WTF?: "Seinfeld"'s Michael 'Kramer' Richards in Weird-o-Rama Onstage Meltdown

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cynical interpretation: sharpton's ensuring hillary doesn't have to go on the show

cynicism justified?

― gabbneb, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 18:21 (nineteen years ago)

What reason could anyone have to oppose him being fired? If some brand new morning talk radio personality was hired by a major network and broadcast nationally over public airwaves, and on his first day on the job he made that same comment and it was met by the same response, what are the odds he would end up staying? Is there some grandfather clause that allows talk veterans to get away with this sort of stuff?

― iiiijjjj, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 18:31 (nineteen years ago)

The only good thing to come out of all of this is Scott's link to the cleaning products.

― Nicole, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 18:32 (nineteen years ago)

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_101052815.html

― gabbneb, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 19:03 (nineteen years ago)

What a bold move, to go on record as a powerful white male in the United States, and say that you believe in one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity/Bob Marley.

― iiiijjjj, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 19:12 (nineteen years ago)

man sharpton owns him on that radio show.

― M@tt He1ges0n, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 19:18 (nineteen years ago)

The Obama campaign declined to comment yesterday on its handling of the issue. One adviser pointed out, however, that Obama issued a public comment before the other major Democratic candidates -- including Clinton and former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

lol double standard lol

― deej, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 19:35 (nineteen years ago)

I first heard "nappy" in middle school, from classmates.

― jaymc, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 20:00 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.scene-stealers.com/images/uploads/bulworth2.jpeg

― gabbneb, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 20:03 (nineteen years ago)

The "but, but RAP" excuse is terrifically funny for all sorts of reasons -- I mean, even conceding that ever since McCain dropped that guest verse on The Massacre, the language of political talk radio is legitimately comparable to the language of music, it'd seem pretty clear that the black people most critical of these comments (like NAACP leaders or Sharpton) are not exactly huge defenders of misogyny in pop music. But I know conservatives have trouble telling black people apart like that.

One great subtextual irony of the athlete's press conference is that they all had their hair pressed nice and flat for the event.

― nabisco, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 22:32 (nineteen years ago)

Pardon me: athletes'.

― nabisco, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 22:33 (nineteen years ago)

P.S. I am really sick of people who are all like "black people call each other nigger all the time" -- this is a severely fucked-up perception based on people getting their information on What Black People Do All the Time pretty much solely from hip-hop videos and The Wire and shit, and I seriously wonder if people who say that honestly believe that the middle-aged woman in the next cubicle at work seriously goes home to her kids and says "what's up, my niggas, we're having Applebee's tonight!"

-- nabisco (nabisco), Monday, November 20, 2006 2:09 PM (4 months ago)

― river wolf, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:09 (nineteen years ago)

he's been dropped by msnbc

― deej, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:13 (nineteen years ago)

imus that is, nabisco is otm

― deej, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:14 (nineteen years ago)

I'm coming to hate the way these things get so drawn out in the media. Dude is a racist asshole and he sucks anyway, and same is for Michael Richards, and neither should be expressing their hate over the airwaves, and that ought to be it. Why does there have to be all this dramatic public self-flagellation, press-conferencing, summit talks between parties, "public debate" (created by more racist assholes who are angry that their right to be racist assholes is severely threatened), etc.? Wah.

― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:30 (nineteen years ago)

I am really sick of people who are all like "black people call each other nigger all the time" -- this is a severely fucked-up perception based on people getting their information on What Black People Do All the Time pretty much solely from hip-hop videos and The Wire and shit

people = white people, I assume

I get what you're saying, but I'm not really sure what the solution to the problem is.

― Dandy Don Weiner, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:00 (nineteen years ago)

The solution is turn off the tv go out of your fucking house once in a while.

― Hurting 2, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:03 (nineteen years ago)

http://i15.tinypic.com/447ziug.jpg

same is for Michael Richards,

Whoa hold on, Michael Richard has done this... once and you can say he was provoked whereas Imus has done this multiple times and is, in some respects, a journalist/member of the media/whatever.

I am really sick of people who are all like "black people call each other nigger all the time" -- this is a severely fucked-up perception based on people getting their information on What Black People Do All the Time pretty much solely from hip-hop videos and The Wire and shit

The funny thing is that the rhetoric of these people is often as offensive, profane and violent as what they criticize.

― JW, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:04 (nineteen years ago)

Whoa hold on, Michael Richard has done this... once and you can say he was provoked whereas Imus has done this multiple times and is, in some respects, a journalist/member of the media/whatever.

