Party of 1

After several weeks of blog posts and press reviews, I’m pleased to present what I hope will be the first of many interviews and features on the site.

The April 4, 2007 incident in which “shock-jock” Don Imus described members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos” quickly spiraled into a surreal episode in the history of American race relations, at once sad and amusing. Michael Awkward, Gayl A. Jones Collegiate Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture  at the University of Michigan, is a thinker of progressive inclinations who at the same time seeks to avoid excesses of so-called “correctness.” He is the author of Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), a work in which he attempts to place the episode in the broadest possible context and give all the participants their due, for better or worse.

I spoke to Prof. Awkward by telephone in late October, from his home in Ann Arbor.

DC: You were a regular listener and/or viewer of the Imus program going back to the year 2000 or so?

MA: Yeah, that’s right.

DC: You mention that you sympathized with Imus, because in your academic work you deal with feminist issues and you would meet with feminists at conferences and in your work — who took the attitude that  “a good man was hard to find” and they weren’t quite sure you were it?

MA: I’m not sure to what extent that has to do with me sympathizing with Imus. I think as much as anything else, I was trying to speak about a moment in my life when I had developed more of an antiauthoritarian attitude than I had had previously, in terms of the work that I was doing and I think that I was a little frustrated with certain things that were going on professionally and personally and in other areas and it was useful and interesting and maybe even refreshing to some degree or another, to encounter at that moment somebody with the predilictions toward those kind of impulses that Imus himself had, so I think that there was a kind of sympathy on my part with regard to my own thinking about things and his.

DC:    Sure. In the sense of not making concessions too quickly to so-called correctness.

MA:    Well, I just, I think I had always tried to some degree to figure out what worked and what didn’t work, what seemed to be a function of people’s limited ideas about things and what seemed to actually be true and I did it in my work with regard to my engagement with feminism, which I fully embrace and accept, but there were also moments and times when I realized that I was being asked to capitulate to certain kinds of attitudes that I didn’t really necessarily fully feel, so I think that there was a kind of element, always, in me that wanted to push the ideology that I was concerned with a little bit further and I was just interested in the ways that Imus, pushed all sorts of boundaries.

DC:    Going back to the  April 4, 2007, incident . . . . It didn’t look as though you ever had any contact with Imus or McGuirk or McCord or any of his employers, MSNBC or WABC, did you?

MA:    Not at all. Maybe for 3 or 4 years or so, I contributed to his charities. . . . More recently, I became an Imus Insider [Actually, "Inside Imus" -- paid subscription to broadcast archive, podcasts, email -- DC] because between the time the show went off of the air and the time that my book came out, I hadn’t really paid a whole lot of attention, except in the newspaper articles, to what was going on, –  it just wasn’t easily available, but now I’m an Imus Insider, so I get to check on his Web site and listen to segments of the program or all of it, if I really want to. . . . But no, I haven’t really talked to any of those people.

DC:    It looked as though you had done some research or were able to dig some information up about what goes on at the program behind the scenes. Can you speak about that, about what you were able to find out?

MA:    Maybe I’m not particularly understanding your question, but just in terms of what I’ve read and what they allow us to know in terms of the minimal interviews that they did, of course, when the incident happened and the show had been taken off the air, Bernard McGuirk started appearing on television as himself in ways that he hadn’t before and so . . . .

DC:    Yeah, I remember one or two appearances on Hannity and Colmes in particular . . . .

MA:    . . . . So I have a sense of what goes on in the show, but largely it comes from what Imus himself talks about or what they talk about on the air. And I’ve read some books and read some interviews and some articles about it, but that’s basically what I know.

DC:    There may be some things viewers and listeners, including yours truly, may have been naive about. For one thing, I notice you describe the incident in question, the exchange between Imus and McGuirk, as a skit . . . .  I can recall seeing a Congresswoman on one of the cable TV networks, a week or two after the incident, mentioning that she thought the remark was premeditated or at least prerehearsed, but  — would the prerehearsal, as far as you know, have consisted of anything more than maybe a brief conversation the night before or that morning before the thing aired?

