Imus and Context

Last week, nationally syndicated radio sports talk guy Don Imus got fired for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed hos" during his talk show two weeks ago. Over the course of this weekend, someone mentioned reading an article that said that if Imus was black, he wouldn't have gotten fired. The article cited rap music lyrics that regularly demean and degrade black women.

My response to that: duh.

Okay, given that Biblically we're called to holy speech and that I think that any abuse of words is an offense to the one who is the Living Word, context matters. That is, words are always important, but words always come in the context of a speaker (or blogger, or whatever). And of course words have different impact depending on who they come from.

Instinctively, of course, we all know this. A family member calling you a name versus a random driver on the street versus a co-worker have different types of affects on us personally. But when we move it to a structural level (between genders or between races) it becomes much more politicized and much more explosive, and so suddenly previously rational people become much more irrational. And some of this comes from the very real feeling that many whites have that just about anything we say in or around issues of race can and will be used against us.

Several hundred years ago, white slave traders gathered together "blacks" who previously had identified themselves not as "blacks" but as people of specific tribes and clans and nation-states. They were re-named by whites in an effort to commodify and conquer them--this is a classic move, used historically by Babylonians in OT times and Romans as well. To have the power to name or re-name is significant. The same thing was done with "Indians."

Whites became whites in the "New World" entirely of their own volition.

So to have the right and/or power to name (or re-name) one's own people group is significant. And to honor the naming or re-naming of a person or a group of people is important. To violate that across structural levels does carry greater weight than it does within the same people group.

This doesn't mean that any person can say anything about people in their own people group (i.e. clearly much of the language describing women in some rap music is offensive and demeaning) but it does mean that we as white folks must understand that there's history here in terms of how language and names and titles and descriptors are used. So yes, context does matter. Who talks about what people in what ways makes all the difference in the world.

Imus got paid to use words, he used these words absolutely wrongly and it cost him his job. This was probably more about advertising dollars than real conviction about the proper use of words, but I think it's an important opportunity to begin to think more about words and their contexts.