Karen’s right about Gwen Ifill’s piece–and I think I was wrong to let Imus off the hook so easily yesterday. Gwen’s key insight was that the Rutgers basketball players are a bunch of kids who deserved to experience their success unimpeded by snarky locker-room racist “humor.” We’re accustomed to treating athletes on the college level as accomplished, impervious neo-professionals, but how fair is that? I have a 20-year-old daughter who was a pretty good high school athlete and I’d be out picketing with Jesse Jackson if Imus had said that her team was a bunch of swarthy, hook-nosed money-changers.
And if the bozo does have a history of this stuff–and if he did actually call Gwen Ifill a cleaning lady–he probably should be fired.
