Hey Lefty, that's a good point about the rapsters and comics who also promote this kind of demeaning view of women. As Hutchinson writes on the HuffPost, "The black rap shock jocks . . . made Imus possible. They gave him the rappers' bad housekeeping seal of approval to bash and trash black women. In many ways, their artistic degradation has had even more damaging consequences for young black women." And he quotes the horrifying stats of black-on-black violence against women.
Amen. I've been yelping about this for years, after channel-surfing one afternoon when we first got cable TV, and discovering BET. In mid-afternoon, post school-time viewing, nearly every rap video it played featured simulated sex acts of a not very creative nor loving sort, with a leaden overlay of male ownership, yeah, pretty much pimp to ho.
Yet whenever I proposed writing about it or making a commotion of some sort, I was advised by those of my chattering class that as a white woman, I shouldn't touch a topic that was so culturally loaded. Talk about the bigotry of low expectations! We're supposed to tip-toe around a topic that encourages violence against women because it's "their" culture? I don't think so. But I couldn't get any traction. And most people had never seen it, and thought I was just giving in to my inner prig.

That said, I think there is a difference in the sordid misogyny of what much of rap is all about and what Imus did. By referring to a specific group of women, he personalized it. I keep trying to imagine what I would be feeling right now if one of those young women were my daughter, or if I was their coach. Even though they're not, and I'm not, seeing them tonight on the News Hour made me cry, and it was oddly reminiscent of the way I felt watching Anita Hill speak truth to power about Clarence Thomas, lo those many years ago. (Kids, go look it up.)

Watching Imus making his now infamous remark, I almost get the feeling he was pathetically trying to be hip, like the teenage boy who wears billowing jeans slung well below his skinny keister, or the white guy who calls his ritzy neighborhood "the 'hood".

But please, he's an experienced and highly paid public figure, who by now should have learned the difference between provocation and personal insult.

And then there's the bigger question indeed, about what sort of culture clamors to see its most insulting and demeaning behavior writ large and glamorized? But that's for another day.