Imus

When I was a teenager in the early 70s, I listed to Imus In The Morning every day. I thought he was brilliantly funny, and I couldn’t wait to hear one of Imus’s characters, the Right Reverend Dr. Billy Sol Hargis, proclaim “Put your hands on the radio!” I went out and bought one of Imus’s books, a satire starring Dr. Hargis. Was Imus bigoted and racist back then? I don’t think so, but I honestly can’t remember.

As an adult, and as a women’s basketball fan, I watched the Rutgers women’s basketball team four or five times this year. I saw them defeat their arch-rival Connecticut, and I watched in disbelief as Rutgers knocked off Duke in the NCAA Regional Finals this year. I admire their coach, C. Vivian Stringer, and by the end of the season, I could name and recognize the five starters on Rutgers.

Not once did I think of the Rutgers women, to use Imus’s recent words, as “nappy headed hos”. Not once did I think of them, as Imus’s called them, “rough girls”. And not once did I think of them as “jigaboos”, like one of Imus’s guests called them.

You see, I don’t think that way. But apparently Imus and his guests and enablers do think that way. Athenae, over at First Draft, listens to Imus’s explanation and sums it up nicely. “It's an imposition, to not be a racist asshole.” And: “People like this really do feel put-upon that they can’t give in to their basest instincts. They really feel like they’ve been somehow reduced because they’re not allowed to reduce others.”

Imus has been suspended for two weeks. That would be fine if this was the first such incident of bigoted racial slurs. But no, there have been a long string of such comments from Imus.

Imus and others have been bigoted and racist for a long time, and have become more and more aggressive about using insensitive wording, code-words for racial intolerance, and outright slurs. It’s time for this to stop. It’s time for Imus to be fired. And its time for anyone who engages in this type of commentary to be fired and permanently shunned.