Racial double standards to the nth degree

It’s really not possible for a normal human mind to keep track of the racial double standards and jaw-dropping lies about race that continually twist our society out of shape, because it’s not possible for a normal mind to keep track of pure irrationality. The media have been in an uproar for days about radio vulgarian Don Imus’s reference to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s.” Yesterday he was fired by his employer, CBS Radio. But, as Phil Mushkin points out in today’s New York Post, where did Imus get a phrase like “nappy-headed ho’s”? He got it from the black hip-hop and rap performers who constantly refer to women as “ho’s” and much worse, who have recording contracts with big media companies like CBS, who perform at politically correct universities like Rutgers, and who are completely mainstreamed in today’s culture. To fire Imus for saying “ho’s” in today’s sewer-like environment is like firing someone for saying “How are ya?”

The basketball players have claimed that they have been scarred for life by the terrible thing Imus said about them. This is arrant nonsense that no one could get away with in a society not deranged by the need to kow-tow to black “victims,” a society in which it is a career-ending offense for a white to emit, on one occasion, a single word that streams unceasingly from the mouths of black performers.

Imus’s firing is thus a pure example of the anti-white double-standard that governs our world.

Instead of spending the last several days apologizing with ever greater fervor for his offense, Imus should have declared that by the standards of today’s culture—indeed by the standards of his own very remunerative radio program on which the people now condemning him have regularly appeared as guests, knowing full well what kind of program it was—there was nothing out of the ordinary about what he said. If he had done that, if he had insisted on a single standard for everyone, he might still have been fired, but at least he would have stood for something other than craven submission to anti-whiteness.

Unfortunately, Imus in his contemptible cravenness is no different from white America as a whole. From the moment, forty years ago, when whites began to go along with the pro-black, anti-white double standard, they sank themselves and America. It didn’t have to be this way. If, the very first time blacks were given easier admissions or hiring criteria than whites, whites had said NO; if, the very first time white society was accused of racism because black intellectual and economic performance was far behind that of whites, whites had said NO; if, the very first time blacks formed blacks-only policemen’s organizations and blacks-only journalists’ organizations, something out of the question for whites, whites had said NO; if, the first time blacks in a racially mixed public meeting addressed each other in the racially exclusive term “brother,” whites had said NO; if, the first time that blackness began to be treated as a sacred object, while whites could never refer to whiteness in positive terms, whites had said NO; if whites, remaining true to their supposed individual rights credo, had forcefully resisted every attempt to install a pro-black, anti-white double standard, we would now be living in a different country. In that country, blacks could have advanced only by adhering to the same standards to which whites themselves must adhere. But to maintain such a single standard, the white majority would have had to exercise unbending will and perseverance against every attempt by blacks and white liberals to create special standards for blacks. In short, in order to maintain America as a single-standard, individual-rights society, the white majority would have had to act as the majority. The “true,” “individual rights” liberalism to which so many white liberals and neocons today claim to look backward in longing was in reality dependent on a particular culture with particular standards; and only a confident and dominant white majority, devoted to a single standard for everyone and enforcing it on everyone, could have kept such a culture in existence.

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Stephen F. writes:

Imus’s three-word career ending utterance has the standard feature of a gaffe in a liberal society: alluding to an unmentionable truth. You have some tall, masculine, weight-lifting, mostly black women with tattoos playing basketball. A normal response to seeing this would be “man, those are some scary-looking women!” That’s really all he said, in a joking way, using worse language. It was an unkind remark, not a crime, certainly not a crime against blacks or women as a whole. I find this to be a more significant feature of the incident than the fact that the terms he used came from the black community, although that’s what many conservatives have dwelt on.

LA writes:

Mark Steyn, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt about Don Imus, again shows his incapacity to make and stick to a coherent point. First he takes an argument similar to my own, that this the attack on Imus is an unaccptable double standard; then under pressure from Hewitt he backs off that position, and ends by saying that the firing of Imus is no big deal.

