This is what I was afraid would happen

Why Imus won’t be fired, despite racial comments
Earl Ofari Hutchinson


The reaction was swift and justifiably angry to radio host Don Imus’s latest racist crack that players on the Rutgers women’s basketball team were “nappy-headed hos.” Imus didn’t step over the line of racial incorrectness — he obliterated it. He then straddled the repentance line with his kind-of-sort-of apology, in which he did not say “I” — only “we.” The careful phrasing turned the “apology” into generic pabulum, and was tantamount to personal absolution.

But even if Imus had made a sincere, heartfelt apology, it wouldn’t amount to much. That’s the standard ploy that shock jocks, GOP big wigs and assorted public personalities employ when they get caught with their racial pants down.

The other reason it’s virtually impossible to permanently muzzle Imus and others that talk race trash is the sphinx-like silence of top politicians, broadcast industry leaders and corporate sponsors.

Ex-Massachusetts governor and current GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry bantered with Imus on his show in recent weeks. Romney hasn’t uttered a word condemning Imus, and Kerry issued a tepid statement in which he merely branded it “a stupid comment” and praised Imus for owning up to it.

While Kerry and Romney are two of the better-known politicians to recently go on Imus’s show, a steady parade of politicians and personalities have trooped to Imus’s microphones over the years. And not all of them are hard-line GOP conservatives. Sens. Joseph Lieberman and John McCain leaped over each other to get a spot with Imus, and we haven’t a heard a peep from any of them about his remarks.

The problem of the silence, or perfunctory belated criticism, by higher-ups surfaced a few years ago following then-Senate Majority Leader-Designate Trent Lott’s veiled tout of segregation. It touched off a furor, and ultimately Lott stepped down from the post, but it took nearly a week for President Bush to make a stumbling and weak disavowal of him.

The silence from top politicians and industry leaders to public racism was even more deafening a couple of years ago when William Bennett, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, said that aborting black babies could reduce crime. Even as calls were made from the usual circles — almost always blacks and liberal Democrats — for an apology, or his firing from his syndicated national radio show, neither Bush nor any other top GOP leader said a mumbling word about Bennett.

There’s another reason for their silence. Over the last two decades, many Americans have become much too comfortable using code language to bash and denigrate blacks.

The Rutgers ladies attend a solid academic institution, worked hard to get to the top of the basketball heap and have not posed discipline problems — yet vile racial typecasting still made them fair game for ridicule.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the National Association of Black Journalists and a handful of sports columnists will continue to loudly demand that MSNBC and radio stations give Imus the ax, and they should. But they won’t. There’s simply too much money in racial trash talk, and too much silence from the higher-ups that sends a tacit signal condoning it. That silence is Imus’s ultimate trump card.

BlackNews.com columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author, political analyst and social issues commentator.

Raid bares deep divide
In New Bedford, hard lines over illegal immigration

By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff | April 15, 2007

NEW BEDFORD -- To Cindy Tapper and her friends, gathered on black-upholstered banquettes at Shawmut Diner on a recent morning, the cause of New Bedford's economic woes was laid bare by a March 6 raid on a waterfront leather-goods factory and the arrest of 361 suspected illegal immigrants.

"I have a nephew who works at one of the fish plants," said Tapper, 56, a homemaker who grew up in the developments across the street from the diner.

"Nobody showed up for work for a week after that ICE raid," she said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "ICE needs to come to New Bedford and set up shop. The illegal immigrants are using the hospitals as a doctor's office. They're putting a strain on the city of New Bedford."

If you want to know where the illegal immigrants are working, said Tapper's friend David Gould, 47, "look for the bicycles. They're lined up outside all the fish houses."

"There are plenty of empty mills in New Bedford we can make into deportation centers very quickly," said Lynn Kelly, a graphic artist, 40. "That's the business to get into."

For years, illegal immigrants and native-born residents have been living side by side in this city of 94,000. Tensions flared occasionally, but mostly the communities coexisted without incident. But when federal immigration officials threw open the doors to the Michael Bianco plant, they also brought resentments into the open that had been long simmering in this struggling city.

"What this raid did, it forced us to look at the issue of illegal immigration in New Bedford for what it is," said Phil Paleologos, co-owner of Shawmut Diner. "The jobs taken, the services being utilized, the schools and the social services. . . . This raid has pinpointed exactly what the problems are and what needs to be done: Enforcement is the best way."

The raid brought the city's mostly underground illegal immigrant population into sharp relief, making them feel vulnerable and less welcomed. It hardened attitudes toward those immigrants in diners and on the streets. It galvanized immigrants and their advocates, who are now more determined to band together and fight for rights.

More at: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/15/raid_bares_deep_divide/