MA:    The only thing that I could imagine that would have happened is that there was some — and this is just pure speculation on my part — but some discussion on Imus’s part about what he had watched the night before. It does seem as though there was some agreement on their part that they were going to comment on that bit, that segment of the news or of the sports, but whether or not it went any further than that, I’m not really sure. A lot of times it just seems as though what they are doing is sort of freeform responding to what the other says. Whether or not that happened in this case, I don’t really know, I’m just speculating, but it appeared to be the case. And the other thing that was just absolutely clear to me is that, um, when I was looking at and listening to the skit again, there was this sense that somebody had decided that they were going to bring up the Spike Lee film, that they were going to bring up other issues that were then addressed there, but that Imus himself wasn’t aware enough or informed enough about what was going on to be able to actually play his part. [Imus responded to producer Bernard McGuirk's use of the terms "Jigaboos" and "Wannabes" to refer to the Rutgers and Tennessee players respectively. Co-host Charles McCord attributed this vocabulary to Lee's Do the Right Thing -- whereas in fact it was School Daze that portrayed a battle between young women who conformed broadly to these stereotypes. -- DC] They had to keep feeding him lines.

DC:    You mentioned he wasn’t really well-prepared for what they were going to do . . . .

MA:    From what I could tell, the nature of his responses and affect, it seemed as though they were trying to remind him of things that they might have mentioned to him before the show, but he just didn’t know — he was pretending in all sorts of ways, a kind of knowledge and hipness with regard to urban culture, film culture, and a lot of other things that he never really manifested at least as far as I can tell, with regard to Black culture.

DC:    Well, I have heard his audience skews toward older white males, so he may be hipper than his audience but maybe not hip enough for what he was trying to do on the day, I guess.

MA:    What I’ve seen subsequently is that the demographic they’re trying to reach and probably were trying to reach by responding to the skit in the ways that they were, was the sort of 25- to 49 demographic but  . . . .

DC:    A younger audience.

MA:    Yeah, but I suspect that — he talks about this a lot and right before the show started airing on [Fox Business Network], he gave a couple of interviews and he talked about the fact that what they were hoping to do was to increase their audience — but he knew that mainly the audience was readers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and I don’t suspect that that audience consists very much of people under the age of 30, so. . .

DC:    Were you tuned in when the incident happened that morning?

MA:    No. No, I wasn’t. I read about it in the newspaper.

DC:    Actually, I think I was, but I wasn’t paying attention fully. . . .  One thing that you mentioned that I wasn’t really hip to and many other viewers and listeners may have not been — was that when they did the skit, they altered the tone of their voices so that, in effect, they were doing the skit in blackface. They were trying to mimic young, urban, African American males.

MA:    As I tried to talk about in the book, Bernie McGuirk, the producer, does that all the time. He does it less, I suspect, these days than he used to, but he used to come on the air in character, not necessarily in blackface obviously, but mimicking the voices of certain kinds of, certain famous blacks who . . . .

DC:    [New Orleans Mayor] Ray Nagin, for quite a while . . . .

MA:    Yeah, Ray Nagin, Maya Angelou, and a couple of other people, and he does it a lot and Imus does it a little bit but mainly in terms of that, “Yo, baby,” — those sorts of formulations. And so it seemed to me that that was the best way to think about they were trying to do, not that they were speaking for themselves but they were trying to approximate what they that thought young Blacks would think about looking at the women who were on the Rutgers women’s basketball team as they were running up and down the court. But it’s just not clear to me that it would be possible to imagine that Imus really cared that much about the appearance of those women. I don’t think that he was thinking about them much at all. I think that they were trying to figure out some way to make the story interesting to their viewers and they did it in the way that they often do things, by offering, just obviously, to some degree or another, sexist remarks, but remarks that responded to specifically what they saw as the appearance of the women that they saw who were running up and down the court, so . . . .

DC:    Well, what happened was that, obviously, he thought he could say this and not be misunderstood but he was wrong. In this case, it went a little bit over the line.

