double standards?

Music: For Against: Echelons (1986)

Don Imus is to meet later today with the women of the Rutger's basketball team whom he dehumanized. The meeting will be moderated by a Baptist minister from New Jersey (at least one of the players is in his congregation). One can only imagine how the conversation will go. Speaking out yesterday and today in various venues, the team and their coach have been underscoring their complex personhood ("we are people," "we are students") and have stopped short of calling for Imus' job. Watching the women on television this morning, the response is unquestionably smart and strategic: it is clear the women and their coach are recognizing an opportunity to dialogue on "race" and are making lemonade of this---or at least trying to do so. How long this discussion can be sustained is questionable (e.g., Katrina coverage has sort of proved the point that the mass media will not sustain a race discussion beyond the point of eyeballs with the dollar-signs in them). Although a couple of commentators have suggested Imus is over-apologizing and thereby losing his main audience, I do think his quick admission of fault has spared him the worst outcome (remember a certain Senator from Mississippi?) and encouraged a larger conversation about the issues of racism and sexism (classicism has definitely been packed away, as the "Rutgers = elite" card was played).

The Today show aired a lengthy segment this morning, with learned and reasonable statements from experts afterward, about the "double standard" of denigration and dehumanization. The leadoff was Imus' assertion yesterday that "nappy-headed hoes" is a phrase from the African American (implied "hip-hop") idiom and the tacit assertion that he was the victim of a double standard. Folks were interviewed who tried to explain why blacks can refer to each other with the "N-word," while white people cannot. Those are the "rules," explained one of the interviewees. Another professor from somewhere in Florida sharply remarked that people need to attend to the complexity of voice---but her remarks were so tightly edited it seemed almost nonsensical.

Not one of the experts interviewed---with a significant time allotment, I might add---even attempted to explain the African American vernacular tradition, or how the "rules of voice" here refers to some extent to "doin' the dozens." Never mind that Henry Louis Gates Jr. has made a career out of explaining the "rules" of black vernacular gaming, beginning with The Signifying Monkey and continuing through many articles, essays, and interviews written for a broader audience, like the stuff he wrote about 2 Live Crew's lyrics. The "rules" are, well, something like a white perception of black vernacular practice in which language is used against itself, on the paradigmatic axis and associatively, to confront whiteness; the practice is rooted in the double-consciousness (and double-speak), and cannot be understood as some "linear" rhetoric in which white folks are subject to a "double standard." To call black vernacular "insults" part of a double standard is to miss the point, and in some sense, become party to "signification" (as opposed to "signifyin'")---a rigged language game from the get-go.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, the president of Spelman College (a historically black women's college in Atlanta) was one of the experts on the show this morning. She stressed the systemic nature of sexism and racism, and noted that the problem is with all communities of speakers. She noted the practice of calling others names should stop in the black community as well as the white community (and, of course, the argot of hip-hop was blamed). Although I do not disagree with the claims that sexism and racism within the black community is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, I'm somewhat taken aback at the lack of references to what is a rather robust research tradition on black vernacular speech practices: calling someone a bitch or ho in a hip-hop song is not meant to be taken literally, or at least, it wasn't back in the early explosion of "rap" when Ice-T exhorted white suburban teens to kill cops. The issue between Imus and, say, a black man calling someone a "nappy-headed hoe" has something to do with figuration. Imus was signifying; when a hip-hopper is boasting of his exploits, well, it's closer to signifyin'---figuration, that is, association and poetics, certainly not the domain of the syntagmatic and the literal.

I worry, Angela, that you may very well be right in your comments on the previous post. But those of us who teach issues that touch on popular culture can at least bring the issue into discussion in the classroom. Fortunately, I'm teaching Gates next week!