Did I really have to just see Paula Zahn interviewing the author of Nappily Ever After about the degree of offensiveness of the word "nappy"? Did I really need Ms. Zahn's Upper East Side lockjaw pronunciation of the word "ho'" forever seared into the deepest recesses of my brain? Isn't there a war going on out there someplace? Isn't there a medium-slow-motion genocide of Africans happening somewhere that starts with a D?
I haven't written earlier because I was praying that the news sharks would have long since had their fill feasting on this story. It was the story of my life and a very boring one so I had absolutely no desire to revisit it. I imagine Obama feels the same way. Those that chastise him for not jumping out early and hard on this incident don't know what the hell they're talking about. Folks like Sharpton and other African-Americans who rarely left their all-black enclaves can be outraged and shocked. For those of us blacks who grew up in white neighborhoods condemning Imus is like condemning a wife beater, a child molester. We don't stop to consider the motivation, the level of gravity, the anything. He's just another of the countless racist pricks we've met in our lives and may he rot in hell. Move on. Next. We've got real work to do.
As a kid growing up in all-white neighborhoods in the Northeast in the 1970s I know a little something about name-calling. I will never forget when I was in middle school frantically sprinting through the backyards of Italian East Haven, Connecticut, with a half-dozen beefy Italian stallion high schoolers chasing me and shouting, "Go back to the Congo!" I wanted to stop and correct them, informing them that I in fact hailed from nearby Hamden, Connecticut, but they didn't seem in the mood for a geography lesson.
The last time I was called "nigger" I was a junior at boarding school (we were called "Uppers" there and it's the same school the Bush boys attended). I was crossing the street after having just aced a Latin exam when a public school bus drove by and a tiny little boy, he couldn't have been more than ten, yelled that to me out his window.
He ruined my day and a few days after. I was sixteen and that's the last time I allowed the knuckle-dragging ignorance of somebody else to so alter my mood.