MA:    Well, I think that part of what happened was — it’s interesting, in large part because of the book but, and in part because I’m sort of very vaguely fascinated with regard to Imus, I’ve continued to read things about him and it’s, it’s interesting that, that part of what he’s tried to do recently is to move away from a kind of defense of his statement that he started to make in the beginning of the controversy. He was trying to insist that people needed to understand him and his show in context and he said that, at the very least, they needed to understand that what the show does, which was to, as he keeps saying, and he’s started to say even more recently, to revel in other people’s misfortunes. And what I think he’s started to do is to, what he tried to do immediately, was to say, if you understand who I am and who this show is, what this show is about, you’ll understand that there was no malice intended. You’ll understand that this is just our attempt at humor that went awry. More recently, though, he’s been saying that that’s not the case. He’s been saying that he said something that he shouldn’t have said, he said something that was over the line and that he  insulting people who weren’t in the position to defend themselves and people who weren’t big enough in the culture to have justified his comments in the ways that he made them. And so there’s a kind of 180 that he’s been taking with regard to what he said. I think he made a promise to the girls on the Rutgers basketball team, the young women on the team, that he was never going to say anything that, that made them think that they shouldn’t have accepted his apology and I think he’s trying to stick to that, even to the extent that he’s sort of reversed himself on whether or not it was acceptable or understandable that he had said what he said.

DC:    Do you reckon bringing Tony Powell and Karith Foster onto the program, and guests like Deborah Dickerson, is that panning out the way it ought to, do you think? Have you followed it closely?

MA:    I know that Karith Foster is no longer on the show for whatever reason — I haven’t tried to figure out precisely why, I never actually saw her on the show. Tony Powell is on the show and he seems to have fit in with what I think of as the sort of “old boys network” that he and McGuirk and Charles McCord and Rob Bartlett have — there’s just this sort of way in which he seemed to be more comfortable with regard to what’s going on there, I suspect, than Foster was, but clearly there’s been a turn toward talking more seriously about racial issues. He had Dick Gregory on the program, Carl Jeffers seems to be frequently on, and of course Deborah Dickerson, who seems to have been on there every 2 or 3 months or so, so there’s at least a willingness on his part to engage certain kinds of issues, but there remains the desire or the need to keep the show at least in part what it was. I was watching part of it today and Tony Powell was making light of the problem that became somewhat newsworthy, that a former colleague of Imus’s on MSNBC — I think it was Contessa Brewer — mistook Jesse Jackson for Al Sharpton and she called him Reverend Al Sharpton and so they made light of that and they had Tony Powell imitating Jesse Jackson and making fun of her and making fun of the issues and making fun of Jackson and Al Sharpton at the same time and so there’s still this desire to keep that element of the show but also, at least in terms of his interviews with people, which tend to be, like all of his other interviews, both serious and played for fun in a kind of way. So it’s become a part of the issue of race and race relations, especially as it relates to the President and people’s responses to him, seems to have become a regular part of the inquiry that’s going on in that show.

DC:    When the incident happened, having watched the show, having followed it for as long as you have, about every weekday morning, I had hoped at the time that a way could be found to save the show — it turned out that he had to go away for a few months, whereas, for a week or two, I had my fingers crossed that something could be done to save it. It became apparent, eventually, that he did have to go away for a while. I noticed there was this sense of, you could almost call it fury, especially among college-educated African American professionals, they took this incident to mean — “Whatever we do, we’re still going to be treated like menials.” And you have mentioned, I think –  you don’t know whether that was really appropriate. At the same time, it’s as though African Americans are trauma survivors and they have an almost instinctive reaction when something like this happens.

