More on Inmus Outrage

Imus Is Snoop's Frankenstein Monster
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on April 13, 2007,
Now that Imus is officially out, the question is will Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the civil rights leaders, black professional and women's groups march on say a company such as Koch Records and demand that they pull Snoop Dogg's forthcoming album, The Big Squeeze?

They should, and that means ignoring Snoop's loud protest that he's no Don Imus. He's not, he's worse.

While Imus's "nappy headed hos" slur has been plastered all over creation, the "B" "H," and expletive-laced rant that Snoop unleashed against Imus, has barely got a squint of mention.

His R rated words are so vile they can't be printed in adult company. But here's the gist of what he said. He gave veiled praise to the Rutgers women basketball players as ladies of distinction.

But that's only a ploy. To him, they're the rare exception among black women. Most are Bs and Hs, poor, hood dwelling, rank-losers. In one grotesque sentence in his knock against Imus, Snoop managed to get in all the ancient stereotypes about black women.

Now this is the same Snoop that strolled out of a courtroom moments after copping a no contest plea, being slapped with five years probation and community service on felony drug and firearm charges. He then delivered his self-serving Imus and I "are-two-separate-things" rant.

This is the same Snoop that in the next few weeks will hit the road and promote, The Big Squeeze with such good housekeeping titles as "We Came to Bang Out," "Pop Pop Bang," and "F----in is Good for U."

The album features some Snoop's rap buddies and rivals and gives them a chance to be heard and of course bought. And you can be assured that these rap maestros offer a generous sprinkling of B's and H's and other endearing references to black women.

You can be assured that Snoops's corporate owners will bank millions off it. Unlike the 350,000 MSNBC viewers and the few hundred thousand more CBS radio listeners that cackled with and at Imus's inane trash talk, millions of young and not so young persons will dance to, talk up, and delight in the rapper's skewed descriptions of black women. That talk will be embedded even deeper in the youth and adult lexicon.

Snoop called Imus, and other shock jocks that spew their on-air slurs, tired old white men. Imus paid the price and got canned for it. That wouldn't have happened if civil rights leaders, black professional and women's groups, as well as legions of blacks picketed CBS, threatened sponsor boycotts, and dumped mountains of enraged postings on Internet websites.

Within hours after Imus ladled out his bile against the Rutgers women, my mailbox filled up with these postings demanding his scalp. Yet, I have not received one angry email since Snoop made his B and H dig against Imus.

I haven't heard any outraged calls for Koch Records to pull the album, or threats of a boycott if they don't. I have heard no denunciations from Sharpton, Jackson, the National Association of Black Journalists, and not a peep from women's groups about it and him.

A few years ago the NAACP got called on the carpet for nominating some of the most vile rap women bashers for image awards. The last draw was when the NAACP nominated R. Kelly, who was accused of sex crimes against underage girls.

Though the NAACP voters back peddled fast, and tightened the reins on who got nominations and awards, it set a subtle tone that it's better to ignore gangster rap groups than mount a full court attack on them.

Imus was a different matter. And many blacks have gone through tortured gyrations during the Imus furor to make a Snoop like defense that his offense was different. But Imus on his own would not have slurred the Rutgers women with the pejorative term "nappy headed ho's." He would have demeaned them with something like this, "They're some rough looking broads" or "They're some funny headed chicks."

That would have drawn few squeals. But "nappy headed hos?" That line is beeline straight from the rapper's playbook. The day after Imus was officially canned by MSNBC, the shock jocks that daily feast off on-air bashing and trashing minorities, gays, women, and Muslims, ran wild.

They relentlessly played lyrics from the gangster rappers. This was damage control, and their insidious point was to cancel out the furor over Imus and deflect the finger of guilt for trash talk from them.

In a perverse sense, though, they got it right. Imus paid the price for his bile. On the other hand, Snoop and his buddies simply have upped the price for their records, and profit from them. As long as the outcry from civil rights groups, and blacks remains feeble, scattered, and disjointed, they will continue to jingle the cash registers while self-righteously defying anyone to compare them to Imus.

Imus demeaned a basketball team; Snoop and his pals have demeaned a whole generation of young blacks, and especially young black women, and blacks have let them get away with it. That's why Imus is their Frankenstein.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black voters

Martin Luther King Real Message to America Hidden

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, AlterNet
Posted on April 4, 2007, It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with "alacrity and generosity," while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Jeff Cohen is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media."