans. And it stuck. And the term “hoes” – Ebonics for “whores” – also comes from our own usage.

Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and Nelly (can you say “Tip Drill?”) are well-paid because of their talent for making America’s filthy sportin’ life fair-seeming. I confess, my list is short, because I cop to not knowing much about the subject of gangsta’ rap music.

A “tip drill” is apropos here because it comes originally from basketball practice where players line up at the free-throw line and tip the ball off the backboard consecutively, one after another. The common street meaning now refers to a group of men “running a train” on, or gang-raping, a woman. First, one man, followed by the next man, until each has had a turn.

That’s sort of what happened in this case. So many, many entertainers have had sport with the image of Black women, but it’s the last guy – Don Imus – who got caught and busted.

Howard Stern, for example, left the broadcast airwaves after his obscenity-laced program had enormous fines levied against him by the Federal Communications Commission. Stern is now heard on one of the satellite channels, where he is paid a king’s ransom and has attracted tens of thousands of listeners to fork over $10 per month to listen to his filth without government censorship. Maybe that’s the future for “Imus in the Morning.”

The “musicians” who purvey these misogynistic products call it “keepin’ it real.” And let’s not forget, nor excuse, the fact that there are apparently hundreds, if not thousands and thousands, of young Black women who appear in the videos produced for these songs, apparently without coercion. Apparently, all 18 years old and older.

All of whom, like the rappers, have mothers and aunts and grandmothers and sisters and, for many, daughters, who are proud, I’m sure, to see Baby Girl gettin’ it on in Nelly’s “Tip Drill” video. Proud I’m sure to be the one whose backside is used by the star as the device in which he swipes his credit card.

I credit the late actor Ron O’Neal for first tapping into our appetite for this kind of volunteer slavery, or “blaxploitation.” O’Neal, starring as Youngblood Priest in the movie “Superfly,” changed our paradigm. In that film, we accepted the reprobate, the pimp, the drug dealer as the hero because he declared, “I’ve got a plan to stick it to the Man.” “The Man,” in this case, being “the White man,” our former slave master, whom we saw as beneath contempt in the years right after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when the film hit the screen.

So, in the guise of “having a plan to stick it to the Man,” we bought into every manner of despicable Black character, and they came at us in hordes, and, soon, they didn’t even need a plan anymore. The Black gangstas became the heroes. It was “pimps up, hoes down,” and a new genre of self-loathing became de rigeur, and no one wanted to be smart, a square, a “sucka,” a “mark,” a “buster” or “talkin’ White” anymore.

Exit Black pride. Enter Don Imus, et al.

Unless, that is, Black people who think that the White shock jock has committed an unforgivable sin are ready to apply that same standard to our own children and grandchildren who think Snoop and Nelly and 50 and Def Jam and Def Comedy are all cool.

Askia Muhammad is editor of National Scene News Bureau, which provides editorial, audio and photographic content for broadcast and print clients, including The Final Call, National Public Radio, Soundprint, WPFW-FM and the Informer. His e-mail address is askia99@verizon.net