These race rows are par for the course, aren't they? I don't doubt that Don Imus has less than a sloppy tongue to answer for with his comment about "nappy-headed hos," but to see anyone reduced to the show trial of having to answer for it to Al Sharpton is cruel and unusual punishment.
You can write the rest of the script in your sleep. During his two-week suspension there will come archconservatives defending Imus, arguing that he hadn't said anything worse than what you'll hear on the latest Jay-Z album. Imus will mutter some network-mandated "official" apology when he returns on the air, on his own show. This episode will sink before the new wave of grim headlines out of Baghdad. Then some other "personality" will open his mouth and talk with his spleen, and the whole pathetic thing will repeat itself.
Why the same displays of bigotry and the same unseemly mea culpas, that often do more damage than the original offense? Rather than ask the hard questions of why it is that a comedic nonentity suddenly turns dire and Jim Crowish on stage in Los Angeles, or a scorched-larynx shock jock coopts an inner-city patois for outer-city racism, we have moments of "healing" and "dialogue." As if the knife had even begun to make an incision; as if any meaningful conversation ever got started.
There was one notable exception to these yawning round-robins of condescension and cant. In the mid to late 90's a play was staged in New York called "Spinning Into Butter." It was about a right-thinking college professor (we're talking "Think Globally, Act Locally" bumper stickers here) who lapses into a way beyond the melting pot tirade about blacks. Why is it, she thunders, that at this late stage in social advancement, the sight of young black men riding the subway give her the creeps and have her clutching her handbag? (This was the most charitable part of her spiel.)
You can imagine the mortified looks from white people in the audience. What made the play undeserving of the adjective "forgettable," however, was the reaction of black people in the audience. They sat there nodding, some even smiling as if to say, "Finally. A white person tells it like she really means it."
Too soon? Maybe. Which is why instead we get "you people."