Don Imus is famous for two things – having a face that looks like a nightmarish scarecrow made from dried salted beef and racism.
It wasn't so long ago that Don Imus was hauled from his long-running radio show in shame because he decided to tell his entire audience that a particular black female basketball team were a bunch of 'nappy-headed hos'. Although it cost him his job, this incident enlightened Don Imus to the plight of people of colour, and he vowed never to be racist again.
Unless you define 'racist' as 'appearing to imply that black people are inherently criminal', that is, in which case Don Imus might have just dropped himself in the crapper again. Will Don Imus lose yet another radio show? It doesn't matter, because so long as birds are still eating seeds from farmers' fields, Don Imus will never be fully unemployed.
If we could give celebrities one piece of advice, it'd be to think carefully before opening their mouths. Actually, thinking about it the one piece of advice we'd give Shane Ritchie is 'go and work in a shop or something', but for everyone else the thinking carefully thing holds up.
All too often celebrity careers are undone by a thoughtlessly insensitive slip of the tongue – Dog The Bounty Hunter was undone by racism, Isaiah Washington was undone by homophobia and Jerry Lewis was undone by something about illiterate faggots. But Don Imus is the daddy of being uncomfortably outspoken in public.
After the big 'nappy-headed ho' outcry got him turfed out into the radio wilderness, leaving him with nothing to do but shop for outlandishly-sized cowboy hats on eBay and claw at the barnacles that have been embedded in his face for upwards of 12 decades, Don Imus had to really search his soul. It didn't take particularly long – we hear it's not that big – but when Imus was offered a new job, he was quick to publicly explain his regret over the incident.
And Don Imus was never racist again. The end.
Unless Don Imus was being racist on his radio show yesterday, which he may well could have been. Yesterday morning Don Imus and his sportscaster Warner Wolf were discussing black American football player Adam Jones, a man who doesn't want to be known by his 'Pacman' nickname any more because it reminds people that he's been arrested a number of times in the past. And that's when things got messy.
As the New York Times reports:
Mr. Imus asked, “What color is he?” “He’s African-American,” Mr. Wolf responded. “Well, there you go,” Mr. Imus said. “Now we know.”
Interesting that Warner Wolf answered Imus' question by saying "He's African-American" rather than going with the more logical answer of screaming "Lalalalalala" into the microphone, launching himself across the desk and clamping Don Imus' mouth shut with packing tape before anything too racially-questionable squeaked out of it.
Anyway, Don Imus has tasted the sour side of people hating you because you seem a bit racist, so this time he isn't going down without a fight. in an email to the New York Times, Imus wrote:
“I meant he was being picked on because he’s black.” He added that the veteran black comedian and activist Dick Gregory would be a guest on his show on Tuesday, to discuss the death of George Carlin. “We’ll see what he thinks,” Mr. Imus wrote. “I mean … come on!”
Perhaps his frank, head-on confrontation of the incident will mean Don Imus will be allowed to keep his radio show – that remains to be seen – but it probably spells curtains for his forthcoming TV clips show Black People Do The Funniest Things (Because They're Genetically Inferior To Me, Don Imus).
KYJurisDoctor says
We have to keep these folks honest, and Don Imus should be NO exception.Maybe, he was being "sarcastic", but he either continues to try to re-write the history of his "nappy hos" comment in order to escape further guilt, or he is a closet RACIST who continues to be INFATUATED with a person’s skin color! OsiSpeaks[dot]com