The last word (hopefully) on the Imus scandal - GoFuckYourself.com

Profits of Doom · 04-13-2007, 03:37 PM

I know the last thing GFY (or the world for that matter) needs is another thread on the phony Don Imus scandal. That being said, I found an interesting article today on The Kansas City Star online edition, here http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html
that sums up the whole situation and the sad state of our world today. In case you haven't heard of the writer, Jason Whitlock, he is a former ESPN correspondent, a hell of a journalist, and a proud black man. Why does the proud black man part matter, you ask? It doesn't, but it goes to show that the truly intelligent people in our society don't care to have excuses made for them, nor did they ask for the Jesse Jackson's and the Al Sharpton's of the world to be the "voice" of their community.

Profits of Doom · 04-13-2007, 03:38 PM

For those who are too lazy to click a link...

COMMENTARY
Imus isn?t the real bad guy
Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.
By JASON WHITLOCK - Columnist

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.

It?s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I?m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn?t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should?ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it?s only the beginning. It?s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we?re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers? wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don?t listen or watch Imus? show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it?s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they?re suckers for pursuing education and that they?re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I?ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is ? a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you?re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There?s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.
To reach Jason Whitlock, call (816) 234-4869 or send e-mail to [email protected]. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com

Scott McD · 04-13-2007, 03:42 PM

Profits of Doom · 04-13-2007, 04:22 PM

Another good article from the same writer, this one posted on AOL...

Time for Jackson, Sharpton to Step Down
Pair See Potential for Profit, Attention in Imus Incident
By JASON WHITLOCK
AOL
Sports Commentary

I?m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down.

Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don?t give a damn about us.

We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That?s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest.

We?ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime.

Why?

If judged by the results they?ve produced the last 20 years, you?d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.

Their job the last two decades was to show black people how to take advantage of the opportunities Martin and Malcolm won.

Have we at the level we should have? No.

Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention.They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus? stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women?s basketball coach Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.

Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.

Imus? words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday?s USA Today. This country?s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black.

You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe?

We?re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.

Had Imus? predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would?ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn?t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.

Imus certainly doesn?t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.

The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.

Jesse and Al are flexing their muscle and setting up their next sting. Bringing down Imus, despite his sincere attempts at apologizing, would serve notice to their next potential victim that it is far better to pay up than stand up to Jesse and Al James.

Stringer just wanted her 15 minutes to make the case that she?s every bit as important as Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. By the time Stringer?s rambling, rapping and rhyming 30-minute speech was over, you?d forgotten that Tennessee won the national championship and just assumed a racist plot had been hatched to deny the Scarlet Knights credit for winning it all.

Maybe that?s the real crime. Imus? ignorance has taken attention away from Candace Parker?s and Summitt?s incredible accomplishment. Or maybe it was Sharpton?s, Stringer?s and Jackson?s grandstanding that moved the spotlight from Tennessee to New Jersey?

None of this over-the-top grandstanding does Black America any good.

We can?t win the war over verbal disrespect and racism when we have so obviously and blatantly surrendered the moral high ground on the issue. Jesse and Al might win the battle with Imus and get him fired or severely neutered. But the war? We don?t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows ?nappy-headed ho?s? is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.

We look foolish and cruel for kicking a man who went on Sharpton?s radio show and apologized. Imus didn?t pull a Michael Richards and schedule an interview on Letterman. Imus went to the Black vice president?s house, acknowledged his mistake and asked for forgiveness.

Let it go and let God.

We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.

A man who doesn?t respect himself wastes his breath demanding that others respect him.

We don?t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn?t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn?t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn?t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.

If we had the proper level of self-respect, we wouldn?t act like it?s only a crime when a white man disrespects us. We hold Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That?s a (freaking) shame.

We need leadership that is interested in fixing the culture we?ve adopted. We need leadership that makes all of us take tremendous pride in educating ourselves. We need leadership that can reach professional athletes and entertainers and get them to understand that they?re ambassadors and play an important role in defining who we are and what values our culture will embrace.

It?s time for Jesse and Al to step down. They?ve had 25 years to lead us. Other than their accountants, I?d be hard pressed to find someone who has benefited from their administration.[/i]

http://sports.aol.com/whitlock/_a/ti...11111509990001

tical · 04-13-2007, 05:06 PM

great reads

Jay Scotch · 04-13-2007, 05:10 PM

Those were great commentaries.

