Monday, April 16: The ABW Almost Daily Commentary - Don Imus Will Not Return After These Commercial Messages

Don Imus Will Not Return (to MSNBC) After These Commercial Messages

So what! CBS cut Don Imus loose. It doesn't mean that we won't have to suffer his brand of "humor" or "journalism" ever again.  I have grown weary of hearing other media types describe his show as entertainment.  As if that justifies the bigotry.  These are the days in which any thing can be said and accepted by the masses as long as it wears the "humor" or rap music label.  The list is long of like-minded organizations that exist in the mainstream and on the fringe, major networks included, who will be more than willing to find a place for Don Imus and his very special brand of racism, sexism and misanthropy.  Don Imus's fall to earth will be gentle, trust me!  He received millions each year for his particular brand of "humor."  His firing will not pose a hardship.  Somewhere an executive is furiously trying to contact Imus's agent to sign him to a new big fat contract.

After a week of television and radio networks and civil rights groups posturing, the fallout from this mess is still sending ripples across the public opinion pond.  But I hope there isn't anyone who believes that first GE, the parent company of NBC and MSNBC, and then CBS looked into their individual and collective psyches, moved a few cobwebs out of the way, found a door with a rusted lock, opened it and discovered the right thing to do just lying about amongst the clutter and litter.  Noooo!  What CBS and MSNBC found was that advertisers rule.  And in the mist of its own self destructive bender for the last six months GE/NBC didn't want to add empty advertising coffers to its long list of problems. Don Imus had been allowed to run amok and unchecked for over thirty years. The decision made by Steve Capus and Jeff Zucker of NBC and Les Moonves at CBS was a financial one, not one intended to stand up to the cultural cesspool that some media outlets have been for years or to exhibit a whit of social responsibility.

While some folks think that the firing took too long coming, the delay in doing the right thing gave civil rights organizations and anyone else who thought they could impact the situation an opportunity to rally their forces, get press releases written, and get lots of face time doing what seems to be the ever increasing list of morning news shows.  So I for one am very happy that CBS and MSNBC paused and looked over their shoulders to see if anyone was paying attention before firing Mr. Imus. 

I remember when I first heard the news.  I had just returned from a trip to North Carolina that I thought would be the topic of my next commentary.  Trying to catch up after being unplugged for a few days, I was greeted by the Don Imus story leading the evening news.

I've waited to see how the media would handle one of their own and I especially wanted to see how civil rights groups would proceed.  I wanted to pick up the phone right then at 7:30 p.m. and ask Rev. Jackson and the Urban League and the NAACP what are "we" going to do.  I wanted to see who would come to the defense of Black women. I didn't want to wear my journalist's objectivity.  This was personal on many levels. 

I am an athlete; I have a 15 year old daughter who is a strong, capable and still-developing athlete.  I'm an African American woman who on most days doesn't have a hair issue, but have friends who do. Finally, I have worked in broadcasting throughout my career, most recently at NBC News' Washington Bureau. I know the mentality of that field of work all too well.

So there I sat on my sofa, mouth agape, outrage and anger building in me so quickly and so hot that my breathing quickened and nervous sweat stained the armpits of my t-shirt.  I thought about the time when I was 8 years old, playing kickball in the back of my grandmothers' house with my cousins and the last little white boy in the neighborhood whose family hadn't fled to the suburbs. He was angry that his face had, accidentally, been used to stop one of my ferocious kicks.  He called me a nigger.  I snapped. Very quietly I went to get a knife from my grandmother's kitchen.  He didn't know that I was fresh from Boston, that I had lived with Ella Collins, Malcolm X's half sister, that I had the benefit of young impressionable ears which had listened to Malcolm X many times over and that my heart still ached for him.  I was not going to tolerate being called a nigger by this white devil.  Fortunately, my cousin stopped me before I eviscerated that boy.  But, that's the ancient-I-don't-want-to-feel-this-crap-ever-again anger that Don Imus stirred up in me on April 4, 2007.

I thought of all the advancements that Title IX had bestowed on female athletes.  While the law itself has been the source of much debate and litigation, what cannot be refuted is that the number of female athletes skyrocketed since its enactment.  While not specifically designed to benefit athletes, that has been the most obvious result.  The Tennessee and Rutgers women's basketball teams are the continuation of women's commitment to themselves and their futures.  The players are at the apex of their physicality, reveling in their journey to the NCAA Basketball Final. They are walking in the footsteps of so many women who have come before and after Title IX's 1972 enactment and excelled beyond belief. To have their efforts, their passion, their legacy, soiled and sullied by a networked-sanctioned bigot is outrageous.

Just a reminder of some who came after 1972: 

1980 - Mary Decker becomes the first woman to run a mile in under 4 and a half minutes in Philadelphia on Jan. 25.

1982 - The first NCAA college basketball championship for women is held. Louisiana Tech defeated Cheyney State 76-62.

1984 - Georgeann Wells-Blackwell, a 6'7" center for West Virginia, is the first woman to dunk a basketball in a collegiate game against Charleston on Dec. 21.

1986 - Debi Thomas becomes the first black woman to win the US figure skating singles championship.

1987 - Jackie Joyner-Kersee becomes the first woman athlete to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated (aside from the swimsuit edition)

1988 - Picabo Street, age 16, wins the national junior downhill and Super G skiing titles.

1989 - By the end of the decade, the number of women playing tennis had risen from 4 to 11 million.

1991 - The US Women's Soccer team wins the first-ever women's world championship, beating Norway.

