Why Don Imus was Wrong - and Right

The Double Standard in Free Speech

If you haven't heard the ruckus over Imus' remarks about the Rutgers Women's basketball team, you must have been in a coma recently. I used to listen to Imus in the Morning back in the early 1970s when commuting to work in New Jersey. He was funny, brash, and pushed the censor envelope every time he went on the air.

He also was fired from an L.A. radio station for similar racial remarks before being picked up by a NY station. His warning was, however, that he would be canned if he went over the censorship line.

I think there are two uproars over his latest gaff: one camp is the Black community itself (and guilty White liberals), and the other is the one that I'm in, called the "tired of the double standard" camp.

Blacks have their own race-baiting champions, namely Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson. They always come out of the woodwork if a White person makes a comment, remark, joke, whatever, that has any racial overtones. Indeed, these usual suspects have made it a cottage industry and they are the CEOs of phony racial injustices. They are so predictable as to be laughable. If I was a Black person, I would be embarrassed to have these chuckle heads "represent" me.

My contention is that you can't have it both ways, yet they persist in their one-sided attacks -- they are the poster boys of the double-standard. And that's what irritates and outrages me to no end.

This is the year 2007, people. Ethnic and racial jokes are pervasive across the new media that didn't exist before the 1970s. We now have the internet, cable TV, and satellite radio as venues for every manner of speech. Does that make it right? No, absolutely not.

Imus referred to the women (of whom there were a couple of White girls on the team) as "nappy-haired hos". I also read the context of that comment, when his sidekick McGuirk mentioned that they had tattoos and were rough girls. That led up to Imus' comment. If you read the transcript, or heard it, it was a virtual Black-speak reference to the women, harsh as it was.