Don
Imus doesn't think he's a racist. He says, over and over again, that he's Òa good
person who said a bad thing.Ó At times he has even seemed outraged that anyone
could think he's a racist, and his defenders seem even more outraged. I heard Tony
Blankley on NPR last night insist that anyone who knows Imus has no doubt
that he's not a racist.
I
believe them. Or at least I believe that they believe it themselves.
The
endless rehashing of this issue in the media has, of course, paid a lot of
attention to the race gap: A lot of whites don't get why blacks are so upset by
Imus, and a lot of blacks don't get how whites could be so dense. But the
under-reported and under-analyzed part of the Imus story isn't the race gap,
it's how the race gap combines with the generation gap. If you're white and
your definition of racism was
formed and frozen in the Fifties or early Sixties -- like Imus and so many of
the graying whites who defend him -- then charging Imus with racism seems
incredible. Really.
To
grasp how this is possible, consider another story reported last night (Friday):
how close white baseball players came to striking rather than take the field
with Jackie Robinson. Keith Olbermann covered this on Countdown. Apparently just
before Opening Day in 1947, the other seven teams in the National League voted
to walk out. On some teams, the report claimed, the vote was 25-0 against
playing with Robinson. The walk-out didn't happen because of some fancy
maneuvering by baseball executives and a strong stand against a walk-out by
superstar Stan Musial.
That's
what racism meant in 1947.
Not insults, not tasteless remarks, but a willingness to take a public stand in
order to keep a qualified black man out of your profession. If Imus was
listening to this story, I have no doubt that in his own mind he identified
with Musial, not with the players who wanted to keep baseball white. Those
guys, to Imus, were racists. And he's not.
If
you go back just a little further, you're in World War II. The Nazis were
racists -- not because they told jokes about money-grubbing Jewish lawyers, but
because they made a serious attempt to murder every Jew in Europe. In the face
of Hitler, most Americans didn't think they were racists at all -- even as they
rounded up Japanese-Americans without cause and made blacks use separate public
restrooms and drinking fountains.
I'm
younger than Imus: He's 66 and I'm 50. But even when I was growing up in the
Midwestern white working class, we told jokes we don't repeat any more. Because
we don't repeat them, younger people have no idea what the atmosphere was like
then. I'm going to repeat one now. I'm giving you warning so that you can stop
reading if you don't want to be offended.
Q:
How many niggers does it take to shingle a roof?
A:
Only one if you slice him thin enough.
This
kind of joke was common, and we thought they were funny. OK, I won't hide
behind a pronoun: I thought
they were funny. I didn't know any non-whites at the time, and so the actual
person who was being sliced up wasn't real to me. Even people who did know
blacks didn't make the connection. I remember hearing someone justify this kind
of humor by saying: ÒWe were telling them at work and then Leroy came in. He
laughed at them. He told a couple himself.Ó It's hard to imagine now, but
scenes like that happened: The one black guy in the group wanted to fit in
badly enough that he went along. And the whites all took that as confirmation
that it was no big deal.
Notice
the difference between that joke and jokes that are considered racist today.
What's supposed to be funny about the joke isn't that blacks display some
stereotypic negative behavior like being lazy or stupid or criminal. What's
supposed to be funny is the image of hideously murdering someone for no other reason
than being black.
I
can't emphasize strongly enough how normal this was. And how disconnected from
reality. We told these jokes while we waited for the basketball court to come
open. And if some black kid showed up wanting to play, we played with him. Because,
why wouldn't you? Different parts of our culture and our behavior were wildly
out of step with each other. But to us it all seemed normal.
For
years, whenever I watched a baseball game on TV with my Dad, we had the same
conversation. He'd say, as if it had just occurred to him for the first time, ÒBall
players are pretty much all niggers these days.Ó (Dark-skinned Hispanics like
Roberto Clemente or Orlando Cepeda counted as niggers to Dad.) And, realizing
the pointlessness of saying anything else, I'd respond, ÒYeah, pretty much.Ó
Dad
would have been amazed if someone had thought he was a racist. From his point
of view he was just observing a fact, not saying that something should be done
about it. If I had responded by suggesting that Willie Mays and Frank Robinson
and Hank Aaron should be thrown out of baseball, I'm sure he'd have scolded me.
He raised me better than that.
And
yet, he couldn't help being nostalgic for a time when sports heroes had looked
like him. Ted Williams. Bob Feller. Joe DiMaggio.
And
Stan Musial. Dad, as far as I know, still doesn't know the story of the
walk-out to protest against Jackie Robinson. Like the nigger jokes, it's
something nobody talks about. Olbermann brought it up to push the boundary of
our denial. If I tell him the story the next time we talk on the phone, I'm
sure Dad will say something positive about the kind of guy Stan Musial was.
Everybody admired Stan, even then.
And
even so, I'll bet (if you go back far enough into the past) Stan told jokes
too. Jokes that Don Imus would never repeat today.
So
what's the lesson here? Never be surprised when old white guys seem to have
some incredibly strange definition of racist. To them, the word means someone who wants to
take action to harm people of another race, for no reason other than race. If
you call them racists, that's what they think you're accusing them of. And
they'll be outraged, because they've never lynched anybody. They don't even
consciously wish blacks harm.
Not
even the nappy-headed ho's. What outrages Imus is that he knows he doesn't hate
the Rutgers womenÕs basketball team. How, he wonders, could anyone think that
he does? He doesn't even know them.
And
he doesn't hate people he doesnÕt know, just because of their skin color. That
would be disgusting, he thinks. That would be racist.
Doug Muder
14 April 2007
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