1997 - The NBA hires two female referees, Dee Kantner and Violet Palmer, the first to work regular-season games in a major men's pro sports league.

The list of women is long and illustrious who have kicked down doors, pushed the limits of their mental and physical endurance, tested their mettle and left a trail for other girls and women to follow, like my daughter.  Last year my daughter decided she wanted to wrestle.  My daughter's school does not have a girls wrestling team.  So she competed, the only girl, on the boy's team.  Damn, did she get strong!  She gained confidence in her own body's ability and started to understand the importance of a "don't mess with mess with me" persona that will prove invaluable later in life.

Don Imus did not just strike at female athletes, he struck a blow at Black women's image of themselves and how the world sees all of us.  I thought about these talented African American athletes that to him were not just "hos," they were "nappy headed."  And as the interminable wait in any hairdresser's shop on a Saturday can attest, Black women and their hair have issues.  If there is any one word that stabs personally and emotionally and still ties us to our slave history, it is "nappy headed."  Having "good hair" went hand in hand with being fair skinned and being more acceptable to the black and white world.  The world where the possibility of attaining a better life through good hair and lighter skin is part and parcel of the collective yoke and amnesia that we as women still want to bear and wallow in along with the jar of Nadinola bleaching cream. Recently, I worked with a woman at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  Ms. J. very clearly had a weave.  But not just a track or two.  Can you say Barbaro.  This was a mane down her back that would make Barbie jealous. And when it went bad it also went ugly--tracks and thread visible at five hundred paces.  The only thing it wasn't was blonde and I was rather surprised by that.  So much effort and money is spent in the pursuit of a perceived ideal that is artificial at best and denigrating and self defeating at its worst.  How could we not be defensive about a duplicitous psychology in which we have been complicit for several hundred years?

Jason Whitlock, a columnist from Kansas City, suggested recently on the Today Show that the women of Rutgers should not feel offended by Imus's remarks.  Perhaps if it had been a blow that landed in the middle of his overly ample male form, we would see what issues bubble up from his psyche.

India Arie sings "I Am Not My Hair." I guess it's just a song with a nice beat that's easy to dance to because by the looks of the ever increasing numbers of Black women who have succumbed to the weave we're still not comfortable with our own hair or in our own skin.

As news organizations pay lip service manuvering this ordeal to its quiet and nothing's-really-changed ending, I thought about my time at NBC News' Washington Bureau.  The number of minority correspondents, producers, writers and even desk assistants was miniscule.  I often, quietly--yes, just to myself--questioned the vision and the corporate culture of an organization that could not see that the world was changing.  The world is becoming more brown--and that perspective needed to be represented. NBC seemed to be ignoring all of the signposts that would have successfully and gracefully pulled it into the new millennium.   It was always amazing to me how many of my daily conversations with other minorities at the bureau centered on race.  Minority correspondents would pitch stories that were DOA or they were left with stories that had no legs. Joe Johns, Suzanne Malveaux and Gwen Ifill (whose appearance on Meet the Press this morning made me proud) are talented correspondents who have moved on quickly from NBC News and in most instances moved on to enjoy professional success at CNN and public television and in ways that NBC simply did not have the vision to allow. And just to give credit where it's due, it was the one African American correspondent at the bureau who believed in  me and encouraged my efforts to work in radio.  Recently when I was on XM, I called on him for an interview--he didn't hesitate.

Minority producers were openly undermined by prima donna correspondents who dictated, quite specifically, that they would not work with the few minority producers on staff at the bureau. Minority producers are a rarity at the bureau these days.  If correspondents are the face and voice of a news piece, producers are the heart and soul.  They know how and where to get information and how to turn it into a well-rounded story.  And, yes, it is ok and right that the perspective, while always objective, come from a person of color. There were at most five minority producers in the bureau several years ago.  Checking with friends and colleagues in the last several days and who have survived the cutbacks, that number has dwindled due to NBC's latest round of buyouts, cutbacks and layoffs.  In training are desk assistants, the next generation of broadcasters, mostly blonde, blue-eyed women who learn the ropes in the same subtle and unbelievably racially charged atmosphere.  Their reality continues to be that the world looks like them and that world is monochromatic.

Recently, on Meet the Press, Tim Russert presented separate graphics of the Democrats and the Republicans who have appeared on Imus's show.  What would have been more honest would have been an accounting of the number of times he and other NBC News correspondents had appeared on Imus's show.  Don Imus was on NBC's payroll, spewing garbage and until the last week it didn't seem to bother anyone at the network enough to stay away from the garbage heap. 

Ask the vice president, bureau chief and moderator of Meet the Press, about the minority producers, correspondents or researchers he has working on his show or The Chris Matthews Show, The Today Show or NBC Nightly News.

Meet the Press has been on the air for 60 years. Its first year on the air, 1947, was the same year Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball.  Soon, the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame will celebrate the Meet the Press achievement with an award ceremony.  But what has changed for minorities in broadcasting in those same 60 years?  Hopefully, the civil rights groups that garnered so much face time on the news in the last week will continue their efforts while the networks plead mea maxima culpa.  Let's see what happens after the cameras are turned off and the phones stop ringing.  Let's see who will step up to insure that television starts to look more like the real world.  How long can the hypocrisy of using Black culture to sell cars, liquor, cell phones or athletic shoes continue?

So goodbye and farewell, Don Imus.  There are lots more just like you out there on the airwaves spreading their feathers and strutting proudly thinking that they are safe for another day.  And sadly, they probably are.

See ya next time,
Sunny!