“Truth Will Out”: Don Imus and the Return of the Living Repressed
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
— W.E.B. Du Bois
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
— Sigmund Freud
It is by now an undisputed fact that Don Imus, the zombie-like host of the “Imus in the Morning” show, a man many of us — thankfully — knew little or nothing about before last week, is clearly a racist son of a bitch and deserves to be strung up by his toes. Or at least that is the impression the media has been pressing home for the last week and a half. The scene, sadly, is not original. Bumbling, often old, middle-aged, or washed-up white dude forgets his place and/or loses his cool and the media has a field day beating him into submission. I am not interested in apologizing for Imus; his previous comments about women, Jews, and Arabs should have been enough to get him fired or replaced a long time ago.
In fact, I really don’t care about Imus at all, nor do I really care about the emotional or economic well being of the other recent manifestations of our cultural stupidity: Michael Richards, Senator Biden, and Mel Gibson. I do, however, think that all of these men are scapegoats for an American culture, both black and white, that is so penitently self mortifying, so obsessed with denying and repressing its own implicit and self-perpetuating structures of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference, that it creates rigid rules of conduct around discussions of race and seeks sacrifices wherever it can find them. Make no doubt, any white person who goes out of her way to actively condemn Imus is either running for office and/or desperately trying to assert their own enlightened position as a non-racist. Hillary Clinton, for instance, wasted no time rushing to New Brunswick to show her support for the Rutgers women, who frankly, did a perfectly fine job defending themselves without her. The party line, for most of the punditry, is that Imus is somehow an aberration, that he went too far, or that talk like that is just not acceptable in public. But when we talk about Imus, Richards, Gibson, and Biden as individuals, we miss the fact that they are also, inevitably, representatives of their culture.
Richards, Gibson, and especially Imus, with his dumb cowboy hat and his Keith Richards countenance, are the perfect vessels for our cultural insecurities. In them we can place all of our fears and anxieties, and by berating them, by publicly humiliating them, we can abject that part of ourselves that we find most distasteful: the fact that regardless of how hard we try, we still see each other differently, and that despite all of the crossover of popular cultures, we still self-identify most frequently by race and ethnicity, and worse that we still insist, whether they like it or not, of placing others in those categories, with all of their attendant preconceptions and bigoted assumptions. That a powerful black woman must necessarily be a “nappy headed ho,” is an assumption that our popular culture has made implicit in image and language; it is not something Imus just came up with in his demented mind. That Imus then went on to talk about the predominantly white team who defeated Rutgers as contrastingly “cute” brought to light a an entire beauty industry, that, Tyra Banks aside, until very recently, and predominantly still, thinks of beauty in terms of whiteness.
This is not Imus’s bigotry; this is our bigotry and it’s not uncommon. Imus does not control the advertising machines, pumping out images of white beauty from Madison Avenue; Imus does not control the Republican Party that still thinks of affirmative action as reverse discrimination, the prison industry that incarcerates whole generations of black men, and the music labels that still produce songs and videos that explicitly denigrate women as objects of status and sexual satisfaction. Likewise, Imus does not control the culture of our everyday lives, in which, for reasons we can neither articulate nor control, we seem obsessed as a nation with re-inscribing codes of speech, dress, taste, and sentiment along the lines of race.
No, our focus on Imus is a distraction. A criminal fed to the lions, makes for a good spectacle, but it does not eliminate the causes of crime. In an explicitly Freudian sense, Imus has revealed the degree to which, as a nation, we suffer from a cultural neurosis that will not merely go away. Rather than fire Imus, it might have been more appropriate to make a case study: leave him on the couch a little longer and let him talk it out. Maybe then we might have learned something about ourselves.
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