David Seaton's News LinksRight away, I have to say that Don Imus should be fired because he's an idiot. Did he think he was being "down"? Nobody could be so stupid as not to realize that the young women's feelings would be hurt by being called "nappy headed hos". Publicly calling a young lady a "whore" can get you (and your network) sued for defamation.
In a purely American context, however, "nappy headed" caused equal pain and was considered equally offensive, and that's what I'd like to talk about. I'd just like to use the incident as starting point for some personal observations made from having lived so many years away from the States.
I come from the suburbs of Chicago, which were, and probably still are at heart, as racist as Alabama, but in my family of liberal Democrats, the "N" word was never, ever pronounced, even by the Saint Louis Missouri branch. African-Americans who worked with my stepfather (a musician) came to dinner with the same regularity as his white fellow workers did... although there were neighbors of ours that didn't like that. I went to integrated public schools in a university town with a large, old, African-American community with no overt, or vulgar redneck type racism. Still the tension was always there and flavored all areas of life. There were so many things you couldn't say, gestures of friendship that were frowned upon (by both races) etc, etc. Until I went to school abroad I thought that this was universal and something intrinsic to relations between races, I found out, in fact that it was really about history.
Over here I went to school with dozens of Cubans. Most of them had some African blood somewhere, "la gotita" or "little drop", what Cuban author Gulliermo Cabrera Infante called, referring to a parisian Cuban intellectual, "the Congo was a tributary of his Seine". Some were white as the driven snow... I was blown away by how little that meant and really blown away how they talked to each other. Everybody, white and brown alike called each other, "Negro" (pronounced "naygrow") and "Negra" and mulato and mulata. I had a drop dead beautiful, Cuban girlfriend who insisted that I call her mi Negra... she said it made her feel sexy... she liked to call me her "chinito" ("little Chinaman" and I was redheaded little mick). Racial terms, were terms of affection!
Then I went to art school in England with several African-Africans and again discovered that relations between people of different colors could be perfectly natural. Even with fellow students of British Caribbean origin you didn't have to walk on eggshells like with African-Americans.
Funnily enough it was the war in the Balkans and the hatred between the Serbs and the Bosnians that suddenly made it all fall into to place for me. Serbs and Bosnians are both Slavs, they both speak the same language, but history has made them enemies.
Color in the United States is just a "warning signal" that history has walked into the room. America is millions of little Bosnias. That history of slavery is pretty horrible, but slavery was horrible in Cuba too. I think it has something to do with America's puritanical steak, with its hatred of vulnerability and slavery is total vulnerability. Anyway, I would really like it if the scandal was about calling a nice group of young ladies "whores" and not about mentioning their "nappy" heads. DS
In a purely American context, however, "nappy headed" caused equal pain and was considered equally offensive, and that's what I'd like to talk about. I'd just like to use the incident as starting point for some personal observations made from having lived so many years away from the States.
I come from the suburbs of Chicago, which were, and probably still are at heart, as racist as Alabama, but in my family of liberal Democrats, the "N" word was never, ever pronounced, even by the Saint Louis Missouri branch. African-Americans who worked with my stepfather (a musician) came to dinner with the same regularity as his white fellow workers did... although there were neighbors of ours that didn't like that. I went to integrated public schools in a university town with a large, old, African-American community with no overt, or vulgar redneck type racism. Still the tension was always there and flavored all areas of life. There were so many things you couldn't say, gestures of friendship that were frowned upon (by both races) etc, etc. Until I went to school abroad I thought that this was universal and something intrinsic to relations between races, I found out, in fact that it was really about history.
Over here I went to school with dozens of Cubans. Most of them had some African blood somewhere, "la gotita" or "little drop", what Cuban author Gulliermo Cabrera Infante called, referring to a parisian Cuban intellectual, "the Congo was a tributary of his Seine". Some were white as the driven snow... I was blown away by how little that meant and really blown away how they talked to each other. Everybody, white and brown alike called each other, "Negro" (pronounced "naygrow") and "Negra" and mulato and mulata. I had a drop dead beautiful, Cuban girlfriend who insisted that I call her mi Negra... she said it made her feel sexy... she liked to call me her "chinito" ("little Chinaman" and I was redheaded little mick). Racial terms, were terms of affection!
Then I went to art school in England with several African-Africans and again discovered that relations between people of different colors could be perfectly natural. Even with fellow students of British Caribbean origin you didn't have to walk on eggshells like with African-Americans.
Funnily enough it was the war in the Balkans and the hatred between the Serbs and the Bosnians that suddenly made it all fall into to place for me. Serbs and Bosnians are both Slavs, they both speak the same language, but history has made them enemies.
Color in the United States is just a "warning signal" that history has walked into the room. America is millions of little Bosnias. That history of slavery is pretty horrible, but slavery was horrible in Cuba too. I think it has something to do with America's puritanical steak, with its hatred of vulnerability and slavery is total vulnerability. Anyway, I would really like it if the scandal was about calling a nice group of young ladies "whores" and not about mentioning their "nappy" heads. DS
