Imus and hypocrisy

Salon.com has a selection of African American culture critics on the Imus issue. If you want something that's really worth reading on the matter, try this link. You may have to deal with advertising unless you subscribe to Salon already. One quotation from Greg Tate, author of Everything but the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture: "Yet do I marvel at the power of hip-hop, still so marginal in American culture as a whole, if we use the minimal radio, television, film, news and even Internet space it occupies as a guide, to be the frame through which we will now attempt to grapple with the nation's racist-, sexist-, greed- and gossip-ridden soul."

From Joan Morgan, apropos of the issue of "where's the criticism of rap from the black community," as if Jesse and Al were the only recognized authorities capable of speaking for and to the black community: "Hip-hop has always had its own critics -- writers, scholars, activists, feminists, filmmakers like myself, Kevin Powell, Bakari Kitwana, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Mark Anthony Neal, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Rosa Clemente, Byron Hurt, Tim'm West, MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Davey D, Moya Bailey, Michael Eric Dyson, Greg Tate -- who have been dedicated to doing the incredibly gratifying, hands-on and unsexy underground work of critical self-examination and consciousness-raising in the last 20 years. Our motivation? We love hip-hop enough to hold it to its highest standards." How many of those people have even the most educated and erudite white people heard of? Other than MC Lyte, Dyson, and Tate (whose name I didn't know until connecting it with his book), I certainly hadn't heard them.

From the aforementioned Dyson: "Long before the Imus affair, there had been great concern in black quarters about the harmful impact of gangsta rap's lethal misogyny and its glorification of violence. But not until white bodies are at stake do black bodies become relevant or noticed -- and only then as a prop for a larger mainstream agenda, even if that is to prove how harmful black pop culture is and, by contrast, how even a powerful, arrogant white man like Imus can't escape its influence."

The significance of this discussion is that even enlightened media watchers like myself really don't know what's going on in black American outside of what the media is telling us. If we don't believe what the media tells us about the Bush administration (for example), why in the hell should we believe what they tell us about black America? Sort of a double standard, isn't it?