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'Shocking reminder'
The main message of The Bee editorial (April 12) on the Rutgers girls' basketball team boils down to The Bee's distaste for talk radio. Don Imus' vacuous insult was already known, so The Bee and letter writers hyping it as a race crisis, even elevating the girls to Rosa Parks/greatness/victim/genius status, seems overreaching, if not inflammatory.
More revealing: The partisan Bee, in a moment of carelessness equal to Imus', takes a swipe at Rush Limbaugh for being "slavishly partisan," but has yet to editorialize on the far more "unwarranted" Duke lacrosse case.
Imus' gaffe pales in comparison to the treatment (without sufficient evidence) of the Duke males as criminals whose lives and liberty were up for sacrifice. If Duke's team had been black females, would they have been treated as the white males were? After a century of coeducation and "empowerment," are today's college-educated girls actually so vulnerable to life's clownish Imuses? Comparing the degree of offensiveness, does being insulted by a
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'Claim ignorance?'
I've got a lot of thoughts about the Don Imus controversy and those who are defending his remarks as nothing worse than what we hear in black rap lyrics.
Imus was very specific in calling black members of the Rutgers ladies basketball team "nappy-headed hos"; rapper words, as disgusting and demeaning as they are, make reference to women as a whole, not in specificity.
What on earth was funny or amusing, as old Don seems to deem them, about his utterances?
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The greater concern
I watched news on TV all day April 10-11. Hours and hours have been spent reporting on the probable consequences of the outrage caused by Don Imus' insults toward the Rutgers women's basketball team, along with the dropping of charges against the Duke lacrosse players.
While no one would think of these issues as unimportant, just how important are they compared to the death and destruction ongoing in Iraq?
I submit that reporting the killings of Iraqi citizens, women, children and babies be as worthy of the same number of hours as that of verbal insults and false charges, even to the point of our leaders who have caused this devastation being in danger of losing their jobs instantly just as Don Imus is.
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'Couple of phonies'
Regarding the recent Don Imus dust-up -- Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are the last two people on this planet to be hammering Imus.
Both Jackson and Sharpton have plenty of baggage from their past encounters in civil rights confrontations to make their crocodile tears of morality suspect.
Yes, Imus screwed up and he apologized. Let's move on. But, no! Now Rev. Sharpton is showing his true motive for revenge by demanding that Imus' employer fire him immediately.
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'Never be tolerated'
Don Imus has shown us the dark side of humanity and that hatred and racism cannot always be contained.
He chose bigotry over decency. He chose hatred over tolerance. And worse yet, he chose badly at every opportunity for redemption.
I will miss him, but the lessons we must learn from Don Imus should not be lost. Racism should never be tolerated, lest we forget.
I received an e-mail from Rutgers University (my alma mater) asking me to attend a rally [April 11] on the Rutgers campus. This rally was against Don Imus, who made the sexist and racist remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team.
Since I couldn't be there, I will protest Imus' remarks here in Fresno.
Paul Robeson graduated from Rutgers, where he was an All-American football player. He later became an opera singer and activist.
Paul Robeson would cry shame to Imus, as I and other alumnae and students are doing.
Beth Richardson Barnett
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