Tim Wise Weighs In On Imus

Like his others, it's a long essay so I'll just quote one of his talking points.

White Hypocrisy, Personal Responsibility, and Shifting the Blame to Black Folks

One thing has been made clear by the Imus incident: namely, white folks are incapable of blaming other whites for white racism and racist behavior. Despite all the demands by whites that blacks take "personal responsibility" for their lives, their behaviors, and the problems that often beset their communities--and especially that they stop blaming whites for their station in life--the fact is, we can't wait to blame someone else when we, or one of ours, screws up. So please note, from virtually every corner of the white media (and from black conservatives who are quick to let whites off the hook no matter what we do), the conversation has shifted from Imus's racism to a full-scale assault on rap music and hip-hop. In other words, it's those black people's fault when one of ours calls them a name. After all, they do it themselves, and Imus can't be expected not to say "ho" if Ice Cube has done it. At this point, I'm halfway expecting to hear Bill O'Reilly say that white folks wouldn't have even heard words like nigger if it weren't for 50 Cent.

But this kind of argument is not only absurd on the face of it, even more to the point, it's a complete affront to the concept of "personal responsibility." It ranks right up there with telling your mom that "Billy did it too," back when you were ten, and playing ball outside, and broke your neighbor's window. As I recall, mom didn't really give a rat's ass, and responded by saying something about Billy, a bridge, and whether his desire to jump off like a damned fool would inspire similar stupidity on your part.

By seeking to shift blame for Imus's comments, or those of Michael Richards, or whomever, onto black folks, white America has shown our duplicity to be something over which we have no shame. Of course, we've been doing it a long time. Witness the way that whites are quick to point out--whenever the issue of slavery is raised--that "blacks in Africa sold other blacks into bondage," as if that would make blacks every bit as culpable as the folks whose wealth was built by the slave system; as if Europeans had only come to Africa for the weather, and had been coerced into the transatlantic slave trade. Or consider the way that whites blame indigenous people for the mass death they experienced after the invasion of the Americas, by saying, with no sense of misgiving, "Well, it wasn't our fault, I mean, they mostly died of disease," as if native folk would have contracted these diseases short of the desire by whites to conquer the planet for our own aggrandizement. Or consider the way that whites seek to rationalize racial profiling, by arguing that since blacks have higher crime rates, individual and perfectly innocent blacks really can't complain when cops target them, and should instead blame their own for the way blacks get viewed, and treated; same thing with Arabs and terrorism. It's their fault, in other words, personal responsibility be damned.

Rap has been an especially useful scapegoat, such that whenever whites act out in a racist way we seem quick to blame rap. In fact, sometimes, when whites commit violence we blame rap too, as with the two school shooters in Jonesboro, Arkansas in the late 90s, who were reported to love rap music, as if that would explain their decision to ambush their classmates. When whites throw "ghetto" parties on college campuses, which denigrate the humanity of persons living in this nation's poorest and most marginalized communities, they routinely claim to be merely mimicking what they've seen on MTV. Snoop Dogg made 'em do it, see? Or perhaps it was Jay-Z, or Biggie, or 'Pac. Odd how the Sopranos never get blamed when white folks kill someone, nor the Saw movie trilogy, or, for that matter (since we're on the subject of music), Johnny Cash, who sang about shooting a man in Reno "just to watch him die." Hell, Johnny even sang that song in a prison to a bunch of inmates, with no apparent concern for inciting violence on their part.

And speaking of Cash, the rush to blame rap is especially intriguing given the history of violent themes in country music--a genre that is never blamed whenever some white, NASCAR lover commits murder. Consider country legend Porter Wagoner, whose song "Cold Hard Facts of Life," tells of a man who kills his wife for cheating on him. Or better still, "The First Mrs. Jones," in which Wagoner's protagonist, speaking to his new wife--who has just left him--tells her how he stalked and murdered his former betrothed, after which killing he buried her body parts in the woods. In other words, unless the "second Mrs. Jones" comes back to him, she's going to join the first one, pushing up daisies in the forest. If Young Buck dropped a song like this, white America would be screaming about how he was encouraging violence against women. But for Wagoner, a revered member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, no such concern attaches. He's just "telling a story."

Then there's Johnny Paycheck's classic, "Pardon Me, I've Got Someone to Kill," or Jimmy Rodgers who sang, "If you don't want to smell my smoke, don't monkey with my gun," or several of the violent ditties recorded by Spade Cooley in the 1950s: a man who didn't just sing of violence, but also practiced what he preached, by beating his wife to death in front of their teenage daughter in 1961. That rap is viewed so much more negatively than any other genre of music--so many of which have had their fair share of disturbing, violent and sexist imagery--attests to the racialized way in which danger has come to be understood. Only a fool could think race wasn't the primary reason for the double standard. In fact, research has found that when lyrics with violent themes are presented to whites in a focus group, as being rap lyrics, the participants respond far more negatively than when the same lyrics are presented as the lyrics they actually are: from a folk song, sung by whites.

But blaming rap is not only conveniently opportunistic, and intellectually dishonest, given all the pandering about personal responsibility. It also ignores the reasons why rap music sometimes--though not as uniformly as some seem to believe--peddles images of violence, or lyrics that are sexist. After all, if eighty percent of all rap music purchases are made by whites (and that is the conventional wisdom), then white consumers must be responding, via their purchases, to an already held impression of black people. Without such a pre-existing mental schema firmly in place, the images of blacks as gangstas, pimps, dealers and "hos" wouldn't resonate nearly so much as to make possible billions of dollars of sales annually. In other words, perhaps whites need to consider the possibility that the thug image has been marketable, and thus created a financial incentive for black artists to play to that trope because these images comport with the negative things that much of white America believes about blacks in the first place. Things which they believed, it should be noted, long before Cool Herc threw his first house party in the Bronx.

If white folks were interested in buying CDs by rap artists who sang about radical social transformation and community uplift--and yes there are many, many such artists out there--then that's the music that would be churned out in larger numbers. But white consumers aren't, by and large, looking to buy songs about overthrowing the system from which we benefit. White boys in the stale and lifeless 'burbs would rather listen to songs about guns and drugs, and being a thug, through which music they can live a more exciting life, if only in their fantasies. So in the ultimate irony, it is white buyers who make that kind of rap profitable, but instead of asking for any responsibility from them, we blame the artists for doing what they're supposed to do in a capitalist system, which is respond to market demand, no matter the social consequences. Naturally, of course, it isn't capitalism that gets the blame--a thoroughly European creation that has brought misery to millions, as did state socialism (another issue from the womb of Europe)--but rather, the black folks who have taken the bait offered by the market system. Even better is to read Cal Thomas's column from this week, in which he blamed liberal values and permissiveness for the coarseness of rap music, rather than the values trumpeted by the right, like profit-making.

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