Posted on 04/12/2007 4:07:07 PM PDT by Chi-townChief
It isn't the Don Imus "hos" insult that has a lot of black people calling for his head. It is his use of "nappy-headed."
After all, no one's saying that Bernard McGuirk, Imus' executive director, should be fired, even though it was McGuirk who started the on-air insult by referring to the Rutgers team as "hard-core hos."
Frankly, not even the most popular rap artist could get away with calling black women "nappy-headed hos."
Those are fighting words.
Despite the fact that sisters of the '60s thought they had stomped out the nappy phobia, another generation ran back to the straightening comb and relaxers --adding Korean weaves and synthetic extensions.
So you can best believe that before the Rutgers basketball players showed up for a news conference Tuesday, they groomed their braids and spent time with a flatiron.
Lance Williams, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University's Jacob H. Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies and an expert in youth culture, observed that some of the women in his class were more outraged by the "nappy-headed" part of Imus' comments than they were with the "ho."
"That was really what offended them," Williams said. "Why is it that nappy-headed offends us so much, when being nappy-headed or having a tight curl pattern is natural to us?" he said. "Why do we still perceive nappy as being something negative?"
I can walk around all day with my hair in twists or an Afro, and no one gives a second look. But don't let me put on my No. 33 curly, honey-colored wig -- the compliments flow.
There wasn't a nappy-head among the Rutgers players even after they sweated through a championship loss.
"You look at the sisters, and they were all straight [hair] and permed," Williams pointed out. "These were highly educated, successful student athletes with perms. Still, after all of that, they are called a nappy-headed ho. At some point, we have to please ourselves and not other people," he said.
"Can you imagine what they probably have to go through every day to keep their hair straight, the torture so they are not called a nappy-headed ho? It should be a wake-up call for us. We need to take the same energy of protest and use it to proclaim our natural beauty and talk about the beauty of black women."
To add insult to injury, Imus put down the black female players to entertain his predominantly white audience. That's why Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the NAACP should keep the pressure on CBS to fire Imus. That's the only way to get the message across that racial insults are out of bounds -- even for highly paid shock jocks.
But the Imus fallout also puts the spotlight on the black community's failure to control its own images.
"I'm willing to bet that Imus got that comment from somebody black," Williams said. "There is no way you can tell me a white man came up with that word on his own. I bet he got that from a black person and he repeated it, not understanding how inflammatory the slur was."
The Imus controversy also exposes the same dilemma that African Americans face when they complain about the use of the n-word. How are blacks to hold Imus accountable when black women are denigrated in their own communities?
"They are regularly calling women chicken heads, bustdowns and tricks and so forth. What [can] we say when people outside our community make the same comments?" Williams noted.
Still, Imus did black people a favor.
Often, it is hard to confront shortcomings in one's own family as aggressively as one addresses an outsider's faults. Black people can't deal with Imus without confronting the denigrating rap lyrics because the same corporate greed that spawned Imus fed the misogynist rap genre.
"If you look at MSNBC, it is ultimately responsible for the comments of Imus. It is the vehicle in which this information was delivered," Williams said. "This same kind of organization is responsible for the gangsta rap. At some point, we have to talk about how these images of dehumanization impact people, and how the general public perceives black people and how we perceive ourselves."
If you hate what Imus said about the Rutgers team, you should stop supporting music that denigrates black women.
Imus was the mimic. Rappers were the muse.
mailto:marym@suntimes.com
Ice Cube?”Ha!
“Give me the nappy and make me happy
After that she called me pappy”
Now Cindy is NAPPY!
She looks nice in her official Congressional ID tho.
I'm white and I've used the term for years! Only I've never called anyone a "nappy-haired ho" - I've always used the term "nappy-haired b$t@h" (only when deserved, of course)
Growing up in Detroit might have something to do with my colorful language.
Ludacris and Snoopy have predominantly white audiences too.
“We are the ones called racist, yet they are the ones with
United Negro College Fund NAACP...”
Could you imagine the outrage from establishing the following:
1) United Cracker College Fund
2) NAAWP - substitute “white” for “colored.
May as well just pull the pin from a grenade and hold it to you chest....
That's why Ice Cube didn't get in trouble with his comments.
Except that is bunk. 99% of "ebonics" is derived from lower class English - who worked in the fields next to black folks.
I have an old engraving from 1810 that shows an English peasant girl saying to an upper class Englishman on a horse, "I ain't been axed yet".
Most of the so-called "black English" came from the Cockney slums - not from West Africa.
If you are going to copy rap lyrics ya' gotta' get it exactly right.
Urban Dictionary has some interesting definitions, and of course, the google adds on the right are selling products and wigs to anyone with nappy hair to solve this socially unacceptable problem. I thought that was very interesting...
LOL
I miss the fun we had with this nut case.
You can “get Sicilian” and threaten to blown up the place next time!
Did he do it again or just that one song?
I am a huge Stevie fan. I don't recall the usage of the word in any of his other songs.
Interesting note:
The song is used in the recent animated feature film, "Happy Feet". The lyric is in there and is not blanked, beeped or otherwise displaced as the song plays when the main character starts to tap dance.
These are regional, not class, differences in pronunciation. Friend of mine from out in The Valley (Shenandoah Valley in Virginia) spent a tremendous amount of time with elocution lessons learning to say "ask" instead of "axe". He's kind of pink skinned, light freckles, orange-red hair, etc. His family goes back centuries in Virginia OWNING STUFF, not working in the fields at all!
We’ll just have to get that “fisked” eh?!
I wish the Rutgers women wore extremely large Afros, like the Harlem Globetrotters. That would be a treat to watch.
Also a good idea for an SNL sketch.
NEVER insult a woman’s hairdo.
Is that the book the grammar school teacher (I think she was white) got in trouble for using in class a few years ago? She tried to explain the book and the rationale, but (of course) got nowhere.
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