MA:    One of the things that Imus himself said in discussions on his show right before it got taken off of the air was that he had talked to . . .  the pastor who had been connected, to some degree or another, with the women on the Rutgers basketball team, who was also a mover, a shaker, in northern New Jersey, and this pastor told him that blacks often, if not always, and again, this is not a direct quote, had the sort of suspicion about the level of racism that white people feel and that when we are always expecting whites to say something or do something to demonstrate that they have this innate racism that they cannot shake and that they spend a lot of time hiding. And when incidents like this happen, these incidents confirm these beliefs that blacks have. So that was at least in part what Imus learned or was told in response to this and I do suspect, in a lot of ways, that this is the case — that there is a kind of fear and suspicion, maybe not so much person to person, but person to institution, to large groups of whites, where there is this sort of fear that the racism that used to be expressed in a kind of institutional and overt way is still there and is still lurking in the hearts of whites but that whites are hiding it. So part of what I was trying to do, to some degree, is to figure out why this incident mattered so much to so many people. Why so many blacks thought this was, given all the problems that are going on in the nation and going on in black communities, going on in inner cities, why this incident seemed to matter so much to them, and the best that I could come up with in terms of an explanation, the best way that I thought that I could understand it had to do with the fact that at the very least we live in a nation where there’s never been a kind of formal acknowledgement, formal apology, formal recognition of the fact that slavery happened, that what followed slavery was 100 more years of terrible oppression and terrible mistreatment of black people. And so a part of what I was trying to figure out is that how, in the context of those historical facts, do black people then enter into the nation in the ways that other minority groups are able to do, the ways that other immigrants are able to do, and feel safe and protected in the place that claims that it’s the sort of model of democracy for the world. And so I think that, at the very least in terms of my argument, part of what I see happening in the Imus incident and in a number of other incidents, is that they become a kind of way for people to recognize and to comment upon and to reflect upon the nature of their marginalization within the country that is historical and that they see these moments as kind of confirmation of the fact that things haven’t changed significantly or haven’t changed enough and that people still don’t recognize the problems that blacks face. Whether or not it was, I mean it seemed to me that it was an overreaction. It seemed to me that it was uninformed or misinformed and it seemed to me that people did not think very much about the context but that they wanted a victory. They wanted a demonstration that somebody who could be said to have said something that was racist and sexist could be brought low as a consequence of the response of decent people to it and it seemed to me that that’s what was happening as much as anything else. It didn’t seem to me that the hurt that people claimed to be feeling as a consequence of that — at least as far as I understood in the conversations I had with people — it didn’t seem that the hurt that was that much connected with what they believed that Imus was saying or doing, but it was connected more to the sort of sense of national and racial hurt that they were feeling.

DC:    You have written, if I may paraphrase you, there’s an agenda between white and black Americans. There are some matters hanging out there that are still unresolved between black and white Americans, but what happens is that we seize upon incidents such as this one with Imus and that’s not quite an appropriate way to resolve it.

MA:    I think it does nothing to solve the problem. I think what it does is to pretend as though, what whites are able to do in this instance, is to say, “Look, one of the people in our midst is a bad guy. We should get rid of him.” The people in Newsweek, the people who used to appear on his shows, said, “We were always ambivalent about appearing on his show but we did it because it was good for us in a kind of way,” and so they were able to locate in him all of the bad things that they think that blacks and other people think about people like Imus. He’s a racist, he’s not, he’s into this sort of progressive consciousness that we manifest and demonstrate all the time, so he needs to be exorcised in a kind of way and that blacks are able to confirm in their responses to Imus the notions that they think whites or at least many whites have, and so, by identifying Imus as The Bad Guy, what both progressive whites and blacks were able to do is to say, “We’ve seen the problem, we’ve cut it out of our midst, and we will now, as a consequence, move on” –whereas the sort of underlying problems, the underlying pressures and tensions and the difficulties having to do with the history of race in America don’t really, as a consequence of that kind of effort, get addressed at all.

DC:    Of course, the Imus incident wasn’t really the only such incident. Right now, the biggest issue seems to have to do with whether Rush Limbaugh ought to have been able to buy ownership of the NFL St. Louis Rams. I don’t think that’s quite at the level of the Imus incident.

