rybeezy

Let me briefly touch on the latest Don Imus race incident.

• First and foremost, the only person who truly knows whether he had any racist implications behind his latest comment is Don Imus.
• Second, the guy is a radio dinosaur, irrelevant in my book, and long-rumored to be a closet racist.
• Third, having worked in radio for as long as he has, he knows how to play the game.
• Fourth, these kinds of comments can be heard on any number of different radio stations under the guise of sarcasm or being facetious.
• Fifth, if you closed your eyes and tried to envision an old codger of a man with deep-seeded racism, and then imagined him talking, he’d sound like Don Imus. Am I right?

So there it is. At a minimum, he should have qualified what he meant after the following exchange with sportscaster Warner Wolf on “Pacman” Jones,

“He’s been arrested six times since being drafted by Tennessee in 2005,” Wolf said.

“What color is he?” Imus asked.

“He’s African-American,” Wolf responded.

“Well, there you go,” Imus said. “Now we know.”

Instead, he left his half-baked comment out there to be interpreted by the listener. He later explained that his statement was being misinterpreted and that he in fact was sarcastically making a point that blacks are treated unfairly in the criminal justice system:

“What people should be outraged about is that they arrest blacks for no reason. I mean, there’s no reason to arrest this kid six times. Maybe he did something once, but everyone does something once.”

While that explanation is a tad hard to swallow given his track record, I do find it hard to believe that he would be so dumb and reckless to make such a blatant misstep after all of the earlier turmoil and subsequent scrutiny.