In case you haven't noticed, Al Sharpton has become
legitimate. No seriously. Hell has finally frozen over in spite
of global warming. Now I wasn't shocked to see liberals like
Barack Obama and the other Democrats running for president meet
with him, but Sean Hannity? The mind-numbing event was a
scheduled debate over the Imus affair at a confab sponsored by
the Reverend Sharpton's National Action Network. As far as I
know, Rev. Sharpton has not apologized for his irresponsible
demagoguery that led to the deaths in Harlem and Crown Heights,
nor has he ever admitted that the Tawana Brawley affair was a
hoax, so why is he suddenly being taken seriously? Well, he got
Imus fired.
No one has ever accused Rev. Sharpton of being dumb, and he's a
master of manipulating the press, so journalists rarely demand an
explanation for his past transgressions. Mr. Hannity did attempt
to corner Rev. Sharpton about the Brawley affair, but Rev.
Sharpton simply avoiding answering most of his questions. By
doing so he gave his supporters in the crowd the impression that
he was being statesmanlike in the presence of a bully.
Now Rev. Sharpton has announced a campaign attacking the
entertainment industry that has been profiting from the filthy
lyrics heard in hip-hop music. When Don Imus was fired for
calling the Rutgers women's basketball team the same denigrating
names heard in this type of music, Rev. Sharpton seized on this
opportunity to appear fair and balanced by going after the music
industry, and now people are paying attention to him.
What I can't understand is why Rev. Sharpton gets the attention
when there are blacks who have been decrying this misogynistic,
demeaning form of entertainment for years yet barely garner any
attention. Columnist Stanley Crouch is one, and Niger Innis,
spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, is another. While
hardly conservative, Mr. Crouch has blasted hip-hop music as
"neo-Sambo" and rails against the producers and artists
who peddle the same "bullying, hedonistic buffoons"
that D.W. Griffith portrayed in "Birth of a Nation."
Niger Innis took it further on an MSNBC show on April 17. He said
that Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television,
started the network so that blacks could have their own network.
Mr. Innis lamented that Mr. Johnson "has used BET as a
vehicle for injecting this filth that is proliferating the
airwaves and changing our culture" and said that Mr. Imus
was borrowing a phrase that is used every night on MTV and BET.
Mr. Innis is certainly right about how the culture has changed
for the worse. My friend's son recently came back from Florida,
where he went to a club where a rapper star made an appearance
and commented how the women threw themselves at the celebrity and
offered him whatever services he desired. Ordinary women are
acting disgracefully like the "hos" in hip-hop lyrics.
I sat next to a young black woman on a cross-town bus who was
dressed in an outfit that left little to the imagination. She
looked barely out of her teens. She was with a friend and jumped
up suddenly and pointed out the window at a man passing by whom
she was certain was a rapper in town for a concert. She giddily
told her friend she wanted to get off the bus so she could chase
him down, and I cannot repeat the rest of the conversation.
If you ask young women in the inner-city high schools what they
want to be, they'll eschew the ordinary professions for a chance
at starring in a hip-hop video. Have you seen one of these? The
rapper has all his clothes on, but the women gyrating around him
have misplaced all of theirs.
I'm really curious about how Rev. Sharpton intends to pursuade
the purveyors of this perverted genre to alter a product that has
netted them billions. After all, it's really not about music.
There are plenty of decent hip-hop musicians who have been told
that the industry just isn't interested in anything other than
the rawest element because that's what sells.
I'm sure there are those who believe that Rev. Sharpton is being
sincere about his commitment to address the racist, misogynist,
hateful language that is flourishing on broadcasts and destroying
our culture. I'm just not one of them.
But what do I know? I truly believed the Yankees were too smart
to ever bring back Roger Clemens.