Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock became a national sensation last week for his bold column about the Don Imus controversy. “We all know where the real battleground is,” Whitlock wrote. “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.”
Whitlock is correct, though he is mistaken when he concludes that Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and others who have seized the Imus outrage to provoke a national conversation about misogyny in rap lyrics are simply opportunists. Sharpton is certainly capable of opportunism, but he has opposed insulting rap lyrics for more than a decade. In 1993, Sharpton and C. Delores Tucker, who was chairwoman of the National Political Congress of Black Women Inc., led an organized movement – which included Congressional hearings – condemning sexist and violent rap. Tucker’s crusade included buying stock in record companies to be able to protest at stockholder meetings. Moreover, Sharpton has pledged to broaden his efforts to go after other offensive talk on the air waves, including degrading hip hop. The Rev. Calvin Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem drove a steamroller over a pile of offensive tapes and CDs.
Steamrolling CDs evokes images of burning books – censorship – which should be hateful in a country with a Constitution that enshrines freedom of speech. However, we all know that Imus felt free to say the hurtful, racist, misogynist things that he said because hurtful, racist, misogynist language is common currency in our popular culture, especially in gangsta rap. If we wanted to see Imus fired, then we should want to do something to control the hateful content routinely spewed over our airwaves.
We commend the Roberts Companies’ decision to ban misogynist rap from the stations it owns, and we urge other media companies to follow suit. Artists should have every right to make the music that appeals to them, but the media gatekeepers also can take a progressive stand by ignoring material that perpetuates a culture of hatred and degradation.
We also must consider a most disturbing possibility suggested by Jason Whitlock: “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.” The reason this music is successful is because it is seductive. Elders have been trying to protect their children from varied forms of seduction from the very beginning of the family drama. As we urge media companies – perhaps using protest tactics – to protect us from degrading filth, we all must also begin and continue a national conversation with the young people who are important to us to teach them about what should be important to them. This battle is necessary, but will not be easy to win. But let’s keep the positive teaching going.