Nappy Ho? Huh?

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Joseph Dunphy

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Apr 10, 2007, 7:08:04 AM4/10/07
to Joseph Dunphy

Looking at Yahoo! News shortly before I made my mad, preclosing dash
to the grocery store, I read


"Racial slur gets Imus 2-week suspension By DAVID BAUDER,
AP Television Writer 13 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Don Imus' morning talk show will be suspended from CBS
Radio and MSNBC for two weeks following protests about his reference
to members of the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed
hos," both networks said Monday.


MSNBC, which telecasts the radio show, said Imus' expressions of
regret and embarrassment, coupled with his stated dedication to
changing the show's discourse, made it believe suspension was the
appropriate response.

"Our future relationship with Imus is contingent on his ability to
live up to his word," the network said.

The suspension begins next Monday.

Imus, who has made a career of cranky insults in the morning, was
fighting for his job following the joke that by his own admission went
"way too far." He continued to apologize Monday, both on his show and
on a syndicated radio program hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is
among several black leaders demanding his ouster ..."

Nappy headed hos?

I had to look that one up. I knew what a "ho" was. That term is easy
enough to get that I understood it the first time I heard it, without
needing to have it explained to me. It's just "whore" pronounced with
the "gangsta" exaggeration of a southern black - derived inner city
accent. But what did "nappy" mean? A quick search under that term lead
me to this page.

http://www.adversity.net/special/nappy_hair.htm

which begins with the quote

"If you're black, or if you have close friends who are black, you are
familiar with the term "nappy hair". Many blacks have nappy hair,
and they describe it that way! Even some white folks have nappy hair.
"


To be honest, I hadn't heard of the word "nappy", and living where I
currently do, I know more than a few black people. But then, maybe
that's just the nature of the relationship we have - there may be a
self-conscious shying away from anything that might be seen as being
sterotypical. A picture found here

http://www.nappyhairaffair.com/nappyisms.htm

makes clear what is being referred to, as does the acronym "Nature's
Absolutely Perfect Style"; in other words, what many would tend to
think of as being typically African-American hair, unstraightened. In
real life, African-Americans are diverse enough that talking about THE
typical African-American look doesn't make much sense, any more than
talking about the typical European-American look would, but that's a
different topic for a different post.

I was mildly surprised that such a thing would be even a matter for
comment - for about half a second. Yes, I've heard remarks about non-
Anglo-Saxon looking hair shouted out of cars before, indeed probably
anybody with a noticable non-Northern European component to his or her
ancestry probably has by now. It's just that ... oh, call it
Mathematician's disease. A part of me wants the world to be logical so
badly that I have to occasionally catch myself blotting the illogical
parts of it out of the mental picture I construct of reality, even
when experience should make me greatly aware of them, but this one
just gets a "huh", a lingering sense of bewilderment that a
mechanistic understanding of a social phenomenon doesn't dispel.
Reality becoming so absurd that on an individual level, some of us
can't take it in. Something inside of us just shuts down, meaning that
sometimes we must work lest we look without seeing or hear without
listening. But then that is hardly a condition that is unique among
underemployed Mathematicians, as we see when we note the public
support of certain remarks that make for well placed incredulity.
Consider, for example, this recent quote I saw on Yahoo news, in a
story about Imus' recent suspension from his show, at a time when
calls for the man's firing have been heard far and wide.


"The Rev. Jesse Jackson said that Imus' suspensions would not halt the
protests.

"This is a two-week cooling off period," Jackson said. "It does not
challenge the character of the show, its political impact, or the
impact that these comments have had on our society."


Umm, excuse me ... Reverend Jackson? Aren't you the same person who
called New York City "Hymietown"? How long were you suspended over at
Operation Push for that remark, which was not anything but hateful? I
will admit that I didn't see Imus' show, mainly because having watched
it briefly I've found it tedious beyond description, so maybe I'm
thoroughly misunderstanding the circumstances being reacted to, but my
immediate gut reaction, based on what I've heard so far is ... again,
huh? Why is this guy getting pounced on?

Maybe when I've seen more than a thirty second snippet I'll
understand, but what I'm seeing in the soundbite is an extremely white
guy trying to sound black. Goofy, yes, maybe even annoying, but
racist? I don't know. Ever hear black guys talking about black women
in this way? Ever see white guys trying to ape black guys, because
they think that they're sounding cool by doing so? For that matter,
ever see Al Sharpton go for a whole year without trying to manufacture
another crisis, just so people will remember who he is? Anybody
remember the name Tawana Brawley and the high profile way in which
Sharpton figured into that fiasco? Now let me tell you another story,
and let me tell you why this is all more than a minor annoyance.

Roll the film back two decades to a time that wasn't yesterday, but
was still recent enough to be uncomfortably close to being now, too
close to today for us to comfortably seperate our own time from it. A
black youth was picked up in Indianapolis for ... I forget exactly
what he was picked up for. I think it was jaywalking. I'm fairly
certain that it wasn't anything that serious.

As the car pulled into the station, the young man was pulled out of
the car, and wonder of wonders, a bullet had gone through the back of
his head, up through the base of his spine and into his brain in a way
that would have greatly hindered him from giving testimony in the
future, or from breathing for that matter. This made some in the press
a little bit curious, so an explanation had to be produced. The young
man, the explanation went, was so distraught over being taken in ...
for jaywalking ... that he reached into his boot, where he had a
police revolver hidden, and shot himself through the back of the head.
"With his hands handcuffed behind his back?" came the response.
Admitting that this did sound like a tricky maneuver, the IPD placed
the two officers on suspension (with full pay) while they examined
"these very serious charges".

