I-mussed Up (Updated) 8
I frankly don’t care whether Don Imus gets fired or not. He’s made a career out of being inflammatory. And now he’s the one in the fire. Let him sweat.
Big whoop. Howard Stern is still on the air, quite joyfully naked.
(I listened to Stern once, for 15 minutes. All he talked about were his testicles. Having no interest in his testicles, I have not listened to him again.)
What is a damned shame and what should cause Imus suffering is that he destroyed whatever joy the Rutgers women’s basketball team could have had in finishing second in the NCAA tournament–that is, second in the nation–in his bid for cheap, racist laughs.
I was talking about Don Imus with my brother today. He and I don’t necessarily land on the same political squares. He cited examples of other on-air conduct, not involving race, which he finds just as offensive as Imus’s remarks, but which has not attracted attention and protests.
Back to Imus, though: both my brother and I grew up under Jim Crow. (And, if you haven’t lived it, it might be difficult to understand it.)
(Aside–Now, in our part of the world, Jim Crow was not nearly so bad as it was in the Deep South. Black persons were not expected, for example, to step off the sidewalk into the street when a white person was on the sidewalk, as they were in certain areas. But Jim Crow was a very real thing.)
My brother and I agreed on two things.
Thing one: Imus is a racist.
We are both Southern Boys. We know racism when we see it.
To paraphrase something I heard on the radio today, if you don’t have those words inside you, they won’t come out of you.
He may be a kind-hearted racist. So were many of the racists we grew up with.
But he’s one amongst many. Racism isn’t dead, though, God willing, it’s on the run. Another racist exposed. Big deal. There will be more.
And, even growing up in a segregated world, with segregated schools, all-white government, poll taxes, and all the other trappings of the institutionalized subjugation of black persons, we never heard in public in our rural Southern county the type of language with which Imus soiled the air waves. Which leads to
Thing two: No matter what words they have might used in private, “Jigaboo” and “nappy-headed” were not words even the worst racists we knew during our growing up would have said in public.
Addendum, 4/11/2007:
Two columns worth reading in today’s local rag:
Annette John-Hall on racism.
Karen Heller on the debasement of public discourse.
And in the Washington Post:
Michael Meyers (no, not that Mike Meyers) on freedom of speech.
April 10, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Hopefully, those girls will consider the source & ignore him. They deserve to celebrate, coming in as they did.
As far as Jim Crow, I’d never heard of him, until I saw you mention him. I wasn’t raised around racism, as my family was from the North. I had to look him up. Google was my friend that day.
I saw Howard Stern on tv once. That was enough. I was embarrassed.
When I was a kid, if someone called somebody a “nigger”, there would be a fight. I knew better. (Besides, if I got into a fight at school, it was reported to mother, who finished it. Nowadays, that would be child abuse.) As far as the other names you have here, I never heard them until I was an adult, & married. I had to ask about the ‘nappy-headed.
The whole thing is sad. Sad that people chose to be that way. He should be fired.
April 10, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Well, when you and I grew up, the parents were on the same side as the school. Sadly, that’s not the case today.
The biggest change my mother saw in her years of teaching was that, when she went back to teaching the 60’s, if little Johnny got into trouble, the parents would call the principle and ask what their little b*st**d did. By the 80’s, they called to ask what the school had done to their little darling.
______
As for the other . . .
Race is a complicated thing in the South. Even as the group was oppressed, personal relationships could be strong.
(The following is a generality that is certainly not directed at you personally–but there is truth in it, just look around you–that’s why we have “white flight.”)
We Southerners were fond of pointing out that white Southerners got along with black Southerners on a one-on-one basis just fine. It’s the group we feared.
In contrast, Yankees got along just fine with black people in the abstract, but wouldn’t live next door to a black family.
As far as your not being raised around racism, you were lucky.
In my growing up, my first playmate was Isaac, a little black kid. I remember running through the fields with him as my father harvested the crops.
We didn’t part ways until we went to separate schools.
I have always wondered what happened to him, for, once I went to the white school and he went to the black school, we never saw each other again.
Mrs. Bertha Collins, the black lady who lived on the corner of the farm (the house is now gone), baby-sat me while my brother was being born. She was as fiercely protective of me as my mother would have been.
When Mr. and Mrs. Collins scraped together enough money to buy a house of their own, my parents were among the first invited to see it.
Recently, when my girlfriend and I were visiting my mother, we dined at the Exmore Diner (where, by the way, we got for $9.00 crab cakes that would have cost $75.00 at the Hotel). We ended up talking to this black guy at the next stool. He knew and spoke warmly of my father.
My grandmother lived to be 99. During her last two years, she was in a nursing home, and, frankly, when you talked with her, there was nobody home.
Most of the staff of the nursing home was black, and my grandmother, being from the Red Clay Country of South Carolina, would forget herself and use the N word (she never used it in my hearing before she began to lose her faculties–she would say “Darkies” or “Colored”–you see, it wasn’t good form to remind them that they were “Negroes”).
My parents feared that the staff would take offense, but, if any of them did, they never showed it.
And, if they had, they would have had to contend with Rosie–a black woman who cleaned for my parents and got to be good friends with her “Miss Rachel.” Had Rosie found out that anyone had messed with her Miss Rachel, there would have been hell to pay.
___________
One of the things about my mother that I take pride in is that she was one of the few white teachers from the all-white high school who successfully made the transition to “full integration.” Most of the rest took retirement fairly quickly after “full integration.”
And, when my father died, Calvin Brickhouse, who had been the principal of the black high school and then became my mother’s principal when the black high school became the integrated junior high school, came to his funeral.
Not for my father. For my mother.
April 10, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Racism is complicated all over, and is only one facet of a much more general problem of human nature anyway.
But my favorite example of how complicated racism can be is the NPR report I heard a couple of years ago about a study that found that black servers in restaurants prefer not to serve black customers because blacks perceive blacks as poor tippers.
April 10, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Oh, and have you noticed lately that no matter how many Howard Sterns show up in the news, they all seem to be slimeballs?
April 11, 2007 at 6:18 pm
I have heard to same about about black cabdrivers.
And, about the Sterns, yeah.
April 13, 2007 at 5:03 am
This is kinda funny, that I hear about this from my father when I’m dating a girl who goes to Rutgers.
That is to say, I wouldn’t worry about the girls being upset. They know what they did, and from the number of arrests for public intoxication in the days following, the rest of the school does too.
As for the schools, well, teachers have changed right along with the students. I had predominately good (great, even) teachers in all my years at school, but there are a few (dad knows) that really were off their rocker. And more often than not, they were the ones who were calling home about me. I like to think my pops and my momma knew enough about what was going on to discern the real “Frank $#^#ed ups” from the “This teacher is cracked” calls.
And when it comes to the notion of waiters and tips… well, yeah, most of my co-workers hold the belief that black customers are poor tippers.
Not saying they’re right, just confirming that. Also not trying to give the impression they get served poorly, they don’t.
April 13, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Yeah, the NPR report was interesting. Another racial pattern they talked about was one I hadn’t noticed – that in restaurants which offer both sit-down and carry-out, blacks prefer carry-out at a consistently higher rate than whites.
April 15, 2007 at 6:23 am
[[ my grandmother, being from the Red Clay Country of South Carolina, would forget herself and use the N word ]]
Well which N word? Did she say niggers or negroes? My (black) host mother said she doesn’t mind when very old people say “negroes”.