Merged: The Imus threads

Re: Best Imus take I've read

This is the quinessential summation of "Whitlockian" philosophy:

Jason “Mr. Chitlins” Whitlock. I was going to write something entirely different for you; something that dissected each paragraph of “Imus isn’t the real bad guy.” At first your piece really affected me. I was initially saddened by your blatant divisiveness and your apparent want to marginalize everyone your color.

But then I realized - The. Shock. Jock. Is. You.

You purposely put your ample self at the center of a maelstrom of your own invention. Brilliant for a negro so foolish as to give himself the nom d’etre, “Big Sexy.” Jason Whitlock, idiot savant, savior for attention-starved frat boys and the attention-challenged Wal-Mart crowd....

Instead of using your position as a well-known black sports reporter to bring down the heavens on the too often amoral, hypocrisy-ridden world of sports journalism, you chose to turn your back on and attack the very people who were awaiting you with open arms, Mr. Chitlins - us, black, people.

Instead you chose to run with the same type of crowd you thought you knew in Hoosier-land; the state with the most Ku Klux Klan members per capita of any in the United States. The crowd can come in cloaks of liberalism, the feather to the neocons’ hammer; they came for you. And when they tickled your flaccid behind you said it felt good and asked for more. See, a real inconvenient truth is that a generation ago liberal Al Gore’s daddy was a friend of the Knight Riders.

Now they got you where they want you because while you think you’re in position to marginalize the rest of us they have you hanging by puppeteer strings - and they’re jerking more than your chain, Mr. Chitlins.

If you don’t believe me, try to come off righteous one more time - in fact, just defend Barry Bonds like you did in Lupica’s face and see what happens. There won’t be a safety net to catch you. Next time everyone will have “philosophical differences” with you and you’ll be stuck out in the wind; one wrong move will leave you skewered like a pig on a spit.

See, Mr. Chitlins there’s room for you if you truly relate your feelings.... But you’ve already proven that you speak out the side of your neck, so nobody will want you. Really, nobody wants you now, you just don’t know it.

To them, you’re just a well-fed blackface jockey with a lantern on their front lawn. To us, you’re pitiful; to us, you’re just a bad joke.

And that, Mr. Chitlins, is your inconvenient truth.


And if you don't believe Whitlock is just in it for himself, check out these examples of where "Big Greezy" is really coming from:
http://espn.go.com/page2/s/whitlock/030227.html

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

I've read your post a few times and can't figure out your point. Are you suggesting that Whitlock needs to take a certain position just because he is black instead of what he believes?

If so that is the height of intelectual dishonesty.

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

The portion of the post used suggests that Whitlock is taking his absurd position because his goal is a self-centered one. No one in their right minds would criticize Sharpton, Jackson, C. Vivian Stringer (but notably not the Rutgers president, athletic director, board of regents, etc.), and Imus (but stopping short of calling Imus, McGuirk, and Rosenberg and their remarks, racist) without having an ulterior motive for doing so.

No one in their right minds would demean the young women on the Rutgers team with the absurd claim that one or more of them has 50-Cent in their iPod(s)knowing that the team captain is a music major (classical piano focus).

Only a buffoon with a track record like Whitlock's would complain that the NBA needs to move its All-Star game with the quote: “The game needs to be moved overseas, someplace where the Bloods and Crips and hookers and hoes can’t get to it without a passport and plane ticket,” and then pretend to be a protector of black women against, "the rap music, gangster idiots who are defining black culture as pro-drug dealing, anti-education, condoning of unmarried babies having babies and in love with random violence, disrespect toward women..." (from Whitlock's bio on AOL).

Only a self-serving ass would utter the following: "It’s only natural that Real Talk act as a catalyst in this cultural revolution, because people of every race are for it. Bill Cosby speaks for all people with common sense. His message just needs an injection of youth and energy. He’ll get it here and from us.”

And then, in an online conversation with Chad Coleman who plays "Cutty" on the HBO show, The Wire, have this exchange:

JASON: Season 4 of The Wire has a chance to be the best season of the series. I love what David Simon is doing with the four young boys. I think he’s basically telling the backstory to Stringer, Avon, Wee-bey and Bubbles. Right now I’m most fascinated by Namond Brice, Wee-beoy’s son. Namond’s mother, D’Londra is basically turning her 8th-grade son into her husband. This is a big problem in the black community, and it’s a problem we never talk about. Single mothers turn their sons into husbands, and the boys never develop the ability to connect with another woman the way they’re supposed to.

