I am fed up with the ridiculous cult of victimology and race baiting that we saw in action this week. Someone (in this case, Don Imus) makes a largely innocuous remark about the Rutgers women's basketball team and five minutes later, his career is in ruins and he is a disgraced social outcast to be spit upon and reviled. The hypersensitivity to anything even remotely connected to the black race has reached a level of insanity.
If you think I'm exaggerating, a few years ago some local governmental official was fired after using the word "niggardly" in a speech. Some blacks thought he was using a racial slur. Ridiculous. It's time to call a halt to this race-baiting madness.
Imus appeared on Al Sharpton's radio show to apologize to Sharpton, who once instigated a racist riot in Crown Heights that left a Jewish student dead. He did the same thing to the Jewish owners of Freddy's Fashion Mart, leaving seven employees dead. But was Sharpton ready to extend his bloadsoaked hand to Imus and forgive? No. Sharpton obviously concluded that, with the racism in Crown Heights and Freddy's Fashion Mart, we've seen too much of this racial insensitivity to be forgiving. It's time to punish this kind of behavior. Sharpton then called for Imus to be fired from his job.
After Imus personally met with and apologized to the Rutgers team, they forgave him and some idiot said, "Now the healing can begin." What healing? Don't you have to be injured first before you "heal"? Oh wait. Imus called them "nappy-headed hos." If someone called me a nappy-headed ho, I'd be in therapy for years, wouldn't you?
I'm joking. If anyone called me a nappy-headed ho, I'd reply, "That's me baby. Come and get it while it's HOT!" But that's just me.
Nappy means "kinky", i.e. tightly curled (I looked it up). Well that's a fair representation of many black women, it's a natural thing, something called "genetics." (It was not particularly true of the pretty Rutgers girls, judging from their pictures - they've obviously discovered curling irons). "Ho" is short for whore, and not to be taken literally since "Ho" is black underclass street lingo for woman. Black rappers use the term frequently, as in "the bitches and the hos." Not to be confused with "Ho-Hos," which is a kind of pastry. No doubt some day some black women rappers will rap about their boyfriends as "the bastards and the pimps." Now that would be poetic justice. One can only hope.
Imus did not mean his remarks in a hateful way, nor did he intend for them to be demeaning. He was trying to be "edgy" and cool. However, context means nothing, intent means nothing, actual meaning (as in that "niggardly" thing) means nothing. The only thing that matters is that some black person, somehow, somewhere, took offense. Stop the world.
Perhaps Imus should have used different descriptors for the Rutgers girls, such as saying they are "melanin-enhanced epidermally." That is generally accurate of black people and not previously copyrighted by black rappers (any rappers out there are free to use this term if they like, but please give me credit). But I digress. The truth is, the race of the Rutgers team was not important and should not have been introduced unless it was relevant to the discussion. Not to be compared with the time a journalist for a national newspaper described Michelle Malkin as a "Filipina Firecracker." Now that was relevant to the discussion, because Michelle Malkin was writing about fireworks in the Philippines. Oh wait, no she wasn't.
However there are a couple of reasons why the liberal-left cannot allow an innocuous remark like "nappy-headed hos" to pass with merely a groan instead of near-revolution. First, it is important to underscore the constant victimhood of black people and how racism is everywhere. Yes it's true, even my Cocker Spaniel is racist. He barked at a black person once. Would he have barked had that person been white? I rest my case. And the only way to protect black people from this omnipresent bigotry is to vote for Democrats. They will then vote for billions for quotas, affirmative action and racial set-asides, whatever those are.
Second, any innocuous remark with even a hint of racial overtones is a golden opportunity for Democrats, liberals and college students to engage in some soul-satisfying posing, posturing and moral exhibitionism. One can tell how enlightened you are, and how sensitive and devoid of hatred, by the decibel level of your howls of indignation in light of such an outrage. Public indignation is a kind of cultural ritual among the left, or some kind of coming of age ceremony, like tribal circumcisions, debutante balls or maybe poo-throwing by Zoo Gorillas. Anthropologists are still studying it and a precise classification of this behavior is not yet available, but you get the idea.
Third, there is money to be made when rude comments or other otherwise meaningless phenomena can be transmogrified into racism. Jesse Jackson has been doing it for years with his "Rainbow Coalition." He goes around to big corporations and says, how come there are no XYZ dealerships owned by black people? You must be racists, but for ten gazillion dollars and a dealership for my sons, I will be your consultant on how to de-racify your establishment. Or, if you refuse, we will picket you night and day and call you "racist" and you will lose millions of dollars and suffer enormously bad publicity. Talk about playing the race card.
Some folks would call this "blackmail." Since that word has "black" in it and is used to describe a crime, it is quite clearly racist and can be summarily disregarded.
There's a book about Jesse Jackson's methods called "Shakedown." I don't want to get into that though. Shake-down must be like "gettin' down," and I'm not about to comment and get into trouble like Don Imus did. How Jesse Jackson boogies is just not relevant to the discussion. And if there is any black person anywhere who was offended by this post, I promise to go on Al Sharpton's radio show and commit ritual hari-kiri. I will even bring my own dagger and mat.
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