Yeah but Richards' rant was outright hateful!

― Curt1s Stephens, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:07 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah Richards went on and on enough that there's not much that can explain it except outright hate, short of maybe a severe nervous breakdown or paranoid episode.

― Hurting 2, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:14 (nineteen years ago)

When you tell your mom and dad you wish they would die, do you really mean it?

xpost

― JW, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:17 (nineteen years ago)

Which is all the more reason why these apologies are so ridiculous, ESPECIALLY coming from Imus, who is an experienced jock and is very calculated in his "telling it like it is" barbs. The only thing he really feels he did wrong here was to miscalculate. It's like a four-year-old apologizing because mommy got madder than he thought she would. (xpost to self)

― Hurting 2, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:18 (nineteen years ago)

[/awkward syntax]

― Hurting 2, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:20 (nineteen years ago)

I think we're on the same page.

― JW, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:23 (nineteen years ago)

heh, was out of country when story broke, am late in stating the obvious, I suppose.

My only other reaction is that the whole thing says almost as much about the nation's prejudice in favor of athletes as it does about racial prejudice. By which I only mean I don't think the story would be as big if Imus had denigrated Henry Louis Gates or something.

― Hurting 2, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:31 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, I can't see the current ruckus happening if he had called Angela Davis a nappy headed ho.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:41 (nineteen years ago)

i dunno, all of nyc calls a-rod a giant purse swinging homo and no one raises an eyebrow

― rps, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:43 (nineteen years ago)

In fact I've heard WABC jocks say borderline racist things about black politicians and intellectuals plenty of times.

― Hurting 2, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:44 (nineteen years ago)

OTfuckingM

There was some story about how that game was *surely* the biggest day of their lives. Ughhhhhh.

― JW, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:45 (nineteen years ago)

Ha, yeah, I think the myth and idealization of the scholar-athlete are probably pointing up the horribleness of his target a little bit. But not THAT much, really. People totally suspend the scholar-athelete myth when it comes to black men (accurately, but often selectively aimed at black men), all the time ... and surely the scholar-athelete ideal is way closer to true with women's sports, where there's not loads of money involved ... and they were, athletically speaking, the underdogs here ... and just generally when a small, specific bunch of girls from places like Newark go to college and are an unlikely sports success and then for zero reason you gratuitously insult them w/r/t race and sex (and let's face it, more than anything CLASS), it's just ... ridiculous.

If a right-wing radio guy had said something similar about, say, abstract "welfare recipients," there'd be grumbling and complaint but not this level of furor -- because that's the current mode of subtextual racism. Whereas the Imus comment kinda points back to an older and more blatant and more hurtful form of racism, which is the kind where you remind specific people that no matter WHAT they do -- college, hard-earned athletic success, whatever -- you're still gonna see them as ghetto, as low-class hos, as dirty and worthless and beneath you.

Note that that's the exact same mode as the Gwen Ifill cleaning-lady comment, too! And I hate to say this, because it's going to sound weird, but ... well, people get away with faintly racist comments when they connect them to behavior and culture, insulting abstract stereotypes of bad things that black people are supposedly like. But Gwen Ifill is ... professional, educated, has a newscaster voice, and is socially no different from any white journalist. So calling her the cleaning lady has that same undertow -- "no matter what you do, how successful and mainstream and respectable you are, you're still a nigger."

And I say that'll sound weird because I don't mean to suggest that it's somehow more okay to make racist remarks about poor, uneducated black people than it is to make them about Gwen Ifill. It's just that when you're doing it to Gwen Ifill, you're making it clearer that you're not just one of those racists who has issues with perceptions of "black culture" -- you don't care WHERE black people are in our society, you're still going to keep sneering that they're beneath you.

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:58 (nineteen years ago)

Apparently I don't know how to spell "athlete."

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 00:59 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0028,goldstein,16350,1.html

― rps, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:35 (nineteen years ago)

little thick with the nazi comparisons, esp at the end there.

― kenan, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:54 (nineteen years ago)

By the way, back to Hurting upthread: I think the sad fact is that most Americans don't really care that much if someone is racist, sexist, or classist, so long as they don't feel like they're in the group being insulted. They might not like it, and they'll criticize it, but they don't want anything to change because of it; they cordon off "race" as a specific, minor, and unimportant issue. E.g., in this case, what everyone probably wishes -- from the media Imus works in to his listeners/viewers -- is that he'd just not say anything too over the line, and they could go on as they did before, appreciating him in every other way.

