Who you callin' Nappy Headed!?

Last week, i was surprised to see a name i had never seen on the bottom line of ESPNews. As i watched longer, it became more clear. The ESPN anchor played the infamous tape of Imus' radio show, where he jokingly refered to the Rutgers Girls Basketball team as "Nappy headed hoes." I didn't think that this would become anything big.

But i continued to see Imus' name on that bottom line, and that sentence on the bottom right corner kept getting worse. It went from, "Don Imus stirs controversy" to "Imus suspended" to, "Imus fired."

What i also noticed progressively getting worse was the media's coverage on this issue. Sports writers and analysts everywhere were calling for Imus to be fired. Many called him an idiot. Then the "idiot" was finally fired and the media still decided to bludgeon Imus with insults for a few more days, none of which i could stand listening to.

But finally a sports writer had an opinion i could listen to. Flipping through the channels one night, i saw a 3-way debate on MSNBC between a black woman who i didn't recognize, some white guy, and writer Jason Whitlock. I can not give an exact quotation of what Whitlock said, but i'll paraphrase it as best as i can. He said that we are teaching the Rutgers women a wrong lesson by firing Imus over this (The supposed reason he got fired was because his sponsors pulled out, but if it wasn't for the media this would never have happened). We should teach him that people like this shouldn't make us upset, and that we should just ignore them instead of giving them more attention.

I'm not saying that the Rutgers girls shouldn't be upset about Imus' comments, they have every right to. I just agree with Whitlock that the moral of this story was miswritten, and it's the media's fault for calling for this man to be fired.

There are also more points that Whitlock did not mention that i'd like to bring up. Don Imus is a comedian, just like Dane Cook and Chris Rock. I'd be curious to see what would have happened if Chris Rock made these comments and not Don Imus, because his punishment should be no different and the girls reaction should be no different. But i would guess that this would not be the case. All comedians exaggerate stereotypes all the time in order to get laughs, and most people don't have a problem with it. I'm sure the Rutgers girl's would laugh when they heard Chris Rock degrading women in one of his comedy routines.

Sure, Imus comments were more pointed than usual. Instead of making fun of Jews or Athletes in general (which i'm sure he has done many times), he focused on black, female athletes. But if you are going to say that he was wrong to make his dumb joke about the Rutgers female athletes then you should have been protesting Imus years ago when he was doing the same thing to other groups.

Media everywhere was calling Don Imus an idiot last week, but they were the idiots. If they really felt that Imus was such a low human being, they wouldn't be paying attention to him so much. Imagine you are a female basketball player at Rutgers. You are walking down the street and a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk yells to you, "Look, it's one of those Nappy headed hoes from Rutgers!" What would you do? Would it not be ludicrous to call for that homeless person to be thrown out of the city?

Truthfully answer that question and then decide if you agree with me or not.