Oprah Winfrey hosted a panel of African-Americans on her show to discuss what's next after the firing of radio personality Don Imus over a racial slur he made against the Rutgers women's basketball team.
(Harpo Productions)
Oprah Winfrey opened her show today by asking a panel of African-Americans what should happen next after the Don Imus firing. Her guests included the Rev. Al Sharpton, appearing via satellite from New York, journalists, a psychologist and a young women from Spellman College in Atlanta, where students had led their own protest against offensive language in rap music.
The town hall meeting, as Oprah billed it, put much of the blame for Imus' calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" on the demeaning imagery of women in hip-hop and rap music.
Stanley Crouch, columnist for the New York Daily News, said, "This kind of dehumanizing content has been normalized. ... If you have black people calling people niggers, bitches and hos for 20 years, you shouldn't be surprised that some white guy is gonna come up and say, 'Hey, I wanna say that, too.'"
But the withering criticism was not confined to the artists who produce that music. Bruce Gordon, a member of the CBS board of directors, who urged the company to fire Imus, focused on those who buy it. "We are allowing our kids to consume it. If we're so angry with the producers, why do we allow it in our households?"
Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock saw hypocrisy among African-Americans "who hold Don Imus to a higher standard than we want to hold ourselves to. That is unacceptable."
An intriguing perspective came from the young women at Spellman who appeared via satellite. Some had organized a protest against the rapper Nelly's invitation from the school in 2004 for a charity event.
These women found his video "Tip Drill" demeaning, and their complaints prompted him to cancel. Asked for their reaction to the fact that similar issues again surfaced in the Imus controversy, one called it "disillusioning. We've been speaking out about this for so long, and it seems like our concerns have just been falling on deaf ears."
Another expressed "the fear that we will only address this issue for about a month or so."