I can understand the impulse behind this kind of cordoning-off -- it's totally natural and makes sense -- but it's all dependent on not really caring how awful these kinds of insults are, and putting your own tastes and convenience above the horribleness of the thing done. (In a way people wouldn't with plenty of other types of horrible comments, actually -- nobody would cordon off a joke about child molestation that way.) Point being that comments like this aren't actually taboo -- people seem to criticize them as "inappropriate," or impolite, but they don't actually get that gut-level taboo "you are a truly bad person for saying that" reaction.

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:55 (nineteen years ago)

Kiss Me
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/don_imus_freshintel.jpg

― danbunny, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:03 (nineteen years ago)

There was some story about how that game was *surely* the biggest day of their lives. Ughhhhhh.

no one says such things about white athletes

― gabbneb, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:03 (nineteen years ago)

Okay also following this story I am really serious about this: Imus's ABSOLUTE best excuse would be to pretend he wasn't aware of the significance of his words! Like, "I was playing with slang, but I'm an old white guy, so I didn't really understand the implications, and I'm really really sorry."

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:07 (nineteen years ago)

i don't think he's that bright

― lfam, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:12 (nineteen years ago)

Like most successful political-radio dudes, he seems like too much of a bull-headed, cantankerous old dick to think of polite ways out of stuff. (Reasonable people make for bad radio -- possibly they spend too much time pausing to actually think about what they're saying.)

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:15 (nineteen years ago)

xxpost That's probably partially the truth, but more true in his head is probably what I joked about earlier about him self-applying the "honky" label. He's thinking, "Well hell, I've always been a bit of a race comedian, how is this so bad?"

they don't actually get that gut-level taboo "you are a truly bad person for saying that" reaction

Which is likely how Imus gets away with saying blatantly racist things. His remarks go un-criticized, and his own attitudes go unexamined. For a long, long time.

― kenan, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:17 (nineteen years ago)

stern was recounting how many times he heard imus referring to th secretary at wnbc as a n---er,in a riff that actually made me laugh out loud.

― danbunny, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:19 (nineteen years ago)

By now he's like your old racist grampa. He ain't going to change.

― kenan, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:19 (nineteen years ago)

By the way, back to Hurting upthread: I think the sad fact is that most Americans don't really care that much if someone is racist, sexist, or classist, so long as they don't feel like they're in the group being insulted. They might not like it, and they'll criticize it, but they don't want anything to change because of it; they cordon off "race" as a specific, minor, and unimportant issue. E.g., in this case, what everyone probably wishes -- from the media Imus works in to his listeners/viewers -- is that he'd just not say anything too over the line, and they could go on as they did before, appreciating him in every other way.

I can understand the impulse behind this kind of cordoning-off -- it's totally natural and makes sense -- but it's all dependent on not really caring how awful these kinds of insults are, and putting your own tastes and convenience above the horribleness of the thing done. (In a way people wouldn't with plenty of other types of horrible comments, actually -- nobody would cordon off a joke about child molestation that way.) Point being that comments like this aren't actually taboo -- people seem to criticize them as "inappropriate," or impolite, but they don't actually get that gut-level taboo "you are a truly bad person for saying that" reaction.

okay this actually explains this whole thread in a way that I didn't understand before, so thanks.

― horseshoe, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:20 (nineteen years ago)

i think what you meant to say was, nabisco OTM

― kenan, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:21 (nineteen years ago)

I like to use different words sometimes.

― horseshoe, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:22 (nineteen years ago)

yeah, that was pretty excellent

― gbx, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:23 (nineteen years ago)

i think if u spent alot of time fixing your hair before a huge televised basketball game u would be insulted if someone referred to ypur efforts as "nappy"

― danbunny, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:24 (nineteen years ago)

I imagine Imus to be the kind of guy who excuses himself by thinking/saying things like, "It's no big deal if I call a black person a nigger, because everyone knows I don't really hate black people."

― kenan, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:25 (nineteen years ago)

stern was recounting how many times he heard imus referring to th secretary at wnbc as a n---er,in a riff that actually made me laugh out loud.

oh my I'd love to hear this.

― kenan, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:28 (nineteen years ago)

I meant nabisco otm, but also, this is an invisible wall I run up against every time I talk about racism and I think I understand the "argument" such as it is a little better now.

― horseshoe, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:29 (nineteen years ago)

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