I have a story, in which Don Imus is the unintentional hero.
During the mid-1990s I was part of a team working against the
worst aspects of popular culture. The team leaders were Bill
Bennett, Senators Joe Lieberman and Sam Nunn and the late C.
Delores Tucker. Their primary targets were the exploitive daytime
TV shows such as Ricky Lake, Jerry Springer, etc; and the filthy
and misogynist lyrics of "gangsta rap," such as Snoop Doggy Dogg,
Tupac Shakur, and others.
As I recall, it was C. Delores Tucker and her husband Bill who
got the project rolling. Ms. Tucker simply said that she had had
enough of hearing young black men and boys calling women "hos and
bitches." These women, Ms. Tucker reasoned, were their mothers,
grandmothers, sisters, aunts and wives. These women deserved
respect. If you had met the Tuckers you would have understood -- a
more gentlemanly and ladylike couple could not be found.
A team was born with former Secretary of Education and Drug Czar
William Bennett, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, C. Delores
Tucker, chairwoman of both the National Political Congress of Black
Women and the Democratic National Committee Black Caucus, and was
later joined by former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. The group used
to joke that they had all the bases covered: Catholic, Jew,
Protestant, black, white, Democrat, Republican, liberal,
conservative. And they did -- this was clearly not a partisan
mission.
So the leaders' staffs (that's where I came in) set about the
background work necessary to launch such a campaign. We taped
daytime trash TV talk shows; we bought rap CDs and transcribed
their lyrics; we reproduced album covers as posters; and we helped
with the operations to get the message out.
The purpose of the campaign was to call attention to the slime
going out over the air and through music. The leaders were asking
the industries to rein themselves in and to practice some
self-censorship and self-control over what they were willing to do
for money. So Bennett, Lieberman, Tucker and Nunn held press
conferences; they had the rap lyrics read out loud; they showed the
worst clips from trash TV; they put out TV and radio commercials --
all to ask the industry leaders to take a look at what they were
doing.
Of course there were cries of "Censorship!" I recall riding an
escalator with some young and well-uninformed protesters who kept
repeating that they would not stand being censored by me!
They had no understanding of censorship itself.
Clearly these ignorant youngsters would not stand for
self-censorship either, for after all our efforts, not much
happened. A few of the worst of daytime trash talk shows
disappeared, and Time Warner broke with the aptly named Death Row
Records; but sex and violence and "hos and bitches" went on
unabated.
Until...Imus! With only a few chosen words from the man his
sycophants call The I-Man, everything changed. Suddenly Al
Sharpton, while going swiftly after Imus, heard the cry, "Go after
hip hop too!" So Sharpton proposed to take on rap lyrics by leading
boycotts and buying stock in music companies in order to voice his
opinions on rap at shareholders meetings. (That is exactly what
Delores Tucker did in 1995 -- she read rap lyrics to the
shareholders of Time Warner -- long before Al Sharpton saw the
light.)
Next thing you know, the "godfather of hip hop" Russell Simmons
says he wants to "redefine" rap (without the B, H and N-words), the
NAACP wants to "bury" the N-word, and the Federal Communications
Commission is asking lawmakers for regulations against TV violence.
Wow! The involuntary catalyst Imus has accidentally done with a few
words what others could not do with an entire campaign. We'll see
how it goes, but for now, C. Delores Tucker must be smiling in
Heaven.
topics:
Education, Law, NATO
