My two cents on the Imus

The Don Imus thing. Who listens to that pickled, shriveled, anachronism? Has he taken a good look at his tumbleweed hair? Anyway, what he said was despicable, not only because the Rutgers players are black, but also, and nobody has mentioned it, because they are women.
Nappy headed -- hideously awful. Hos -- makes it even worse, because it insults their blackness and their femaleness.
Someone made the point on a letter to the Daily News, that this kind of language is par for the course in rap records and videos. People have complained about that forever, and it doesn't change. In fact, it gets worse. No rappers are getting fired for their indiscriminate abuse of women, in both word and image. Their record contracts are not being cancelled, their appearances are not being yanked, their record companies are not trying to extricate themselves from them. It's a thing that makes you go hmm...
We do subscribe to the wise criteria of "I can trash talk my own people, but you can't." That's how it works. Blacks have the prerogative to use the n-word and debase themselves and their women as much as they want. Others don't. A Jew can jokingly call another Jew a kike, and it will not be that amusing. But others certainly may not. However, one thing is clear, if certain people are in the habit of trashtalking about themselves all the time, they run the risk of making it a commonplace and they make it easy for others to think it's okay to do it as well.
Still, I think that black men calling women hos is not the same as them calling themselves the n-word. It is much worse. Think about it: would you abide anyone routinely calling you a whore? The last time somebody called me that, (it's a long story) I jammed a burning cigarette in their back.
I wish the Rutgers players, who are going to meet with the Imus, (whose contrition feels rather forced, insincere, pathetic and gutless), would take the opportunity to remind all the other people who use those terms, to zip it once and for all.