While I was trying to understand why Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” a flood of experiences washed over me.
For those who can’t understand why Imus’ vile comment is upsetting, permit me to share a couple of stories.
In 1969 I became the first black woman hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a reporter. While covering a flood in Missouri, I sat, fighting back tears, with a white couple who had just learned that their only child had been found drowned in a tree after waters receded.
The couple had moved to houses hastily built in a flood plain to accommodate those fleeing integrated neighborhoods in St. Louis.
“If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have lived with the niggers,” the grieving father said. I thanked them for their time, closed my notebook and let myself out.
More recently, as a reporter in Texas, I was shown to the back door when I arrived at a home in Dallas to cover a reception for a well-known author.
I never got to introduce myself. It was assumed that as a short black woman in a short black dress I was part of the catering crew. Once the hostess learned who I was, her chagrin was palpable the rest of the evening.
Every black person I know has a similar story to tell. So when we hear of, say, former Denver Nuggets coach Dan Issel shouting, as he did in 2001, “Go drink another beer, you (expletive) Mexican piece of (expletive),” we look at one another and shrug. Such vituperative exclamations are hurtful, demeaning and insulting, but we’ve been hearing them since Moby-Dick was a guppy.
In 1976, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz was quoted as saying, “I’ll tell you what coloreds want. It’s three things: First a tight (a vulgarity referring to a woman’s vagina); second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to (defecate).”
Butz resigned in the wake of the subsequent furor.
And how could we forget Rush Limbaugh’s reprehensible mimicking of Michael J. Fox’s palsied movements, poking fun at the actor’s Parkinson’s disease? Limbaugh subsequently apologized.
In the interest of equal time, how’s about Jesse Jackson in 1984 referring to Jews as “Hymie” and New York City as “Hymietown”?
Let’s not leave out the Rev. Al Sharpton, perennial advocate for the underdog. I was living in New Jersey in the late 1980s when Tawana Brawley perpetrated a terrible hoax on New York by crying rape when there was none.
Sharpton took up her battle, denouncing investigators as complicit for failing to be vigorous enough in looking into the case. Ultimately, they investigated only too well, but not before officers’ lives and careers were tainted. Brawley moved to another state without ever going before a grand jury.
How about a Sharpton apology?
A while ago I interviewed former Nixon operative G. Gordon Liddy who said he was able to resurface and move on with his life after his Watergate conviction because Americans have short memories and almost no sense of history. They can remember that someone did or said something, but they can’t remember what.
Well, I promise you that every nonwhite who has ever been the victim of a racial insult, every Latino who has ever been wrongly arrested and detained, every gay person who has ever been publicly taunted and every disabled person who has ever been mocked remembers.
Sadly, the women of Rutgers probably won’t remember their stunning NCAA near-victory as clearly as they will remember Imus’ insensitive, juvenile characterization of them.
So enough already with this apology stuff. Enough of retreats into rehab. If you find this sort of behavior unacceptable, denounce it, or be complicit.
With his career imploding, Imus might ponder whether in 30 years, his name will be invoked with the same derision as Butz’s. He seems to have little chance for a legacy beyond that.
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-954-1284 or at esweets@denverpost.com.
