When I first heard about the comments made by Don Imus on his syndicated broadcasts about the Rutgers womens basketball team, my first reaction was, so what? The language he used was language you might overhear in the bar at a TGI Fridays somewhere in the suburbs where ESPN is on the plasma screen. It wasn't the high-test racism and sexism you'd expect from extemists; it was something casual, something commonplace.
But that's looking at the realities of daily life, where cultural standards are just plain lower. Public figures are treated differently. Imus' comments raised a number of debates about what is acceptable speech, even acceptable thinking. As with many talk radio personalities who've grown rich on their empires, he channels the collective unconscious of the angry, non-urban white man, and the unwritten superiority with which this class of individual views the world. This jocular sort of chiding is a tool for looking down one's nose at others.
But this behavior is not the exclusive province of the white male radio host; it can be witnessed in any number of settings, and is committed by all sorts of people. Consider not only when radio hosts don't describe a group of women as college kids who play ball, making it to the Final Four, but rather as nappy-headed ho's, but also when people refer to poor whites with funny accents and habits as "white trash", or when we all make acceptions to the hip hop artist who makes millions off of far more vulgar riffs on Imus' language just because he's a young black guy.
This is an issue of standards and judgments that we all place on one another. It only becomes a matter of public concern when someone representing the traditional powerholders in America, also known as the white male, hits the right note. But let's be honest--we all do it. For Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to call for this man's head without even a moment of self-reflection is as damaging in its impacts on their cultural constituents as the now-infamous words themselves.
We must all admit to our casual and implicit judgments on one another. Young black men are somehow exempt from shameful language and behavior since it seems a given. Old white men will always be thrown to the mob over almost any moral indiscretion, since we're all waiting to get a piece of them. But speech that is damaging to black women (or anyone else) should never be considered acceptable, legal, yes, but not acceptable.
Speech out of one mouth or another is morally equivalent in its impacts on others, making this a moral question for us all. Neither Imus nor some unnamed hop hop artist should be treated any differently for speaking in those terms. Fire Don Imus or not, but disparities in race, class and gender won't change until our standards become universal and we truly judge equally. We must make no acceptions.
