Death, Black Hoes, and White Devils
by Dedrick Muhammad
"Corporate America's pride in ending a news show after decades of racist rhetoric and hundreds of millions of dollars of profit is our current reality."
39 years to the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated Don Imus refers to Rutgers predominately Black womens basketball team as "nappy headed hoes." A week later MSNBC states they will no longer broadcast Don Imus radio show. That same day the final three Duke lacrosse players were cleared of all criminal charges for assaulting a young woman who was dancing for a Duke lacrosse party.
It was a very interesting week in the racial politics of America.
MSNBC bent over backwards in announcing that it was getting rid of Don Imus due to their outrage of his racist comments. The news anchors of MSNBC tried to make itclear that it was not falling to the pressure of African-Americans and CivilRights leaders like Rev. Jackson andRev. Sharpton but it was their good white conscience which
brought about this action The fact that it took MSNBC a week for their good
white conscience to move them to fire Don Imus and that the firing took place
only after the withdrawal of Proctor and Gamble, General Motors, Staples and
other major advertisers from the Don Imus show I suppose was a coincidence.
Barack "Beyond Race" Obama (sounds better then Barack Hussein Obama) states that he won't tell Don Imus's employers what to do but that he would have fired him and that the important thing to understand is that this issue goes "beyond race," as he hopes his campaign will go beyond white America's racism. The leading Republican candidate, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, was satisfied with Don Imus' apology and accepts Imus' claim that he is not a racist. This reminds me and am sure many other Black New Yorkers how Giuliani accepted the words of his police officers that they needed to be able to shoot at unarmed Black men up to 41 times and not be accused of any racial prejudice .
"The news anchors of MSNBC tried to make it clear that it was not falling to the pressure of African-Americans and Civil Rights leaders like Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton."
It was interesting how Don Imus, his friends, and even some random Black people were so adamant that Don Imus was not a racist man since he has done some charity work that, if we can believe this, even assisted Black people. The fact that his all white show has a long history of racist remarks and that this 67 year old thought it was appropriate to call a team of primarily Black women "nappy headed hoes" on a nationally syndicated and televised morning news show was supposed to be an aberration of clearly a racially sensitive man.
Finally there was what the Associate Press described as almost a pep rally for the last three "completely innocent" Duke white Blue Devil lacrosse players. There are no criminal charges against these young men and now I think we are all supposed to feel sorry for these young men, some of whom called two young African American women niggers, and one who wrote about how he wanted to kill "the bitches... then cutting off their skin while ejaculating in [his] Duke-issue spandex." As one can tell my empathy for these young men is not as strong as those at the pep rally.
So what do all of these events say about where we are with race relations? Dr. King's dream of racial equality and little black boys holding hands with little white girls is still a dream but white senior citizen broadcasters calling Black women derogatory names, young rich white college students hiring poor black women to strip and calling them bitches, and corporate America's pride in ending a news show after decades of racist rhetoric and hundreds of millions of dollars of profit is our current reality. We shall overcome?
Read against the terrible incineration of Rafah today, this poem of resistance and refusal, by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, is as powerful now as it was fifty years ago.
I spoke to William Sakawa, a producer and reporter with the Nairobi-based media outlet African Stream, about Kenyan President William Ruto’s agreement to invade Haiti for the US.
"Hearing! Hearing! Hearing!" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
This week’s featured authors are Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. Their book is The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition.
Despite the undeserved loyalty of Black people to the Democratic Party, lawmakers continue to push policy that ignores concerns about climate change and environmental damage in their communities.