CHAD: Absolutely, and who’s to blame for this misguided approach to raising a son? Is it the fact that the father is incarcerated or is the mother blinded by materialism? Seems to me she has misplaced values, but also I guess she’s going by the model of manhood that’s been demonstrated to her. Inevitably it does become some kind of reverse Oedipus syndrome. It locks the child into this false idea of manhood….

JASON: Hmm, Who’s to blame is a good question. But I don’t know if assigning blame is where we need to be as black folks right now. The blame is obvious. We were stripped of our family structure 300 years ago. Where we need to get to is acknowledging that this is a problem and then correcting it. I don’t think we even know this is a problem. Denial is our biggest enemy, in my opinion.

-------------------

It is intellectually dishonest for Whitlock to blame single mothers in the black community who are raising their sons alone without their fathers for the fact that their sons have a difficult time relating to women…a job that black MEN should be doing…(many are) but note that Whitlock, who is all about forgetting and ignoring the past…then goes on to lay the blame at the door of ----- slavery!! Whitlock whines about Jackson and Sharpton and their victimization roles, then declares in his view on current black family problems…”We were stripped of our family structure 300 years ago.” Apparently in Mr. Chitlin's (oh, I'm sorry, he calls himself, "Big Sexy") world, victimization is a role-play objective and calling black women whores and blaming them for problems that young black men have is a terrible thing when other black men do it - but it’s OK for the "new civil rights voice in America" (as he also calls himself) to do so.

All this from a man who defended Michael Jackson's repeated acts of child molestation with the following:

I don't blame Michael for using his money to create a fantasy world for himself where he never grows out of the most carefree time in a person's life. Michael wants to be 12 and host slumber parties. I want to be 21 and be on location for the next collegegirlsgonewild video shoot. Is there really that much difference?
(http://espn.go.com/page2/s/whitlock/030227.html)

What?!!!

What is intellectually dishonest is for anyone to think that Jason Whitlock's words are at all heartfelt and that he and his words play any role in meaningful change in the U.S.

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

As I've mentioned before, I am a sportswriter-turned-teacher (I wanted a less stressful job).

Jason made my job pretty easy yesterday.

Yesterday was the day before vacation and we had already tested out on the Korean War, so we did current events.

We read the Globe's news piece on Imus, then Jason's piece. This made for five straight periods of great discussion and led to me learning a lot about rap and hip-hop.

Our school is in a blue-collar, immigrant town (Hispanic, Greek, Albanian, Portuguese, Greek, etc.). I had one Black student in four of the five classes, but many of the kids are well-versed in rap and the hip-hop culture.

Almost all of the kids agreed with the column, and I actually got a couple of them commenting on the strength of his writing. (I likened the piece to a thesis paper. Jason had a thesis and used facts to prove it. I also thought there was some pretty good history in the piece. I have never thought about how brief the "I Have a Dream" speech was, even though we analyze it every year).

Several kids felt Jason didn't understand hip-hop and rap that well, and we had a really good discussion. One young man, whom I need to prod with a stick to write a paragraph, was all of a sudden banging out four-plus on his keybard-equipped cell phone, writing an e-mail response. I was stunned. He said he sent it to Jason, which frightens me because no one proofread it.

Anyway, I thought the piece was well done and the fact that it made the day before April vacation a fruitful one is a shiny bonus.

 

Re: AWESOME JASON WHITLOCK COLUMN

what i wrote is that conservatives are for globalization and free trade. sorry if it wasn't clear.

ashy, every conservative may not embrace the entire conservative agenda
nonetheless, that is the conservative agenda

oh, and don't forget anti-stem cell research

 

Re: AWESOME JASON WHITLOCK COLUMN

Right over the cliff.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeee?
(And, Mods, if we can't have one Imus thread, can we at least have One Whitlock Thread.)

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

Lisa Olson is now doing the backpeddle that so many of the boring and predictable politically correct among the media are doing currently, now that ALL OF THEIR HYPOCRISY has really been exposed. I mean, all of them claimed they wanted a discussion about race and issues like sexism when easy target Don Imus -- whose audience is like 90 percent white male over the age of 45 and who has a history of playing to the lowest common denominator -- but once it turned to the fact that perhaps if CBS -- owner of MTV and BET -- is so concerned about mean-spirited things being said about women, well, it better start doing a helluva lot more house cleaning.

