Quoth TulipGirl on my Double Standard for Free Speech post:
And then there is another double standardâ????that in which other entertainers (comedians and rappers come to mind readily) say racist and degrading things regularly, and are rewarded with record contracts and adoring fans and not held accountable. As they should be, and as Imus was.
I agree most heartily.
While lying awake last night listening to CNN Headline News, I heard about some in the music industry defending the use of racial and gender-based slurs toward women in music, saying that they should be standing with Imus instead of going against him. According to Russell Simmons, “hiphop is a phenomena that transcends race…” Ummm… no.
What makes it right for rappers and hiphop stars to use the N-word, call women “ho’s”, and have scantily clad women making suggestive movements in their videos, yet at the same time call for Imus to be fired for the comments he made about the Rutgers women’s basketball team? Either words are simply words or we have a serious double standard here that needs to be rectified.
I remember being in middle school, high school, and college and having the guys at my schools make nasty comments toward me and other girls based on the lyrics of whatever song was popular at the time. I also remember feeling contempt and disgust for one of my classmates in high school (who was seriously clueless) when she started reciting lyrics to various songs that degraded women. (This is the same person that saw Titanic at least 10 times hoping that the last time she saw it, the boat wouldn’t sink. Needless to say, I was quite happy when I graduated and got the heck away from this moron.) I’m sorry… you don’t get to have it both ways. Either get rid of the “back that @$$ up girl” lyrics or stop being surprised when people outside the hip hop community use your words.
Some problems with this premise:
First and foremost, rap and hip-hop (which are race-transcendent, as 80%+ of consumers of both are white) have been subject to this same criticism for years. More than years. It’s only on very rare occasions that the mainstream media pays any attention to those critics (look up the Rev. Calvin Butts from Abyssinia Church in NYC or C. Delores Tucker) and usually only when there is a situation like this where some white person says something horrific and borrows the language of rap music and people start falling all over themselves to try to deflect national attention from the racist and onto a culture that they will gladly appropriate for all manner of money-making purposes but simultaneously love to vilify whenever possible. But the message of the social irresponsibility that permeates rap is and has been an ongoing discussion within the black community for decades, there have been symposiums at HBCUs about this every year for the last 20.
But the thing is, it’s a facile argument. White people don’t need rap music to teach them how to be racist and oppressive, men don’t need rap music to teach them how to be misogynistic and oppressive, it only provides new and different language. Actually, not even new and different, just derivative. Ho is nothing but a shortened form of whore, after all.
To say that this is a “double standard” ignores something very key: there is a difference between works of artistic and creative expression and commentary outside of the artistic sphere. Much as there is a difference between a novel and a speech or television program or movie and the actions of a person walking down the street. To draw an equivalence between what Imus said and songs which have a discrete meaning is off point, because it ignores both cultural place and power and, more importantly, intent. Only someone who has only a scant comprehension of what rap is about could say that a rapper has no standing to decry a white man’s unprovoked, non-artistic, commentary-based racist attack on a group of black women. Only someone from that same perspective and without any respect for the barriers that must exist between the currency of communication inside vs. across racial boundaries could draw an equivalence between rap — the majority of which doesn’t go near those lines in the least, by the way — and what Imus said.
Oh, and for the record, back that @$$ up? It’s a compliment.