One of America's original “shock jocks,” Don Imus, is in hot water again, this time over some ill-advised comments over the Rutgers women’s basketball team, calling them, among other things, “nappy headed hos” and “jigaboos and wannabees,” a reference to Spike Lee’s film, School Daze.
It’s not the first time that the Imus show has run into problems over racial insensitivity. A couple of years back, regular guest Sid Rosenberg contrasted the Williams’ sisters to Anna Kornikova, claiming that while Anna was the type of women you’d expect to see in a Playboy magazine centerfold, the Williams’s sisters were the type “you’d expect to see in the centerfold of National Geographic.”
Rosenberg was released for awhile and now works in a Florida radio station.
Imus, of course, is not the only entertainer, white or black who has dabbled in gross insensitivity and all of this leads inevitably to the question, “Should offensive remarks be punished, and if so, why?”
Personally, I think it’s a good thing that people can say offensive things. On the one hand it puts a lot of our petty bigotries (and we ALL have them) out there in the open, and on the other hand, the First Amendment exists solely to protect offensive, unpopular and controversial speech, with exceptions only for overtly threatening, reckless (“fire in a crowded theater”), slanderous and treasonous or seditious speech.
Ethnically insensitive speech is none of the above, so there can be no governmental sanctions against such speech.
Certainly there can and have been private sector sanctions against such offensive speech. John Rocker, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Al Campanis and Bob Grant have all been fired for various offensive outbursts. But such sanctions are dangerous, because they lead to more hyper-sensitivity on the part of various segments of the public.
For instance, if humorist Don Imus can be fired for these comments, can there by any tolerance for anyone from another race making fun of whites, or Hispanics?
The answer is probably not, precisely because even if a majority of those groups can accept such comments as humorous, there will always be enough of a vocal minority within those groups to impact corporate decision making.
Sanctioning offensive speech is a double edged sword, as virtually every thought is ‘offensive” to some people.
It’s not the first time that the Imus show has run into problems over racial insensitivity. A couple of years back, regular guest Sid Rosenberg contrasted the Williams’ sisters to Anna Kornikova, claiming that while Anna was the type of women you’d expect to see in a Playboy magazine centerfold, the Williams’s sisters were the type “you’d expect to see in the centerfold of National Geographic.”
Rosenberg was released for awhile and now works in a Florida radio station.
Imus, of course, is not the only entertainer, white or black who has dabbled in gross insensitivity and all of this leads inevitably to the question, “Should offensive remarks be punished, and if so, why?”
Personally, I think it’s a good thing that people can say offensive things. On the one hand it puts a lot of our petty bigotries (and we ALL have them) out there in the open, and on the other hand, the First Amendment exists solely to protect offensive, unpopular and controversial speech, with exceptions only for overtly threatening, reckless (“fire in a crowded theater”), slanderous and treasonous or seditious speech.
Ethnically insensitive speech is none of the above, so there can be no governmental sanctions against such speech.
Certainly there can and have been private sector sanctions against such offensive speech. John Rocker, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Al Campanis and Bob Grant have all been fired for various offensive outbursts. But such sanctions are dangerous, because they lead to more hyper-sensitivity on the part of various segments of the public.
For instance, if humorist Don Imus can be fired for these comments, can there by any tolerance for anyone from another race making fun of whites, or Hispanics?
The answer is probably not, precisely because even if a majority of those groups can accept such comments as humorous, there will always be enough of a vocal minority within those groups to impact corporate decision making.
Sanctioning offensive speech is a double edged sword, as virtually every thought is ‘offensive” to some people.
