That to me is racist.

Comment by Lisa — April 14, 2007 @ 12:52 am

AMEN TO THAT

I bet that most of you don’t even know that April is National Autism Month, or that the rate of Autism has risen from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 150 adults and children, mainly children, since 1986. Where’s all the media in this. Plus the fact that a lot of parents and physicians and even scientist agree that it is caused from mercury poisoning from mercury being used as a preservative in seeds the farmers plant and the mercury in vaccines, not to mention the other toxin’s in vaccines too. Why isn’t our country in a big uproar about this?? Why aren’t the big networks dropping the pharmaceutical advertisements because of what’s happening to this countries children in numbers that are greater than the amount of people getting cancer from smoking?

No, their not gonna drop the pharmaceuticals, look at all the financial ties there, good ole’ Don Imus can’t bring in that kind of revenue from his lies and slurs like the pharmaceuticals can.

Like my name says… Fed Up.

No one is coerced to listen or watch radio or TV. Every set has an On/Off switch and anyone can change the station - at will. Imus makes millions of dollars for himself and those who own the stations that carry his program because millions of people make the choice to listen or watch. Imus should not be fired (especially for doing something he’s been doing for decades) - he should be shunned, ignored. The audience should vote with its remote.

And why is no one outraged at the corporate hipocracy here? “Gambling! I’m shocked to find gambling here!” Who hasn’t known of Imus’ long history of racism and sexism as part of his program? The suits at MSNBC? Or CBS? Oh, sure.

I fear the joy some might feel at Imus losing his gig will be short lived, especially when they try to find political and social humor on radio or television… and there ain’t none, because everyone is too scared to say anything.

In one of my novels, I use the “n” word where I obviously thought it was called for. No editor questoned me. Will I be able to do that again? Should I scan the book I’m currently writing for offensive language? I would have had a different answer last week than I have today.

Firing or retaining Imus is not a free speech issue. It is only a question of whether the elites running the respective media companies decide that it is politically salvageable to have an open and consistent racist commanding national respect, attention, to rake them in handsome profits. It is simply a question of collateral damage for them.

As with most incidents that make the headlines, what grabs the headlines is the most superficial part of the story. The real story is the charged undercurrent of white anger and resentment that blacks can denigrate themselves, but a white might be fired for doing the same thing. Conveniently ignoring in this calculation is the outstanding fact that Ice Cube or any other clownish rapper is not running a national political talk show courting the country’s leading political and journalistic figures. Indeed, such a black host does not even exist, on radio or television.

As a white person, I am very concerned with all the forms that whites display racism, under a bewildering panoply of justifications and rationalizations. The commentator z flynn displays one of the most insidious in his 4/10 5:44 am post with the phrase “those who believe themselves historically repressed”. In other words, he is implying that blacks today have, as it were, a chip on their shoulder about something that happened long ago to people who looked like them. The further implication is that if blacks would just get over the past, we could all be liberated and equal in the present moment.

Racism is real and alive and present — in fact, rampant in the United States in 2007. Blacks and all people of color, growing up in the US, are touched by racism, are hurt by racism. No conversation about what whites and blacks should say or should do can be real until white Americans are ready to face the pain cause by racism, the real pain in the lives of people of color, and look at the ways that we white people have benefited and *still benefit* from the very system that causes others pain. Most white people simply don’t want to go there. It’s easier to pretend that people of color don’t have it any harder than anyone else. It’s easier even to add insult to injury, telling black folks that their present anger over present pain is really just resentment about something a long time ago.

The issue is not about free speech vs. censorship. The issue is really: who is willing to enter the real conversation, about the pain of racism, about white privilege, about the myriad assumptions that whites and folks of color must shed even to see one another? Apart from that real conversation, most comments about race relationship could scarcely avoid being simply more of the same, posture as they may behind tautological encomiums to the value of free speech in the abstract.