Don Imus, Travis Cuddy, and Racial and Gender Discussions on Campus

Even though it has little to do with the goings-on at WestConn (except for perhaps the way that discussions on race--rare as they are--go), as the Don Imus controversy fades into memory, I feel an urge to put in my two cents about the whole thing. As far as WestConn is concerned, the Imus issue is relevant, too, because of the way that it has become folded into the controversy over Travis Cuddy's use of crude and potentially sexist language in a music review (calling a female singer a "c**dumpster" in WestConn's student newspaper, The Echo).

The one thing that's clear about the whole Imus thing--and Cuddy's piece as well--is how typical it is. This sort of language has produced outrage in some and mock outrage in many more several times in the short memory of American popular culture. One thinks of Joe Biden's "clean" comment about Barack Obama, the controversy over Michael Richard's stand-up routine, and the Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" as prominent examples.

While remembering the feigned outrage that these events produced, it's also instructive to remember what actions, over the same period, have not produced outrage. Over the past several years, the current United States President, former congressman and Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchison, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, have visited Bob Jones University, the venerable South Carolina institution that has denounced Catholicism as "satanism," prevents female students from having "manly haircuts," prevented black students from enrolling until the 1970s, and until just recently banned interracial dating.

From even this one example, we see where American culture is in terms of racial and gender relations: you can be as racist and sexist as you want in your actions, as long as you avoid racist and sexist words.

And this fits perfectly well with the hypocritical priorities of the white upper-class liberal academic elite. White elites in the United States have always been perfectly comfortable in scapegoating others as long as they don't have to change their own behavior. This is particularly true when it comes to being the language and culture police. From the Salem Witch Trials to Hester Prynne's "scarlet letter," the idea of repressing people for violating a puritanical code of ethics is as American as Apple Pie. Today, this tradition is carried on by the white academic elite, who make more and more considerable efforts to extend "hate speech" to broader categories of discourse. Since they are too upper-class to ever have used this speech before (and what need would they have to engage in racial discussions anyway, considering that few of them actually interact with minorities in the first place), scapegoating others for using foul and nasty words provides them with a nice alibi for changing their own actions. After all, they support affirmative action and condemn the likes of Imus and Cuddy with impunity.

Oddly, mainstream African-Americans have largely embraced these strategies even as they solidify their continued oppression. Language policing is a smokescreen for the banal, everyday deeds of racism that people accept. Why hasn't Al Sharpton succeeded in making sure that the average dark-skinned man can hail a cab in New York City? Well, because he's too busy getting Don Imus fired. Yet this is precisely the structure of American racism. As long as the powers that be can assure themselves that racism is "not their fault" because they're not white trash like Cuddy or a shock jock like Imus, this mollifies African-Americans and ensures that no substantive discourse about race and no substantive social or political changes in the real race issues that confront us (like the fact that African-American men are disproportionally dying in Iraq, or that inner-city schools can't get funding and the average African-American student can't get a decent public education in this country) get forgotten.

The most disgusting part of this all is that in truth the reason that these actions get so much press is not because people are concerned but because they are secretly fascinated by it. Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction got so much play because those condemning it could secretly get off on it. Cuddy's language got so much play, in reality, not so much because people were actually disgusted by it but because those same repressed liberals who condemn it have a secret masturbatory fascination with naughty language. This is something that few will admit is the case, but since the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne, good cultural critics have known it.

This is not so say that we should all go out using the hateful words of Imus or the tasteless vocabulary of Cuddy. It simply means that if we want to have a dialogue about race, we cannot do it by muzzling one side of the dialogue. What we have now is a monologue about race. And that's precisely the problem.