And why stop there, what about the trash that is passed off as network television every single night. And why stop there -- let's start to examine every single talk show -- black or white -- on CBS-owned stations.

See that's the problem with people like Lisa Olson and people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson -- when the Boogie man is an unlikeable easy target like Don Imus, or Rush Limbaugh, they are all for piling on. But once it comes time to dig a little deeper and go beyond the grand standing and soap box sermons, it gets real sticky and most of them would rather keep the focus on the irrelevant.

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

s'chick --
Don't you understand? Black people and women are just supposed to be noble for the rest of us.
Read the memos, willya?
I'm all for a general discussion of talk-radio. In fact, if it's not too much trouble, I'd like the Fairness Doctrine back. But it's not the issue here. "Going beyond the issue," I suspect, is now code for "making the issue go away."
Sheesh.

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

Jason Whitlock doesn't have to assume that Rutgers players listen to Gangster rap and watch offensive things on television -- it is all written down, advertised right in their OWN MEDIA GUIDE.

Yes, that's right, the poor little sensitive girls whose feelings were hurt by the big bad wolf - and since the coaches sign off on the media guide content -- apparently the enlightened coach who has seen all kinds of injustice hasn't educated her girls on the definition of hypocrisy -- had no problem advertising they listen to Jay-Z, watch Flavor of Love, which is about as demeaning to women as any show created, and enjoy the movie White Chicks, which, if there is a more racist, homophobic and sexist movie created I'd love to know what it is -- and the list could go on.

Again, this issue and so many of the people who are trying to make it an issue is so full of so much hypocrisy on so many levels it has become comical.

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

Oh no, I don't want the issue to go away --- let's just make sure now that the lynch mob got Imus fired and he has gone away -- that we really talk about the issue -- which is the hypocrisy of the left-wing whiners who spend most of their time scolding conservatives for trying to be the moral police, but have no problem trying to be the moral police when it suits their agenda or hurts one of their political opponents.

Oh and by the way, I turned on the NFL network today -- just to try and get some sports news without hearing some self-important talking head, like DJ STUEY SCOTT, pontificating about how evil Don Imus, or seeing C Vivian grand standing, or hearing about anything other than sports news -- of course, the first words out of the mouth of the anchor were "Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith have called what Don Imus said despicable......"

Good thing National Lampoons Vacation was on.....

 

Re: AWESOME JASON WHITLOCK COLUMN

wow. how does henry hecht know my positions on issues i've never written about? wow. just wow.

i have NO political affiliation. NONE. ZERO. absolutely abhor politics. i'm going to disappoint a lot of republicans/conservatives because i ain't one of them. nor am i a democrat/liberal.

my political affiliation, for those who care: jason whitlock party. it's a one-man army that isn't looking for recruits.

 

Re: Best Imus take I've read

So let me get this straight, you would "love" to let this roll off your back but you can't because the story is all over the newspaper,radio, ok. That doesn't hold any weight tho, because you voluntarily came to this website and clicked on a thread which is discussing the issue to express your opinions. I don't know who you are trying to fool, the people here or yourself. You obviously are very bothered by people's reaction to Imus's comments, and you feel the need to keep expressing that opinion, why can't you sit back and allow others to do the same w/out insulting them? My point is that you're accusing people of "whining" simply because they are expressing opinions and feelings that you don't agree with. If you were truly as tired of hearing about this issue as you claim, then you wouldn't be on this site and in this thread posting your thoughts.

Everyone of your posts exposes a little more of your agenda. You obviously don't care about racism or sexism, your only goal here is to discredit the people who were offended by Imus and his comments. Imus should have people like you and Whitlock on his payroll. All you are trying to do is cloud the issue and basically justify Imus and his comments.

This little "people are being hypocrites, what about this, what about that?" crusade you're on is a joke. The Rutgers women listening to Jay Z or watching Flavor of Love does not justify Imus personally insulting their physical appearances using racial characterizations and racist undertones. I think it is simple minded to try and equate rappers calling unspecified women in the street b's and hos with someone who has personally attacked a specific group of college-athletes live on national radio/tv using mean spirited racial remarks for no reason at all. This imus situation and the negative and demeaning elements in rap music and American pop culture as a whole, are 2 spearate issues. The only reason people like you and Whitlock are trying to combine these issues is to excuse Imus and discredit his detractors. It's real see thru.