As Nasty As You Wanna Be?

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Case 1

During a discussion of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship, shock-jock Don Imus refers to members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.”

His weekday morning radio show, Imus in the Morning, is canceled on April 12, 2007, following significant public outcry.

Case 2

Responding to increasing violence in London’s black communities, British Prime Minister Tony Blair says the following during an April 11, 2007, lecture delivered in Cardiff:

Economic inequality is a factor and we should deal with that, but I don’t think it’s the thing that is producing the most violent expression of this social alienation. … I think that is to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them. … We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong—it has not—but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need specific measures to be brought back into the fold.

Interpreting Blair’s comments, the April 12 Guardian reports that “Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture.”  This interpretation is picked up by Carl Bloice in a thoughtful post at The Black Commentator.

Case 3

The Chicago Tribune reports that Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, is “arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.”

There’s some speculation that Allen Lee wrote the essay as a prank, responding to his English teacher’s request that students express their emotions through their writing.

*                 *                 *

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

— Mark Twain

_____

A tip of the hat to Bruce Trachtenberg, executive director of The Communications Network, for forwarding the Allen Lee story.

Comments

[erasmus]

Dig the Mark Twain quote. Works for me. What was the Twain in Germany essay you once showed me?

[i.a.t.]

here's a link to allen lee's essay. little dix complaining about his teacher's brownies. glad he was arrested.