It's about us, not about Imus

It's easy to say that CBS Radio should fire him. But maybe there is another way.

Don't get me wrong, what Don Imus said was intolerant and stupid. Intolerant because, yes, a world-class college basketball team is made up mostly of black players. Get over it. Intolerant because, no, just because they are black women does not make them whores.

But it was also stupid: he said these things loudly into a microphone for a national audience, not in a whispered hush for his friends over a round of tequila shots, in the safety of an all-white or predominately white bar. Do any of us really believe that only one white man in America bemoans the disproportionate prevalence of blacks in sports?

For 12 years I have intuited that this is where white-on-black racism is most problematic, when blacks are not around. I can pinpoint it so exactly because I started this job 12 years ago, and in my early weeks here I first heard the term, "It's about to rain pitchforks and nigger babies." This was 1995: enlightened, reasoned 1995. It goes without saying that I am white, and that there wasn't a black man around. I felt I had woken up in Mississippi in 1962, that we had lost an entire generation of social progress in a single instant.

But of course this is impossible. A culture doesn't lose over 30 years of enlightenment by telling one single, disgusting joke. It can only mean one thing: the progress was never there to begin with. The racism had moved underground, had buried itself under a polite exterior.

It pains me to say it, but no more burying. The Nazis burned books and probably still do somewhere, while American booksellers stock the most Naziesque of literature available, Mein Kampf, written by the movement's totem, Adolph Hitler. As a writer, and out of simple common sense, I prefer the American way. Indeed, the Amazon.com review says it better than I ever could, "Had the book been taken seriously when it was first published, perhaps the 20th century would have been very different."

And while I'm writing caveats, let me write one more: a rube like Don Imus does not deserve a radio show. But firing him outright is tantamount to burning his book instead of airing it out. CBS radio should broadcast and analyze his ideas out instead of quashing them. A more fitting punishment (for the stupidity, not for the intolerance) would be to keep him on the CBS payroll and let him lose all of his sponsors one at a time, Arthur Andersen style, until the court of public opinion has spoken. The Rutgers University team, African Americans in general, women, and our society at large all deserve nothing less.

UPDATE: Reason Magazine says exactly what I say, only better and funnier, here.