Hypocrisy and timing first come to mind when absorbing the recent Imus flap.
Race comes in third place. Yet, race trumped all comers and brought down a questionable media icon this month due to his inopportune and injurious utterance about 10 young female basketball players. Eight of them were black. They failed the night before to win the NCAA women’s national championship.
Sure, the comment had clear racial and feminist overtones. So what else is new? This is Don Imus, the bad boy who is always in a bad mood. I periodically listen to his ill-humored diatribes against everything and everybody. Sometimes I grimace and turn to another station after my propriety and conscience pop. Imus always danced on the sharp edge of satire, humor, insult, bombast, and controversy. He even seemed angry at himself at times for something or the other.
So, why dump him now? Some say that the political correctness (PC) police finally managed to serve him a subpoena to appear before the court of condemnation. He offended two inviolate groups: women and blacks. He may have survived the former, but not the latter. Not today. Not any longer.
It also does not help when the public moral rage comes with the faces of Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who carry so much baggage that they always pay extra for airline tickets. I will not recite their offenses. They are legion and well-known. Besides, Imus is responsible for his own remarks regardless of who wishes to prosecute him.
If this were his first offense, his acknowledging guilt and groveling, which were considerable, may have sufficed. Mea culpas were heard from the hilltops. He came clean. He admitted guilt and appeared sincerely contrite. But this was Imus: broadcast icon, serial offender, and stereotypical curmudgeon.
My fear is that we shall we learn to shut up and lay low. That does not sound like an uplifting prescription for progress. Do not parody the popular black culture, unless you are black, and then all bets are off. You have a lifetime pass and need not worry about out-of-wedlock births, high-crime, low-employment, and absent fathers. If we dig our heads in the sand and accept the underachievement of the black race in America, everything will be fine.
Who can forgot about the reaction among the Black Community to Bill Cosby’s trenchant comments about its failure to set, demand, and achieve high standards? No one likes to be told of his or her failings. Thus, it was easy to dismiss an aging Cosby, and place the blame squarely on white racism, social and economic barriers, and any other systemic shortcoming that did not require blacks to reprove those who are bringing down the community.
Many would say that my view is one of a White person. I am White. I have a View. Thus, it is a White View. I will not argue. But if those labeling my position believe that most blacks are comfortable with current teen-pregnancy rates, absent fathers, etc., then I strenuously object. To believe otherwise would be to fling the greatest insult upon any group imaginable: desire (or destiny) to remain a perpetual underclass.
Intractable problems require enormous amounts of commitment, resources, and stamina. They also require all members of society to work together to achieve agreed upon societal norms of morality, health, productivity, and safety. Human communality transcends racial bounds. Differences between individuals within any race are always greater than those between races.
Decent people understand standards of decency. Imus repeatedly failed to follow them for years. And while I disagree with the circumstances surrounding an execution championed by similarly flawed putative leaders of the Black Community, I can only hope – though I do not expect – for an honest and frank discussion between white and blacks about perceptions and perspectives.
Unfortunately, I know that we will again masterfully sweep the whole matter under the rug until it erupts again. We are good at doing that.
Pray for progress through divine intervention. Experience tells us it will not come by human means.
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Fred W. Apelquist, III, M.Ed.
Approximately 675 words.
(c) April, 2007