Posted by
Tzimisce on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 8:12:09 PM
Last week Don Imus made an off handed comment about the Rutgers basketball team in the Championship game. He laughingly referred to them as "nappy headed hos".
Of course this sent the civil rights crowd in to overdrive. "Look, America is still a racist nation" they screamed. Reverend Al Sharpton went so far as to call for the FCC to fire Imus. (Yeah, I'm scratching my head over that one too.)
What's amazing to me is that this shows how nonracist we are as a society. So far, Imus is losing advertisers left and right - including companies like American Express. Just a little while ago MSNBC stated their dropping the Imus simulcast. If this was a racist society, I would expect everyone to be standing with Imus' comment. But the best defense anyone can muster is approaching this as a free speech issue. No one is actually defending the term "nappy headed hos" (including myself).
But while this Imus stuff is going on there is another racial case going on largely ignored because of the races involved. Today North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dismissed all charges against three Duke Lacrosse players. At a press conference he proclaimed them "innocent" of all charges. This after thirteen grueling months of harrassment along racial lines. When the "victim" Crystal Gail Mangum made her accusation she couldn't identify the ones who did it - only saying it was done by white men...even though she couldn't pick them out of a police line up, even though no DNA from any of the men was found on her, even though her co-dancer disputed her story, even though she changed her story several times. Despite all of this, the case dragged on and as late as a couple of months ago looked like it was actually going to go to court.
I remember when the case first broke, civil rights leaders claimed that white men found black women irresistable, it was a trait left over from the days of slavery (as if that was good evidence.) A group of 88 Duke professors issued a statement supporting the "victim" saying in part:
"Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment's extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday."
-www.concerneddukefaculty.org
Can't help but wonder what race they're referring too. I always thought that "lynch mob" was a description of whites hanging a black, but at Duke it appears that it's the other way around.
So while the entire nation is focused on the racism of what Imus *said* we should be racism of what is being *done* at major universities. Odds are that Imus will eventually recover and carry on. Although this incident will always hang over him he's big enough to take the hit. Meanwhile the students accused at Duke have sustained serious damage that could cripple their chances in the future. But that's okay, crippling the chances of white people is exactly what drives affirmative action laws - where assumptions based on race mean everything.