Why Imus Won’t Be Fired, Despite Racial Comments

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The reaction was swift and justifiably angry to shock jock Don Imus’s latest racist crack that the Rutgers women’s basketball players were nappy headed ‘hos’ (An even more curious characterization given Imus’s trademark floppy mop). Imus didn’t step over the line of racial incorrectness, he obliterated it. He straddled the repentance line with his kind of, sort of, apology in which he did not say “I” only “we.” The careful phrasing turned the “apology” into generic pabulum and was tantamount to personal absolution.

But even if Imus had made a sincere bare-the-chest heartfelt apology it wouldn’t amount to much.

That’s
the standard ploy that shock jocks, GOP big wigs, and assorted public
personalities employ when they get caught with their racial pants down.
On a few occasions the offenders have been reprimanded, suspended, and
even dumped. However that’s rare. Imus’s act has been syndicated on
dozens of stations for more than a decade by MSNBC. Though the network
gently distanced itself from Imus, it won’t likely show him the
broadcast door.


There are two
reasons why. And they tell much about why loudmouths such as Imus can
prattle off foul remarks about gays, blacks, Latinos Asians, Muslims,
and women and skip away with a caressing hand slap. The first reason is
that these guys ramp up ratings and that makes the station’s cash
registers jingle. Since January, Imus’s MSNBC show has drawn an average
of more than 350,000 viewers. Nielson Media Research says that’s a leap
of nearly 40 percent over the same period in 2006.


The other reason
it’s virtually impossible to permanently muzzle Imus and others that
talk race trash is the sphinx like silence of top politicians,
broadcast industry leaders, and corporate sponsors. GOP presidential
contender Mitt Romney and former Democratic presidential contender John
Kerry bantered with Imus on his show in recent weeks. Yet, Romney
hasn’t uttered a word condemning Imus’s bile.

Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain leaped over each
other to get a spot with Imus. And we haven’t a heard a peep from any
of them about his remarks.


The problem of
the silence or perfunctory belated criticism by higher ups to racial
taunts surfaced a few years ago following then Senate Majority leader
designate Trent Lott’s veiled tout of segregation. It touched off a
furor, and ultimately Lott stepped down from the post, but it took
nearly a week for Bush to make a stumbling, and weak sounding disavowal
of him. The silence from top politicians and industry leaders to public
racism was even more deafening a couple of years ago when former Reagan
Secretary of Education William Bennett made his weird taunt that
aborting black babies could reduce crime. Even as calls were made from
the usual circles almost always blacks and liberal Democrats for an
apology, or his firing from his syndicated national radio show, neither
Bush or any other top GOP leader said a mumbling word about Bennett.


There’s another
reason for their silence. The last two decades many Americans have
become much too comfortable using code language to bash and denigrate
blacks. In the 1970s, the vocabulary of covert racially loaded terms
included terms such as “law and order,” “crime in the streets,”
“permissive society,” “welfare cheats,” “subculture of violence,”
“subculture of poverty,” “culturally deprived” and “lack of family
values” seeped into the American lexicon about blacks. Some politicians
seeking to exploit white racial fears routinely tossed about these
terms.


In the 1980s new
terms such as “crime prone,” “war zone,” “gang infested,” “crack
plagued,” “drug turfs,” “drug zombies,” “violence scarred,” “ghetto
outcasts” and “ghetto poverty syndrome” were shoved into public
discourse. These were covert racial code terms for blacks and they
further reinforced the negative image of young black males as dope
dealers, drive by shooters, and educational cripples. And the image of
young black women as a dysfunctional collection of B’s and “hos,”
welfare queens, and baby makers. The Rutgers cage ladies attend a solid
academic institution, worked hard to get to the top of the basketball
heap, and have not posed discipline problems, yet the vile racial
typecasting still made them fair game for ridicule.


The Reverend Al
Sharpton, the National Association of Black Journalists and a handful
of sports columnists will continue to loudly demand that MSNBC and
radio stations give Imus the ax, and they should. But they won’t.
There’s simply too much money in racial trash talk, and too much
silence from the higher ups that send a tacit signal condoning it. That
silence is Imus’s ultimate trump card.

Columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.