Why 'Ho' Is So Hurtful
Don Imus surely never imagined that he would provoke such a widespread national conversation about race, sex, and culture. Some good may yet emerge from this squalid episode if we get beyond Imus himself.
Given his record, it was more than a slip of the tongue. Plumbing this new low, he should have been fired instantly by CBS (instead of waiting for advertisers to pull the plug). Such a swift repudiation of his assault on the admirable young black women on the Rutgers basketball team would have expressed the national revulsion. "I'm a woman, and I'm someone's child," said Kia Vaughn with moving restraint. "I achieved a lot. And unless they've given this name, a 'ho,' a new definition, then that is not what I am."
Imus, it has been said, was doing no more than spewing the language of sexual and racist aggression mouthed by African-Americans in rap and hip-hop (and talk radio, movies, TV, etc.)-and financed by corporations. If you look at the current top 10 rap albums they relish the "N" word and insult "ho's" and "bitches." That does not make the revealing language acceptable. In fact, it takes us back to a core issue: why the increasing stature of African-American females seems to have caused the male culture to demean them.
Female gains. The evidence of the relative status of females versus males in the African-American world is all around us, as pointed out recently by the Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger. The income gap between them has been growing in favor of women. African-American males do much less well in education. Many more African-American males are in prison; many have a diminished family life compared with women. Here is a little-addressed but critical dimension of the many other problems that beset the black community-including the disproportionate number of children with absent fathers, poor schools and poor school performance, and high levels of crime. There is a distressing, and growing, gap of academic performance between African-American children and the wider society. Black high school students graduate an average of four years behind white students in academic skills. In other words, the high school diplomas they receive are too often given for a junior high school education. This education failure explains to a very large degree why blacks, especially black males, continue to lag so far behind whites in income and socioeconomic status.
Equally distressing is the relative lack of responsiveness to the enormous effort and expenditures applied to narrowing the education gap. Many of the common prescriptions, such as smaller class size, have not yet worked. In schools like those in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent and integrated suburb of Cleveland, the reality is that moving into the suburbs or achieving middle-class status has not freed black students from the learning gap. In suburbs such as Cambridge, Mass., there is huge per-pupil expenditure-50 percent greater than that of the city of Boston just across the river-yet black students there lag not just behind whites and Asians but behind the state average for blacks as well. Schools can make a difference-they must be our principal hope-but programs and attitude matter as much as money. The 52 locally run KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools in 16 states and the District of Columbia not only teach academic subjects but set social norms, including self-discipline and respect for adult authority, as they seek to make up some of the human and social capital that some children were not or have not been acquiring at home. More than 90 percent of the KIPP students are African-American or Hispanic, and nearly 80 percent of their students matriculate in college.
KIPP's firm emphasis on encouraging achievement is an attempt to ease the powerful grip of peer culture on too many black children and fill the gap in their lives at home. The greatest single problem in American life is related, to a significant degree, to the one institution most inaccessible to social intervention-to wit, the family. One reason that impoverished Asian students at inferior city schools outperform their black and Hispanic classmates is the emphasis that Asian parents put on education.
The failure to complete high school is almost the equivalent of economic suicide. Those who drop out have lives that are marked by increased rates of crime, drug use, and gang membership. The street culture not only reflects a deeply dysfunctional society but perpetuates what it celebrates. So it is imperative that we address these issues that so often manifest themselves in the attempts by black males to demean striving black females. That is what we see in the language of the street, and that is what was regurgitated by Don Imus: When he had to call forth from his subconscious a way to react to the women of the Rutgers basketball team, he could only think of "nappy headed ho's."
Imus has helped reset the boundaries of acceptable speech. But we must go further, reawakening awareness of the unmet needs of our society.
This story appears in the April 30, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.