Guest Column:Don Imus and the Hip Hop Nation

By Sikivu Hutchinson
Editor
www.blackfemlens.org
a journal of progressive commentary and literature

Proving his essential manliness, shock jock Don Imus officially tipped his hat to the hip hop nation with a pair of vicious on-air slurs about black women.  The latest incarnation of the marriage between hip hop misogyny and hypersexual imagery of black women, Imus’ reference to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos” has been roundly condemned by African American activists and commentators who have called for the shock jock’s removal.  Imus’ comments highlight how the degradation of black women in mainstream media parlance has become a bankable commodity within public culture.  Thanks to the global influence of hip hop, the “h-word,” is almost an Americana staple, used to demean young women as sexually promiscuous while male proprietary control of women’s bodies is rewarded.  While sexist exploitation of black women is hardly a new phenomenon, plantation era stereotypes about black women’s sexual availability have bubbled up into so-called urban (white America’s euphemism for all things black) American film, TV and video as a crucial ingredient for success.  Rappers get Academy Awards for “whooping that trick,” become admired entrepreneurs for hawking products like “pimp juice” and grotesquerie like Eddie Murphy’s recent movie Norbet, whose ad campaign features an obese scantily clad black woman straddling the film’s namesake, rake in millions at the box office.

Though clearly worthy of outrage and censure, Imus’ comments are symptomatic of the kind of cultural blowback that occurs when communities of color aid and abet the global commodification of their own sexist conventions.  While Imus has made scurrilous racist-sexist attacks on black female luminaries before (e.g., Gwen Ifill and Maya Angelou), the uproar over his latest offense is partly reminiscent of the continuing debate over the use of the n-word.  Due to its historical resonance, no other term in recent memory has had such a tenacious hold on the African American imagination.  Blacks from all walks of life routinely twist themselves into existential knots over the pronunciation, use and provenance of the word.  Whereas many older and/or more educated African Americans decry its use as a symbol of white supremacy, younger African Americans insist it has value as an expression of solidarity and camaraderie.  The global influence of hip hop has transformed this “positive” spin into an equal opportunity coinage—sprung from the linguistic closet, young whites, Asians, and Latinos use the n-word freely amongst themselves, gobbling up every new idiom, scowl, swagger and booty shaking/gold digging black female stereotype that the bird flipping hip hop empire has to offer. 

In this regard, Imus’ sexist swill is totally in keeping with the ghettoization of black women’s images and the lack of mass outrage over the circulation of these images on the world media stage.  In Los Angeles and other cities, advocacy initiatives like the Mother’s Day Radio campaign have engaged young women and men to challenge sexist misogynistic images and language in all musical genres by demanding that corporations and radio stations devote one day in May to music that doesn’t sexualize or degrade women.   When the hip hop generation is socialized to regard racist and sexist imagery as unacceptable in any form the Imus’ of the world won’t be able to hide behind the guise of shock jocularity.
 

Comments

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[Joc]

While I understand the sentiments behind this article I have to argue a few points. First, I think its ahistorical to suggest that the commodification and globalization of Hip Hop culture in the 1990s was the first or even most infamous examples of Black women's hypersexualization and degredation in mass media. For example, blaxploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s carried messages just as sexist and misogynistic--perhaps in different language that to some might seem less vulgar than today's mainstream Hip Hop, but it was still present.

Second it always frustrates me, as a member of the Hip Hop generation, when people suggest that Hip Hop heads need to retrain ourselves to be less misogynistic and or sexist as if we grew up in a vaccuum devoid of elders who's responsibilities it was to pass down such lessons. My point is not to say that there is not misogyny and sexism in Hip Hop--there is and to a degree that worries me greatly. However, I think it is dangerous for we (as a black community) to take a stance that suggest that any issue within our community is one particular part of the communities "problem" and up to 'them' to solve so as not to jeopardize the rest of 'us'. If there is misogyny and sexism Hip Hop culture then it is our duty as a collective community who are worried or invested in our youth to combat it together.

I could say more but I'll stop there.

[teka]

I have an idea how about we all spend one day in May where we don't watch TV or listen to the radio. We can go to indepedently run blogs and we can still watch cable access, but as far as any corporate entertainment, movies, radio, television we say heck no...corporate america isn't going to do anything while we keep watching it.

i think may should be get rid of you cable month. where are these videos shown where women are degraded, cable. I don't have cable, I never see it, hence I'm not nearly as mad at black men as maybe I should be...lol...in fact I'm not mad at them at all and I think that's probably owing to the fact that I'm not bombarded with corporate sponsored images of them saying crappy things about people who look like me.

So possibly May can be get rid of your cable TV month, because its not doing anything but pissing you off and making assholes money.

teka