MA:    No, it’s because he’s such a lightning-rod figure. For a little while, I watched — I don’t know how long it was, Rush Limbaugh had a show that was on CBS in Philadelphia. It started at 6 o’clock in the morning and I watched it a bit and I read about him but I’ve never actually listened to him so I don’t quite honestly know a whole lot about him except what other people have to say about him, but I know that in all sort of ways, he’s a kind of lightning rod, that he says all kinds of things that people . . . that a number of people who are on the left believe are racist in their constructions and in their intent — the most I know quite honestly, besides these little sound bites and his jokingly, I think, talking about Obama as the dancing Negro [Actually, "Barack the magic Negro" -- DC] during the campaign and his discussion of Donovan McNab during his ill-fated and fortunately short-lived time on ESPN’s [NFL] pregame show — I know about those incidents, but I don’t suspect that the question of whether or not Rush Limbaugh should own or partially own an NFL team really concerns much of anybody at all except Rush Limbaugh and the people who support him, and clearly, there are millions and millions of people who do. But I guess there’s a question for somebody who’s so directly involved in and seen as a leader of a political party, should that sort of person be a part of a sports organization that’s trying to serve everybody. I, to be quite honest with you, I’ve never thought about it much before this. I mean, I do know that the person who wound up being the [43rd] president, used to be the owner of the Texas Rangers and that was never an issue or a problem for him, so . . .  I don’t know, I’m utterly agnostic about the question of whether or not Rush Limbaugh ought to have been an owner or a partial owner of an NFL team but it certainly is the case that there are — it became a controversy and I know on WABC’s Web site there is this . . . [link] where you can read Rush Limbaugh’s response to the efforts on the part of people to keep him out of the NFL. [The link appears to have been removed from the WABC website, but readers may click here to read Limbaugh's Wall Street Journal op-ed on the matter. -- DC]

DC:  You discuss the matter of reparations, but you are not quite as enthusiastic about reparations as other people you’ve met. Could you speak to that?

MA:    When the movement actually started depends on when you want to date it. There’s right after slavery — and there have been little moments where it’s become vaguely popular within black communities. It became really popular in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, where the idea was to try to pay or at least compensate blacks in the United States for the forced servitude of their ancestors. It is an idea that, again, a lot of people have thought about that seems, on some level to a whole lot of people, logical, but it just never seems to me, in its execution, to be possible. And also, we’re in a country where I know that it’s never going to happen. I’m just too much of a pragmatist to believe that we ought to be putting a whole lot of energy into efforts that are bound to fail. And since I’m so cynical about it or so pragmatic about it, I don’t really take the movement quite as seriously as other people who are smart and whom I respect. But it does seem to me that, at the very least, one of the things that the nation could do and should have done years and years ago, is to take it upon themselves to do what we do in these situations all the time. When people are mistreated, and the nation is at fault to some degree, somebody with some power offers an apology. It happened with the Japanese who were interned during World War II. It happens all the time and in all sorts of ways, but there seems to be no political will on the part of lawmakers to do so, although I did learn that some time in 2008, people in the House of Representatives at least sponsored a bill whose purpose was to apologize for slavery, but that bill had no traction and, as far as I could tell, was not publicized at all and it might as well have been that it didn’t happen. [For what it may be worth, apology resolutions were approved by the U. S. House in 2008, and by the Senate in 2009. The Senate resolution stipulated that it could not be invoked in support of claims for restitution. -- DC] Obama was seen like, a very very serious candidate for the President, so that seemed to be infinitely more important than any sort of backward-looking effort to say that the United States’ participation in chattel slavery was terrible and horrible and something that we needed to apologize energetically for. So what you saw happening at that point was what I think America is always involved in, is that on the one hand there is this desire to recognize and to see the significance and importance of history, that is to think about our national history and to think about our founding documents and other sorts of things, and on the other hand to think about the present and the future, and I think that that we make justice toward the past but we’re really not that concerned about the past except as it serves us and I think that what people became infinitely more involved in, and understandably perhaps, was Obama’s candidacy and then presidency, to which they could then attach all the issues having to do with race and the nature of black-white relations in the United States and so I think that that’s what happened then.

DC:    Any such apology could provoke a backlash.  There has even been a backlash against the apology for the Japanese internment [click here -- DC]. There has been something of a backlash against some statements made by President Obama for overseas consumption that have been taken in this country as overly apologetic. You mention the possibility of a national slavery museum of some kind. What are the prospects for such a thing?

