I think he was just referencing the movie School Daze and added "hos" on the end to try and sound cool or something. They were comparing the looks of the two teams like the premise in School Daze.
He was...which makes this whole thing even MORE ridiculous......they were goofing on SPIKE LEE'S movie for christ sakes...they were referred to jiggaboos and wannabes in the movie....the movie written by an african american man....who wasnt suspended even for a second as a matter of fact....what the hell do you think JUNGLE FEVER refers to???????????? Is it politically correct? Probably not.....but since Spike friggin Lee wrote it, its ok....but if Ron Howard calls his next movie Jungle Fever, it'll be on CNN all day long
now you're using twisted logic. the terms in the movie aren't used as flattering terms. they're both insults to the other group. and spike lee isn't using the terms in the movie to insult a group of people. they are characters in the movie. surely even you can understand the difference of a movie character using a term to make a point, and a radio host using that term to insult a real person. in the movie "mississippi burning" the characters use the term "******" as an insult. the movie is written by someone white and directed by someone white. surely you understand the difference.
he never caused fat al sharpton or jesse jackson to hold court on national TV either BTW - Miss burning told a STORY....a true story....slight difference. Spikes movies are based on stereotypes of African Americans (and other races too sometimes) Does that mean it would be ok to do a remake of the Fish that saved Pittsburgh and call the team the Kike, 4 Jiggaboos and a Ho? Those would be characters after all.
This is an interesting column by Whitlock. I think he is wrong to let Imus off the hook, but I think he says important things about the toxicity of much of hip hop culture. It is a serious problem for the black community and the country in general. Here's a column where I think he makes the case much better- Hip Hop Serving Up Plan for Failure Black Youth Need to Break Free of Prison Culture By JASON WHITLOCK What to do? That's the only thing left to ponder now that the hot mess that was NBA All-Star Weekend has left us with no choice but to deal with a problem that has been fomenting for 20 years. Under Hip Hop's Hold Prison culture swallowed hip-hop culture, turning party music into a celebration of violence, hostility, disrespect and drug-dealing. Prison culture created the Black KKK and negated much of the progress won by the civil-rights movement. We can no longer afford to live in denial of these realities, and we must formulate a game plan to combat the self-destructive culture that is influencing too many young black men and women. I offer no apologies for putting these issues on the table publicly. If anything, I apologize for waiting too long. Prison culture is winning. It has corrupted a form of music that once gave us great joy and/or offered inspiration. Prison culture -- with its BET and MTV videos, popular movies, acceptance in the mainstream media and false gods -- Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg -- has perverted the American dream for black youth. The blueprint for black success painted by pop culture and the mainstream media goes something like this: Step 1: Four to five years posted up on the block building a small drug-dealing empire. Step 2: Three to four years shuffling in and out of prison on drug-trafficking charges. Step 3: Write and perform rap songs about dealing drugs, killing *****s, running from the police and bad-mouthing black women. Step 4: Sign with a major record label that is anxious to make money off prison culture. Step 5: Start your own record label and find other drug-dealers-turned-rappers or wannabe-drug-dealers-turned-rappers to exploit. Step 6: Buy a small percentage of a pro sports franchise, run around with NBA and NFL players and allow black and white members of the mainstream media to kiss your pinkie ring. What to do about all of this? Hip-hop/prison culture must be destroyed and remade. In its present, N-word-reliant, violence-promoting form, nothing good can come from hip hop. Just like the prison system, hip hop's popular music is another vehicle to imprison the minds and bodies of the youth who devour it. Our children think they're participating in a culture that is meant to empower them. Hip hop -- disguised in low-hanging platinum chains, 24-inch rims, platinum grills and other flossy material possessions -- cripples black youth and infects them with a prison mindset that even NFL and NBA dollars can't seem to shake. I don't hate hip hop. I hate what it has become. I hate what it has done to the minds and values of young people. You think you're going to be the next Jay-Z. The reality is if you follow the principles celebrated in hip hop, you're far more likely to be the next Tookie Williams. Big Tigger and other hip hop groupies won't tell you that. Hip hop is filled with hostility and disrespect, the tools needed to survive while incarcerated. Hip hop cares little about family and knows nothing of the rewards of parenting. You don't parent in prison; you baby-daddy in prison. Hip hop judges love by your willingness to embrace evil -- ride (kill) or die. Just like the Ebonics language, the tattoos and cornrows are straight from the prison playbook. So are the sagging pants, which started as a way for gay prisoners to signal their availability for action. The rappers love to tell you they're keeping it real, but they leave out so much to the hip hip/prison culture story. "Gangbanging" and being a "rider" is glorified. They don't tell you that much of the violence played out on the streets is directly related to the love affairs that play out behind bars. You've heard that there's a thin line between love and hate. Well, when two people lay down, at least one person is getting up with feelings. It's easy for those feelings to turn hard and lethal when one person is forced to lie down. But they don't rap about that. They don't tell you what's at the foundation of the most self-destructive culture in American history. Prison values are being popularized through hip hop. Men who don't expect to or care whether they live past age 30 are passing on their values to kids. That's why hip hop is an instant-gratification movement. The civil-rights movement took a long-term approach; it was about sacrificing for the next generation. America, with its repressive drug laws and get-tough-on-non-violent-crime political maneuvering, has incarcerated 25 percent of the black men from the "next generation." Art is often born from pain. Should we be surprised that a culture has been born from the pain of black incarceration? A white critic of my All-Star columns, Dave Zirin, asked me Monday: "If black men weren't in prison, don't you think they'd rap about something else?" It was a great question. What came first, the explosion of American