Old Whitey's got something to say.

PREFACE:

Thirty five years on into my life and I'm still working out how I feel about freedom of speech.

I used to be an ardent defender, someone would would willingly allow all manner of offensive chatter on the grounds that censorship bestows undeserved power. My honest belief was that people such as Ernst Zundel should be allowed to spew their filth, the better to brand themselves as fools.
As I got older, though, my faith in my fellow man became increasingly tenuous as I began to realize just how many people in any given audience were fools themselves and would believe and repeat anything they heard. Then I saw a movie called The Aristocrats...an utterly depraved journey through filth beyond anything I'd ever imagined...which disillusioned me further. As I said then, some things shouldn't be said. Hell, some things shouldn't be thought.

But I've regained some of my former conviction over the past week or two.

Having lived a sheltered life, I can't say I'm entirely interested in the antics of so-called "shock jocks" like Howard Stern....or Don Imus. To be honest, I had no idea who the latter was until I heard his commentary excerpted on my own local radio station. As the now-infamous words spilled out, my jaw spilled open. My wife and I regarded each other, both thinking well, that guy can kiss his job goodbye.
If you've been off the planet for the last couple of weeks, Imus referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos".
He apologized, of course. Profusely, repeatedly, and with what seemed (at least to me) like sincere remorse, at least until it became clear his apologies were falling on deaf ears. Little good it did him. I learned long ago that there are certain things considered so evil, so utterly beyond redemption, that no amount of apology can ever mitigate them.
Such things vary from time and time, place to place and context to context. You don't have to go far to hear things much worse than "nappy-headed hos" directed at women: just turn on some so-called "urban" music and brace yourself. The women so described don't seem to mind overmuch (indeed, they almost seem to take pride in it!) while the men who spew such filth are revered by their millions of fans, many of them too young to really understand what they're hearing.
As an aside, most words considered rude, obscene, or profane nowadays weren't always such. The Toronto Star ran an interesting article yesterday detailing a startling array of consumer goods whose colours were described as "nigger brown", "nigger black", or "nigger pink". Apparently you can still see this in places like Hong Kong.
Or consider an even nastier word than "nigger". Ask any woman what she considers to be the most vulgar word in the English language and there's a better-than-even chance she'll cite a word she hesitates to even say aloud: "the c-word", she'll say instead. Everyone knows the c-word, right? But nobody says it, ever. Nobody decent, at any rate. Suppose I told you that word was once the common, accepted term for female genitalia, no more offensive than "vagina" is now. Would you believe me? Doesn't matter: it's the truth. Even then, I'm sure it was offensive to call the entire woman by the name for her genitals--but have you noticed how many men shrug off being called "dicks" these days?
Not that I'm excusing Don Imus, precisely, because what he really ought to have known better. In the United States of America, the First Amendment doesn't mean what it used to...and most people understand and accept that. Archie Bunker would never fly on network TV today, even as shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood don't just push envelopes, but rip them open and spill their contents.

"You can't call them 'nappy-headed hos'", goes the argument, "that's racist!"
Is it? Is it really?
Look up "nappy-headed" on Wikipedia and you're redirected to "natural hair"...the standard hairstyling of many 'people of African descent' the world over. Also called "woolly", "hard", and "kinky". These are pure adjectives, descriptors, with no emotional attachment implied.
A couple of points here. One: there has simply got to be some simpler term for 'people of African descent'...preferably one word...but every such thing I've ever heard is considered racist by some group somewhere for some reason. At one point, "Black" was the preferred term. At another, "Negro" was correct. Now there's no single word to safely denote the racial group we're discussing here.
A second thing I find of interest: it seems as though most of the outrage centered around "nappy-headed" when, to my way of thinking at least, "hos" is at least as offensive. And yet, as noted above, "hos" is common as bling in rap music.
Why is it, exactly, that rappers--who are predominantly "melatonin-enhanced" (yes, I've actually seen that monstrosity in print!)--are allowed to denigrate and degrade women at every opportunity through their lives lived and their music, while one old honky gets fired for one off-the-cuff remark? I grant you it wasn't exactly a nice thing to say, but is that our bounden duty now? To protect everyone from every "not nice" thing that might be said about them? One wonders how the Rutgers ladies' basketball team managed to get the age they are now without suffering multiple nervous breakdowns.

Look, I don't like racism any more than the next guy. I consider us all part of a single race called Human, and divisions based on silly things like skin colour do little to augment our humanity. Perhaps Imus did go too far. But the response went so much further.

"