Is Imus really the problem?

I have been trying to avoid giving any coverage on this.
Its been talked about like crazy all through the blogoshpere and talked about on TV and radio even today!

But I think I just need to voice my position on this.
I'll go with Whoopie on this one.
Should he be fired? Naaa. He did nothing illegal.
What he did do was stupid and morally reprehensible but not illegal. Lets face it. He is a shock jock. Its what his job is. To say stupid shit!

Is a complete moron. Sure.
What he said was I guess supposed to be a joke I guess.
But that doesn't excuse his stupid comment.

But the reality is that this is a problem within the Minority community that needs to be corrected. Something that we do to ourselves on a daily basis. The one thing that may actually be a good thing from this is that people get it and change things within the HOOD. Its a crazy wish but maybe it is something that can happen.

His firing was/is dangerous. Its a step in the direction of censorship and a step in the direction of Facism that liberals constantly scream about. It brings in the thought police into this situation and into many other arenas that are dangerous in this nation.

Here is a man that analyzes this situation PERFECTLY!



But to make it fair. Here is Al (pimp my race card) Sharpton with Jason Whitlock



Notice how Sharpton gets MOST of the air time while Jasons segment is not only cut off but trivialized by Soledad O'Brien.

Jason highlights the true point of this whole argument.
IMUS IS NOT THE PROBLEM:

Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

To take it one step further lets look at Jonetta Rose Barras take on this situation as well:

We're Our Own Worst Imuses

They wanted to slay Don Imus and they did. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the NAACP, the National Association of Black Journalists and their posse knocked the shock jock off his throne at CBS Radio and MSNBC. But behind the scenes in the black community where I live and work, the outcry all along has been for something else.

Rather than blast the talk-show host for his derogatory description of the Rutgers University women's basketball team, many African Americans I spoke to in my work as a radio commentator said all along that black folks, including and perhaps chiefly those who led the charge against Imus, should take a long look in the mirror.

I think they're right.

The sensational indignation that got Imus fired last week struck many of us as hypocritical. It cast African Americans principally as the victims of discrimination -- and ignored the fact that they are the chief purveyors of the demeaning language being decried. It ignored the realities of how culture gets transmitted in contemporary society and the prominent role that African Americans play in that transfer. It failed to recognize the market forces at play. And it held blacks unaccountable for any of the damage, saddling whites with all the blame.

Urban American pop culture is fast becoming a black -- and sometimes Hispanic -- thing, and a bunch of people are getting filthy rich from it. The dirty little secret here is that the fight over Imus may not have been so much about his terminal foot-in-mouth disease as about who has dominion over that culture and who collects the cash.

Consider that last year's Academy Award for Best Original Song went to "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" from the movie "Hustle and Flow." That Howard University gave rapper P. Diddy the same postgraduate achievement award that it once bestowed upon famed African American author Zora Neale Hurston. Or that in 2001 the NAACP gave its prestigious Image Award to R. Kelly, a black singer accused of having sex with underage girls. (YOU CAN'T BLAME THE WHITE MAN FOR THESE THINGS!!)

Lets skip the BS and look for the root cause of this problem.
The root cause is NOT from white America. The root cause is within our own communities or rather HOODS! Is it too much to ask for our hoods to be looked at as NEIGHBORHOODS! Is that too far of a stretch.

Its thinks like this that make me look at Cosby's Speech:

Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are [not*] holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.

I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?

The church is only open on Sunday. And you can’t keep asking Jesus to ask doing things for you. You can’t keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you. God was there when they won all those cases. 50 in a row. That’s where God was because these people were doing something. And God said, “I’m going to find a way.” I wasn’t there when God said it… I’m making this up. But it sounds like what God would do.

We cannot blame white people. White people .. white people don’t live over there. They close up the shop early. The Korean ones still don’t know us as well…they stay open 24 hours.

I’m looking and I see a man named Kenneth Clark. He and his wife Mamie…Kenneth’s still alive. I have to apologize to him for these people because Kenneth said it straight. He said you have to strengthen yourselves…and we’ve got to have that black doll. And everybody said it. Julian Bond said it. Dick Gregory said it. All these lawyers said it. And you wouldn’t know that anybody had done a damned thing.

50 percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse

I had this argument before with someone on a google forum back when Cosby said this. And her argument wasn't WHAT he said but how he said it. WHO GIVES A FUCK how it was said. The reality is what he said NEEDED to be said. Sadly though other than Cosby's own personal mission little is being done about these problems in our communities. HOPEFULLY this IMUS thing is the swift kick in the ass that is needed for people to drop the BS and start to fix the problems. And the solution is within. Because the white man doesn't give a damn!