Apologies Are Not Enough, Don Imus
CNN just reported that radio host Don Imus will be suspended for two weeks starting Monday, April 16, based on an announcement from NBC. Imus recently made racist remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team — he called the players “nappy-haired hos.”
The NY Times today published a transcript of Imus’ appearance on Al Sharpton’s radio show where Imus tries to defend his racist remarks. Imus acknowledged on the program that he’d gone “way too far.”
The AP’s Jocelyn Noveck also writes today on a subject that relates to efforts to hold AsianWeek accountable for its publication of hate speech:
“I don’t care about an apology,” said Angela Burt-Murray, editor in chief of Essence magazine, who’s been one of the stronger voices speaking out against Imus’ characterization of the Rutgers women’s basketball team. “You’re not a child on the playground. You’re an adult who needs to take responsibility for his actions. And there need to be consequences.”
The public apology has merely become a quick fix, Burt-Murray said, to get back to business as quickly as possible. “Michael Richards apologizes. We move on. Mel Gibson apologizes. We move on,” she said. “When does it stop? When do WE make it stop?”
For one of the nation’s top feminist activists as well, Imus’ efforts at public remorse are pointless.
“It’s completely hollow,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, who called his words “beyond racist and sexist.” Her organization launched a drive Sunday for members to contact Imus’ corporate bosses at CBS Corp. and NBC Universal to demand his firing—and she says a few thousand have responded so far.
“This guy is just trying to get himself out of trouble,” said Gandy. “It’s hard to take him seriously when you look at his past. He’s not a first-time offender. The 47th time, I think it rings pretty false.”
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This ever-rising chorus of mea culpas leaves Cohen, author of a syndicated ethics column, rather disgusted.
“What passes for a public apology is utterly pro forma,” he said. “It’s: ‘I apologize and I take full responsibility’ … after which the person goes right on and does the same thing as before.”
Alternate Realities: Google Maps and NOLA
If I was a Katrina victim in New Orleans, I would be insulted by Google replacing its Maps views with pre-Katrina images — as if nothing ever happened there. But I think that I would have more critical issues to worry about.
North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight, wrote a letter to the Google CEO, saying that “Google’s use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history.”
I don’t believe that Google’s “airbrushing” was malicious, but as a mistake, it was indeed a great injustice to the victims. This incident is just symptomatic of how this country has mostly forgotten about Katrina’s victims. But not everyone, thankfully.
John Hanke’s explanation of the mistake relied on a technical explanation for why the pre-Katrina images were used. “[w]e were a bit surprised by some of these recent comments,” he writes and “it looks like this April Fool’s joke was on us.” Not the way I would have advised him to word the blog post if I was Google PR. John doesn’t seem to understand why Rep. Miller had an issue with the image replacement.
“Entire neighborhoods are now slab mosaics where houses once stood and shopping malls, churches and marinas are empty of life, many gone altogether,” reported the AP article.
And that’s the post-Katrina reality.
Essay on Asians and Blacks Sharing a Civil Rights History and Vision
Reprinted in full is an essay published March 27 on the New America Media website.
A Shared History And Vision
By Stewart Kwoh & Julie A. Su, APA Legal Center
Editor’s Note: A column published in Asian Week entitled “Why I Hate Blacks” promoted dismay across the ethnic media and prompted NAM to host a discussion with ethnic media leaders about journalistic responsibility. This is a comment from Stewart Kwoh and Julie A. Su. Stewart Kwoh is the Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles. Julie A. Su is Litigation Director at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and a Senior Fellow with the Jamestown Project based in New Haven, Connecticut.
Asian Week’s recent publication of an article by a Chinese American columnist entitled “Why I Hate Blacks” has created a stir among Asian Americans and African Americans, with swift calls from Asian American leaders for apologies from Asian Week, termination of that writer’s column, and accountability from the paper. We initially resisted writing about it, thinking that it would only give more air time to an article that does little more than remind us of the ignorance that fuels racism, but the lesson of this hateful article provides an opportunity for us – Asian Americans (and specifically, Chinese Americans) – to reflect and to act.
Today, high poverty rates characterize many Asian American ethnic groups, including Vietnamese, Hmong and Bangladeshi. The relatively high family income statistics for Asian Americans often result from multiple generations in the workforce rather than high individual incomes, an important distinction if we seek to measure success in the workplace and financial well-being. But it is true that, particularly in the Chinese community, a growing number are professionals or run their own businesses; own homes and send their children to good public schools. Last year, for the first time, Asian Americans became a majority in the University of California system. Nine Asian Americans currently serve in the California legislature.
Lest we forget, such achievements are not simply a matter of hard work and individual initiative.
Asian Americans owe a debt of gratitude for the rights we value, privileges we enjoy, and even presence in this country to our African American sisters and brothers. Changes to immigration laws in 1965 that opened the door to the wave of Asian immigrants who make up much of today’s Asian American middle class would have been unthinkable without the African American civil rights movement. Prior to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision barring states from setting up separate schools for Blacks and whites, it remained legal to segregate Chinese children from white public schools. African Americans defeated “separate but equal,” which paved the way for Asian American students to attend integrated schools.
As African Americans sat in at lunch counters and boycotted busses in the South, their calls for racial justice broke down barriers for Asian Americans. The passage of the Voting Rights Act, a victory achieved primarily through the struggles of African Americans, made possible voting districts where Asian American votes would not be diluted and includes the federal requirement of bilingual ballots utilized by so many Chinese and other Asian immigrants. How many Asian American government contractors, firefighters and police officers, and college professors would there be today had doors not been opened to us by affirmative action?
Asian Americans who know of our history in the U.S. – a history filled with both great cost and great achievement – know that our destinies were transformed by African Americans who fought for a better, more just world. It is our obligation as Asian Americans to remember this not only because of what it means about our collective past, but also for how it should inform our future; whether we as beneficiaries of civil rights continue to expand and protect their promise, or be silent in the face of regressive efforts to curtail them. Whether we enjoy our relative privilege without attention to the unfinished business of racial justice, or say we will not be content to rest while so many are denied a decent education, job, home, or real opportunity, because of racism.
Today, examples abound of Asian American-African American community building efforts, though they often occur beneath the media radar. The Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC), Los Angeles Urban League, and Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund are engaged in a historic effort to organize and empower parents to improve education in Los Angeles. Just last month, a parent summit attended by over 300 African American, Latino and Asian parents from Los Angeles County demonstrated the power of a multiracial network of parents to join together for change.
In 1991, APALC initiated a partnership with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, League of United Latino American Citizens, and Central American Resource Center to develop a training curriculum called Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations (LDIR). Today, LDIR includes a school-based component that brings our philosophy of moving beyond “celebrating diversity” to serious engagement on the root causes of racial, ethnic and cultural tensions to high school students. APALC has also joined in coalition with the NAACP LDF, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and other allies in the African American community and communities of color to sue educational institutions and private employers for discrimination against African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. Last fall, APALC helped the Los Angeles Urban League organize a delegation of Black leaders to China, a sign that growing ties between the two communities is not only a local phenomenon, it is global.
School children across the country learned about Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks last month as part of African American Heritage Month. We embrace such lessons, not only for what these heroes accomplished for African Americans and for all Americans, but because they embody the courage, leadership and vision for a just world that lifts us all. We, Asian Americans, should embrace that vision and work alongside African Americans to realize it.