Watching the demise of national talk show host Don Imus this week for calling the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" was like watching a building implode.
There is a tremor at first. Then a pause. Then a big cloud of smoke. Then another pause. And finally the anticipated collapse, a rain of rubble and ruin.
Several years ago there was a nine-month stretch when I commuted each morning from Vermillion to Sioux Falls. I tuned into KSOO and listened to Imus on every drive. Say what you want about the man – that he's a pompous misanthrope, that he's a bitter curmudgeon, that he's a green-eyed opportunist, or, what some are saying now, that he is both racist and sexist – his wit is lightning quick and razor sharp.
His show – at least at that time – was satirical, and what in art is more difficult to pull off than satire? Imus got national politicians, journalists, academics, religious leaders, authors, musicians and others to come on his show, and he played no favorites. He asked hard questions, and to his credit, he often got his guests to can their scripted responses, the ones they polish and practice and distribute en masse in droll press releases, and to speak genuinely for if but a few brief minutes.
For the life of me during those nine months, I could not determine Imus' politics. Republican. Democrat. Libertarian. Green Party. Whig. He seemed to have, if not distaste, then a good dose of suspicion of those whose ambition is so great they seek a national stage to air their solutions to that which ail us.
I have listened infrequently to Imus since, but when I read the other day his hateful remark aimed at – of all things – a college women's basketball team, I was more saddened than shocked. Racism is alive and well in America today, and I didn't need Don Imus to remind me of that.
§ For every 1,000 black males born in America U.S.
§ In 2005 the median income for black households in the United States U.S.
§ Of all the black children born in America
§ Black teenagers are almost twice as likely as white teenagers to drop out of high school. – U.S.
§ In 2004 the rate of AIDS diagnoses for black women in America
Racism is more difficult to spot, more difficult to characterize nowadays. It can no longer be found so easily, so evidently as it once could be in places like Montgomery, Ala., bus stops or Greensboro, N.C., lunch counters or Little Rock, Ark., high schools.
Oh, sure, from time to time racism returns to its overt roots – like the young Native American man I know who was called a "prairie ------" while at the bottom of a pile of players during a South Dakota
Or the young U.S.-born Latino man I know who, after being involved in a car accident, telephoned his mother. When she arrived, they began talking in Spanish to each other only to be rebuked by a Sioux Falls police officer. "This is America," the cop snapped. "We speak English here."
Or the young black man I know who was so incensed by what a young white man said to him that he locked onto the collar of the young white man's shirt, and though I am a head taller and 70 pounds heavier than the young black man, try as I might I could not break his grip.
Calling a predominantly black women's basketball team a collection of kinky-haired whores on a radio talk show heard by millions of listeners is racism unplugged. Only if Imus had donned a white hood could he have topped it.
Every one of the thousand cuts Imus received this week was deserved. What he said was indeed both racist and sexist – and indefensible.
As remarkable as this incident has been, however, it, too, shall pass. And then what? What of the difference between the rates at which black males and white males in America go to prison? What of the difference between the rates unmarried black women and unmarried white women in America have children or the difference between the rates black teenagers and white teenagers in America drop out of school?
Why do blacks make so much less than whites?
Which is more offensive, more damaging? What Imus said? Or the fact that one quarter of all blacks in America
Don Imus has fallen from the pinnacle to the rocks below, done in by his own doing. But if by his ruin we are to believe that racism is on the run in America, then we have been misled.
America is a far different place for blacks than it is for whites. It was that way with Don Imus. And it remains that way without him.