MA:    I know there are a lot, a lot of cities and states have small local museums, sometimes much smaller than museums but call them museums, part of whose purpose is to recognize slavery and to give people some capacity to interact with the documents and other kinds of relics of that period, but — and I’ve said this before — what seems to me to be the case that what the nation wants to do is to recognize not our participation in bad things but our victories. That we will memorialize wars, we will give monuments, construct monuments to all sorts of things, but the idea of us, of the nation sanctioning the notion of a museum whose purpose is to say, “We were wrong, look what we did, look how horribly we failed to do what the nation claimed to be about, and that is that to recognize the humanity of everybody and to try to make it possible for everybody to succeed in the nation,” the idea of us doing so seems to me to be — however good it might seem to be, it would go against everything that I understand the intensity to be in terms of thinking about these issues. So we are much more likely to and have already sanctioned a museum that deals with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, which then demonstrates not so much the negative racial atmosphere that caused it but the fact that that led to the necessity of a Martin Luther King acting in the ways that he did or the civil rights movement. What we are able to think about is the victory, that King gives us the victory over the bad forces within the society and we are able to sanction that and to feel good to some degree or another about the changes that happened rather than sort of reveling in and thinking really seriously about what could have caused us to participate in that sort of activity in the first place, so I don’t see a museum like this ever being possible even under a Black president, maybe especially under a Black president because of the fact that the nation doesn’t want to think about how we failed.

DC:    I understand there have been Civil Rights museums built. There’s one in Montgomery . . . . There’s one in either Atlanta or Memphis, I think . . . . [There is a National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, built around the former Lorraine Motel -- site of the assassination of Martin Luther King.  There is a Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.  An International Civil Rights Center and Museum is under construction in Greensboro, located in the former Woolworth's store that was the target of the 1960 "Greensboro sit-ins." Richmond is home to the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial.  The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was designed by artist and architect Maya Lin, creator of Washington's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Not to be neglected is the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta and the adjacent headquarters of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. -- DC]

MA:    Yeah, I just think symbolically, that the difference between a sort of local museum dedicated to those issues and a museum that’s on the Mall in Washington, which then says the nation finds it central, in the nation’s sense, I think that’s a big difference.

DC:    Professor Awkward, to wrap up — the whole incident back in April ’07 was sad and amusing at the same time, or so it seemed to me. Surreal, almost. Imus scheduled this meeting with the basketball team, the Governor of New Jersey has an automobile accident and is almost killed on the way to mediating the meeting, and the thought occurred to me, if Hollywood wrote the script that way, nobody would believe it. Which brings me to the question, do you think there will ever be a movie made about the incident?

MA:    (Laughter) I don’t think so. I don’t think there will ever be a movie made about the incident while Imus is alive.

DC:    See what you think of this. This is who I’m going to cast in Nappy Headed Hos — the Movie: We want Dwight Yoakum as Imus. He’s a singer but he’s had a few film credits including Sling Blade. We want Billy Bob Thornton as Bernard McGuirk.

MA:    Okay. . .

DC:    We want Forrest Whittaker as Al Sharpton and we want Oprah Winfrey as Coach Vivian Stringer.

MA:    (laughter)

DC:    We want Julia Roberts as Deirdre Imus [Sorry, Deirdre -- Julia Roberts is bigger box office --DC], but we want Deirdre making a cameo as someone other than herself.

MA:    (more laughter)

DC:    Deirdre crashes into the radio station as an impostor claiming to be Deirdre Imus. So that’s who we’re going to cast. How does that grab you?

MA:    Okay, do you have somebody in mind for Corzine? Because you do have that dramatic accident that you would have to film . . . .

DC:    I uh, no, I don’t have anybody in mind for Corzine, actually. But. . .

MA:    And there would be some news footage . . . .

DC:    But if you would find somebody to raise the money, as long as I can get a cut for my casting suggestions . . . .

MA:    Well, Corzine might be out of a job soon, so maybe he’ll. . .

DC:    Maybe he can play himself. . . .

MA:    [Laughter]

DC:    Well, Professor Awkward, thank you so much for speaking to us.