prison building or the explosion of gangsta rap? California, Ronald Reagan's state, was at the forefront of both explosions. They're both byproducts of the war on drugs. They all need to stop -- gangsta rap, prison building and the fruitless war on drugs. We need to reject prison culture. Take it off our black-owned radio stations, BET and MTV. Refuse to support it at movie theatres. Make Kanye West pay a price for telling black kids they're stupid for pursuing an education. (To give you an indication of how screwed up things are, Time Magazine put Kanye on its cover and hailed him a genius.) And we need to fight for sweeping reforms to America's drug laws. We probably need to legalize recreational drugs and eliminate drug dealing as an extremely lucrative occupation. If it was legal, there would be less violence associated with the sale of drugs. If it was legal, there would certainly be far fewer non-violent drug users headed to Black KKK laboratories/prisons. There also needs to be serious prison reform. We have this lust to see criminals severely punished. We seem to take delight in the fact that they brutalize each other while incarcerated. We want them thrown in the hole, denied the right to education. We want them caged up like animals, and then we wonder why they act like animals when their mandatory-minimum sentences run out and they're set free to rejoin society. These black and brown, formerly non-violent offenders don't come home to our lawmakers' neighborhoods. They don't attend the same parties or frequent the same nightclubs as our lawmakers. They don't join Joe Biden's posse. We have to deal with them. They're family. They're cousins, uncles, nephews, best friends from fifth grade. Ideally they need to come home to us more civilized than when they left. At the very least, we can't build prisons that specialize in manufacturing predators. Our drug laws snatch them. Our prisons rape them of whatever humanity they had. And hip hop culture installs them as role models. The whole vicious cycle needs to be blown up or we're going to lose the next-next generation at an even more alarming rate than the previous one. http://sports.aol.com/whitlock/_a/hip-hop-serving-up-plan-for-failure/20070227103009990001 Here Whitlock is frank about a serious problem in the black community, but he goes beyond that to identify the societal role in creating this problem (the War on Drugs > large % of black males imprisoned in a dysfunctional violent system > toxic prison culture dominating hip hop > huge negative impact on black youth. He describes this reality without excusing people from personal responsibility and he proposes solutions beyond "Black folk need to just start acting right."
But they were talking about the movie and where the terms came from. That was the gist of the conversation; pointing out the different appearances of the girls of the two teams just like the different appearances of the movie characters.
the whole point of freakin movie is stereotypes. that's the whole freakin point of the movie. the stereotypes are negative. its the same thing you're constantly complaining about in this thread. if you're weren't so hot on your soapbox you'd understand. the movie was addressing negative stereotypes in the black community about each other. black on black racism sort of. he's addressing the same issue you guys are complaining about in reference to rap music. he's saying that black people shouldn't be stereotyping each other in those ways. you obviously haven't seen the movie because if you had I can't believe you missed the point.
I understand what they were talking about. he was making a joke, like the movie was like the game. rutgers' girls were jiggaboos, tenessee's were wanabes. but spike lee's movie uses those terms as negative insults. he's not portraying using those terms as a positive. they are negatives in the movie. his point is that blacks shouldn't be looking at each other like that. that's my point. the poster who said spike caught no flack for using those terms in the movie acts like spike is going around using those terms in real life, totaling ignoring the point of the movie.
and even though the movie "school daze" isn't a true story, its a movie that is supposed to address real issues.
I have seen the movie...i like Spike's movies...they are entertaining...as is Imus sometimes Im saying that Imus was referrencing the movie when he and Bernard used "nappy headed hos" and "jiggaboos"...so the double standard that Imus is being flamed for reiterating those terms is a joke.
Anytime you use derogatory terms that are directed at people only due to ethnic or racial charateristics or features, you're going to be crossing the line because you're attacking an entire race or ethnicity. It does beyond just being mean-spirited and takes it to a different level. Using the term "nappy-head hos", which while not the most vile thing someone can say, is still racially directed. Only black people have "nappy heads" and this is generally a derogatory term. I'm not saying that it would be necessarily good or right if Imus had been mean-spirited but non-racial but whenever there is a derogatory racial element to it, you're taking it to a new level.
its not a double standard. spike lee isn't using those terms as a joke. in the movie they're insults. the whole point of the movie is no one should be using those terms. its just like movies that use the term "******" for dramatic purposes.
Get a clue. Imus is not a director or actor making comments as a character inside a movie. He was making these comments as a real person in "real life".
But everyone is going to see it and Imus was pointing it out. He used the movie and it's terms a backdrop to what he was talking about. He wasn't just throwing insults. The terms had a purpose. And what we are talking about here is not even being mentioned in the national media.
I don't understand your point. clearly when the guy says "jiggaboo" he's using it as an insult, because that's what it is. yes I understand using the movie as a backdrop, it was actually fairly clever, but it was an insult. that had already established that they thought the girls looked "rough".
Good articles by Whitlock, both this one and the one cited by Gifford. Listening to Imus' remarks they strike me as being more mysoginistic than racist and that he was mostly riffing off of hip hop lingo. During a lot of this I've been thinking about an ad that I saw for the movie How High starring rappers Method Man and Red Man and I remember one ad for it that said "Ho Ho HO" underneath pictures of nubile young women both white and black. The term "Ho" is getting a lot of attention that a white male like Imus has said it but it is something that has gained widespread cultural use from hip hop. I'm not going to say this should excuse what Imus has said as being offensive but mysoginistic languange is a problem that is far greater than Imus and something that has been popularized by others.