04-13-2007, 03:37 PM	#1
Profits of Doom Monster Rain Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Mongo Posts: 4,978	The last word (hopefully) on the Imus scandal I know the last thing GFY (or the world for that matter) needs is another thread on the phony Don Imus scandal. That being said, I found an interesting article today on The Kansas City Star online edition, here http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html that sums up the whole situation and the sad state of our world today. In case you haven't heard of the writer, Jason Whitlock, he is a former ESPN correspondent, a hell of a journalist, and a proud black man. Why does the proud black man part matter, you ask? It doesn't, but it goes to show that the truly intelligent people in our society don't care to have excuses made for them, nor did they ask for the Jesse Jackson's and the Al Sharpton's of the world to be the "voice" of their community. __________________ “My Free Cams Affiliate Program by CrakRevenue”

04-13-2007, 03:38 PM	#2
Profits of Doom Monster Rain Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Mongo Posts: 4,978	For those who are too lazy to click a link... COMMENTARY Imus isn?t the real bad guy Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture. By JASON WHITLOCK - Columnist 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. It?s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud. I?m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack. But, in my view, he didn?t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should?ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it?s only the beginning. It?s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$. I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had. Somehow, we?re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers? wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage. But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction. In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive? I don?t listen or watch Imus? show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it?s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they?re suckers for pursuing education and that they?re selling out their race if they do? When Imus does any of that, call me and I?ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is ? a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you?re not looking to be made a victim. No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There?s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out. To reach Jason Whitlock, call (816) 234-4869 or send e-mail to [email protected]. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com __________________ “My Free Cams Affiliate Program by CrakRevenue”

04-13-2007, 03:42 PM	#3
Scott McD Too lazy to set a custom title Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Glasgow, Scotland Posts: 67,795	__________________ I Buy My High Quality Traffic Here, You Should Too!

04-13-2007, 04:22 PM	#4
Profits of Doom Monster Rain Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Mongo Posts: 4,978	Another good article from the same writer, this one posted on AOL... Time for Jackson, Sharpton to Step Down Pair See Potential for Profit, Attention in Imus Incident By JASON WHITLOCK AOL Sports Commentary I?m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down. Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don?t give a damn about us. We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That?s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest. We?ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime. Why? If judged by the results they?ve produced the last 20 years, you?d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment. Their job the last two decades was to show black people how to take advantage of the opportunities Martin and Malcolm won. Have we at the level we should have? No. Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention.They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus? stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women?s basketball coach Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally. Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians. Imus? words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday?s USA Today. This country?s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black. You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe? We?re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that. Had Imus? predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would?ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn?t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world. Imus certainly doesn?t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest. The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer. Jesse and Al are flexing their muscle and setting up their next sting. Bringing down Imus, despite his sincere attempts at apologizing, would serve notice to their next potential victim that it is far better to pay up than stand up to Jesse and Al James. Stringer just wanted her 15 minutes to make the case that she?s every bit as important as Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. By the time Stringer?s rambling, rapping and rhyming 30-minute speech was over, you?d forgotten that Tennessee won the national championship and just assumed a racist plot had been hatched to deny the Scarlet Knights credit for winning it all. Maybe that?s the real crime. Imus? ignorance has taken attention away from Candace Parker?s and Summitt?s incredible accomplishment. Or maybe it was Sharpton?s, Stringer?s and Jackson?s grandstanding that moved the spotlight from Tennessee to New Jersey? None of this over-the-top grandstanding does Black America any good. We can?t win the war over verbal disrespect and racism when we have so obviously and blatantly surrendered the moral high ground on the issue. Jesse and Al might win the battle with Imus and get him fired or severely neutered. But the war? We don?t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows ?nappy-headed ho?s? is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis. We look foolish and cruel for kicking a man who went on Sharpton?s radio show and apologized. Imus didn?t pull a Michael Richards and schedule an interview on Letterman. Imus went to the Black vice president?s house, acknowledged his mistake and asked for forgiveness. Let it go and let God. We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket. A man who doesn?t respect himself wastes his breath demanding that others respect him. We don?t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn?t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn?t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn?t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies. If we had the proper level of self-respect, we wouldn?t act like it?s only a crime when a white man disrespects us. We hold Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That?s a (freaking) shame. We need leadership that is interested in fixing the culture we?ve adopted. We need leadership that makes all of us take tremendous pride in educating ourselves. We need leadership that can reach professional athletes and entertainers and get them to understand that they?re ambassadors and play an important role in defining who we are and what values our culture will embrace. It?s time for Jesse and Al to step down. They?ve had 25 years to lead us. Other than their accountants, I?d be hard pressed to find someone who has benefited from their administration.[/i] http://sports.aol.com/whitlock/_a/ti...11111509990001 __________________ “My Free Cams Affiliate Program by CrakRevenue”

04-13-2007, 05:06 PM	#5
tical Confirmed User Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Las Vegas Posts: 6,504	great reads __________________ 112.020.756

04-13-2007, 05:10 PM	#6
Jay Scotch Registered User Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 42	Those were great commentaries.