Probing the Don Imus Media Event

“Shock-jock” Don Imus's slur on the Rutgers women's basketball team as “nappy-headed hos (prostitutes)” has generated media narratives ranging from free-speech issues to gender and racial stereotyping. Some have evoked the specter of political correctness, while others have pointed to his many celebrity guests as enablers. New York Times columnist Frank Rich, portrays Imus as an equal-opportunity bigot who “both kissed up to Dick Cheney and called him a war criminal” (“Everybody Hates Don Imus” New York Times, 15 April 07). But there is another very different perspective to take on this media event. This is the paradoxical way a white majority culture appropriates a minority culture's modes. It might be called perverse empowerment and it is my focus as a psychohistorical student of popular culture.

The process extends at least back to minstrel or “darkie” shows at the turn of the last century. Broadway shows like Showboat and Porgy and Bess were authenticated by African-American imagery, and in the 1950s, Elvis Presley transformed the traditional Blues style for a white audience. Another cultural dimension appeared in Norman Mailer's 1957 essay, “The White Negro.” The hipster Mailer was defining arises from a fusion of the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent, and the Negro. The latter brought to this equation a sense of danger and risk, of living outside society's laws and conventions, and of pursuing peak experiences through drugs and sex. In effect, Mailer's hipster grafts on to himself the Negro's perceived sexual prowess as his “urban adventurers” pursue ever-greater orgasms (Dissent, Summer, 1957, and reprinted in all editions of Advertisements for Myself).

Eldridge Cleaver took this construct of a Black ubermensch to political extremes when he construed his own progression from raping black to white women as an “insurrectionary act” of symbolic revenge against white oppression (Soul on Ice, 1968, p. 14). Acquiescence to these views among white liberals cast a spell that was not broken until Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will (1975). The continuing reticence across cultural and racial lines to speak out against the homophobia and sexism in rap and hip-hop is further testimony to this toxic mix of naiveté and complicity. But among other things the Imus episode exposes that what is accepted in the Black community is much more problematic coming from a white person. These are evidently cultural-linguistic encodings.

With more impunity, today's white suburban teenagers adopt “ghetto” fashions in order to “look cool.” But the stage was set long before in 1940s zoot-suits and in the “pimp style” which Tom Wolfe described in 1970. On the street the pimp who thrived by not working was “king” of the job-scarce ghetto. Wolfe cites Thorsten Veblen's “spurious aristocracy” as a “leisure class of bottom dogs devoted to luxury and aristocratic poses” (Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers [1970], pp. 130-2). Thus the “pimp-style” does not reference pimps per se but the “aristocrats of street hustle.” The street hustlers were recognized by their attire and accessories, just as the Black Panthers were by theirs along with their violent street talk of “pigs,” “m-fers,” and so forth, that were adopted by white radicals (Wolfe, pp. 23-4). Wolfe is not unique in reading encoded cultural trade-offs through fashion and language, but his own hyped-up—indeed hipster—prose

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style admirably captured the spirit of the times.

Traces of these bewildering racial exchanges continue to crop up in John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever (1977), in Warren Beatty's political figure in Bulworth (1998) incorporating rap and hip-hop into his campaign rhetoric, and in Clinton's being anointed as the first Black president. There were apparently coded messages in his eating and sexual habits.

Various explanations and rationalizations have been put forth to account for Imus's self-destruction, but a pair of these, no less significant for their being elusive, are admiration and envy. In some warped sense the freedom of Black entertainers to diss (disrespect) gays and women with impunity is an enviable power. White shock jocks would never aspire to become Black or dress Black or pass as Black, but they do want to access the perceived potency of Black entertainers and to don their aggressive verbal style. As the adoption of Black slang is still a way of being hip, cool, and sexy, it is no doubt intended both as a token of macho credentials and an oblique tribute. Imus initially dismissed his lapse as merely “rapping,” but the ensuing brouhaha amounted to a kind of racial outing (Imus quoted in Randy Kennedy, “Hey, That’s (Not) Funny,” New York Times, 15 April 07).

When he rapped on “hos,” it was understood he meant whores, but “nappy-headed” is more ambiguous. The dictionary associates nappy with nap, i.e., downy or kinky hair, but also includes the English term for diaper. This stirs post 9/11 associations with a southern congressmen's disparagingly label of turbans as diapers. From TV clips, I don't recall the Rutgers team as wearing headbands, so the epithet would be purely racial, though at least one player was white. At most, there may have been some carry-over of collective anxiety about Islamic terrorists. It is also true that the country has been reeling from an epidemic of apologies coming from people like Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales. But Don Imus was the first to suffer consequences, perhaps as the delegated scapegoat for the group in the face of an intense media feeding frenzy.

These reflections on the place of the Imus affair in the 2007 emotional life of America are intended to encourage additional psychohistorical discussion of popular culture.

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