I remain amazed at the unworthiness—the sheer intellectual tackiness—of the people held up today as the leading lights of the “conservative” movement.

Virginia A. writes:

And don’t forget that Al Sharpton called the Central Park jogger a ho, and suggested that maybe her boyfriend was the one that beat her up. Sharpton never apologized.

A reader writes:

Excellent commentary Mr. Auster. I have only two things too add. A little while ago a young lady I know said she would like to get her hands on the I-pods of the Rutger’s women basketball team too see just what music they really do listen too. She added how interesting it would be to slip into some sort of party on the Rutgers campus, especially if it was interracial or black, to see what they were dancing to. I predict if any reporter did that this story could be blown to hell by a super large dose of hypocrisy.

One more item comes to mind in this matter. Bryan Gumball’s remarks at the last winter Olympics games.

It was along the lines of these whites, who by the way no doubt had struggled their whole lives to get there, were not up to the par of the truly great athletics that the blacks are.

Now is that mean spirited, or what?

Charles T. writes:

I have been listening to the comments on talk radio this week about this very subject. The comments by several black men have been most interesting.

I do not remember the exact day—either this week or last—a black man told O’Reilly that whites were resposible for the racial mess we are in because white people in certain positions would not stand up against the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world. Ironic. A black man telling whites they should tell Jackson and Sharpton to shove it.

Just yesterday, there were two black men who had a discussion with the host sitting in for O’Reilly.

The first man who called in was criticizing Sharpton. The host asked if Sharpton was right to critize Imus. The caller hesitated, said yes, but immediately said that Sharpton had done some hypocritical things as well. He also said that Jackson and Sharpton do not speak for him.

The second caller said that the reason that Jackson and Sharpton conitnued to pile on Imus was because that in order for these two guys to keep the money rolling in, they had to keep racial hatred stirred up in the black community. When asked if Sharpton and Jackson actually had congregations they were responsible for, the caller said that these two men—who designate themselves reverends—were actually wolves in sheep’s clothing. This caller—who happened to be black and did not approve of what Imus said—had no respect for Jackson or Sharpton.

LA replies:

People naturally look for leadership and respond to leadership. Whites did not have to collapse and give up their natural position of leadership in this society. That was the fatal error, as I wrote in my article, “How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable.”

James N. writes:

Full disclosure: I’ve been an Imus fan since I heard his first (pre- Cleveland, pre-rehab) WNBC broadcast in 1969 or 1970. I understand he uses bad taste to entertain.

One of the most remarkable things about this little episode is how RELATIVELY mild and even innocuous his language was.

Nappy headed? A lot of those young ladies ARE nappy-headed.

Hos? Well, I hope Mr. Imus doesn’t KNOW whether or not they are hos—and it would serve him right if they (or the nappy-headed ones) sued him for defamation of character (assuming they can withstand an adversary process over the question of whether or not they are, in fact, hos).

But an uproar of this magnitude is an extraordinary “cultural X-ray,” to steal from Tom Wolfe, and what it reveals is the deep fear the “white power structure,” as Brother Stokely would say, has of revealing its hidden opinion of blacks.

After all, the appropriate responses to the involved parties here are:

One: “Al Sharpton, you liar and manipulator, shut up”;

Two: “Basketball ladies, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Grow up”; and

Three, “Mr. Imus, you spoke like a pig. Apologize and don’t do it again.”

Anything more than that is SO excessive as to place our national sanity in question. But of course, the corporate suits and white politicians believe deep down that blacks are unruly children who will react violently when treated like adults, ESPECIALLY if telling them the truth involves any ego challenge.

Don Imus is no loss (although I personally will miss him). But the further circumscription of free speech in such an unfair and non-evenhanded manner is a big deal, and I fear it’s just beginning.

LA replies:

Excellent comments by James N.

Donna E. comments on the original blog entry:

This is the first rational view I’ve heard since this whole mindless episode began.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 13, 2007 03:20 PM | Send