Two weeks later, the officers "remembered" that they had mistakenly
handcuffed the deceased suspect with his hands in front of his body,
allowing him to escape the consequences of his heinous jaywalking
career. Amazingly, this explanation seems to have been accepted. Try
acting that one out. Hold your hands together, as it they were
shackled, make a gun out of your fingers in the way that smalll
children will, and try to point your "gun" toward the back of your own
head. I'll guess that you can't do it. The officers were never
punished and the family of the kid couldn't even find what little
justice would be offered by a wrongful death settlement. They found
that the police could murder their child with impunity, and to this
day, can barely even get anybody to listen to their story, including
Jesse Jackson who, relatively speaking, is in their backyard.

My point? That there is real racism out there, not to be confused with
the things that some people like to posture about, and if you ever get
the impression that it's gone, you've been fooled. The 80s came after
the civil rights era, and that didn't keep the rednecks from coming
out of the woodwork the moment the federal government looked the other
way. What is wrong with backing a demagogue like Sharpton or Jackson,
aside from the fact that doing so puts one in the position of helping
to harass undeserving individuals and making one into the bad guy, is
that it puts those who talk about racism into a position in which they
are perceived as having cried "wolf". No great harm comes to anybody
from a goofball like Imus being left in peace. Great harm comes when
people like the parents of that murdered child find that nobody is
willing to hear their story, because people look back on the memory of
somebody being mistreated in response to a trumped up complaint, and
just assume that what they're hearing when a real complaint is made is
just more demagoguery.

Let us speak plainly.

Like it or not, the African-American population does not deal from a
position of anything other than perceived power, and probably never
will. At the turn of the 20th century, if I recall correctly, America
was 20% African-American; by the turn of the 21st century, that figure
had declined to 12%. Realistically speaking, the minority is not going
to become the majority, no matter how many urban folktales we hear
about welfare mothers with 87 children awaiting the next group of
octuplets. In the long run, a minority can only hope to obtain justice
from the majority by appealing to its sense of fair play, because no
group of people is so incredibly cowardly as to stay browbeaten
forever; push them around long enough, and sooner or later, they push
back. If the day comes when it is the put upon majority pushing back
an aggressive minority that is seen as having taken the position that
right and wrong don't matter, that only power does, then what shall
the minority say on its own behalf when it discovers that power is the
one thing it never really had?

Victory in such struggles is not to be found by bullying the bullies;
such a victory is a fleeting one, based as it is on a bluff destined
to be called. Victory is to be found through one's righteousness, by
truly being so much better than those who would mistreat one that
anybody worth respecting will instinctively rally to one's side. When
somebody like Louis Farrakhan can rant on the radio for hours about
Judaism being a "gutter religion" as he calls Adolf Hitler "a great
man", finding not even the faintest trace of criticism in his own
community for having done so, and finds that he gets a free pass on
such conduct for decades, and yet mild goofiness brings screams of
racism from those who've been granted leave to practice it, and
demands for rapid action from those who've had to take no
responsibility for their own conduct, what is being seen is not
righteousness. It is hypocrisy, and one really would have to be a
racist to believe that African-Americans did not, by and large, know
better than to be supportive or even accepting of that, which brings
me back to one question to which I never seem to have an adequate
answer.

Why do so many pretend not to know what they can not escape the
knowledge of, and why do they believe that in such willful ignorance
is to be found the path to liberation?

Yes, I can already hear somebody saying "I'm black and I don't think
like that", and I don't doubt it. I know that there are people of good
will in those communities, because I've met them, but how widely do
they ever make themselves heard? I do understand that the traditional
news media tends to show a reliable preference for that which is
sensational, and that the calm voice of reason in a community might
have trouble getting air time, but now there's this little thing
called the Internet, and one can get around old fashioned media
blackouts.

Even so, the voices of calm only seem to make themselves heard to a
few people at a time in coffeehouses and laundry rooms, while the
crazies speak to a mass audience, and in politics perception makes
reality. "Joe, you do know that's not where we're all coming from",
somebody will say, and yes, I do know that, but I'm one guy with one
vote and an outsider at that, as disabled people tend to be, even when
they are a lot more "racially pure" than I am. Look at this one from
the point of view of a Jewish person who, say, has never been poor and
has never known anybody in public housing personally. He sees a
lengthy history of Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights movement,
and then sees the swastikas up in Washington Park, and the acceptance
of Jesse Jackson seeing the racist mote in the eyes of others while
ignoring the beam in his own (to borrow a metaphor from the scriptures
from which the man supposedly preaches), and what is he to think? Can
you see why your friends from afar might find themselves feeling like
fools, while your enemies might be emboldened by the same thought?

To have no friends outside your own numbers is to be lost. To have a
friend in a place, you must be a friend and be known to be a friend,
which is to say to some of those I know who have been far too silent,
I know you're there and I know just how well you can speak, so please
make yourself heard. Your voices are needed.


Joseph Dunphy

Joseph Dunphy

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May 24, 2007, 12:41:02 PM5/24/07
to Joseph Dunphy
Trackback of a sort from post "Moron of the day on Yahoo answers":

http://groups.google.com/group/Joseph_Dunphy/browse_thread/thread/c1f7d53205c7e4f3

By the way, if you didn't hear, Imus got fired. The woman I mentioned
in the post I just linked to, however, is still welcome and accepted
where she decided to make her post. Isn't life remarkable?

Joseph Dunphy

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Nov 8, 2009, 12:50:48 PM11/8/09
to joseph...@googlegroups.com

For further postings on this subject, or to return to your ring

http://groups.google.com/group/joseph_dunphy/web/nappy-ho-redirection

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