p2pnet news | Music:- Rutgers University women’s basketball team, with eight African-American and two white players, were “nappy-headed hos,” said MSNBC’s Don Imus on April 4, noted Media Matters.

Sparked by that, under From Imus to Industry: The business of stereotypes and degrading images, rap and hip hop songs and videos with dodgy content were debated by the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee under chairman Bobby Rush, today.

“There’s some rough girls from Rutgers,” Imus said back in April.

“They got tattoos …,” but, “the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute”.

It seems to us the first crack about “hard-core ho’s” came not from Imus, but from Sid Rosenberg, who was on the phone with Imus.

Check out the YouTube video below and see what you think.

Imus picked the line up and ran with it, saying there were some “nappy-headed ho’s there” and now, “We have allowed greedy corporate executives – especially those in the entertainment industry – to lead many of our young people to believe that it is OK to entertain themselves by destroying the culture of our people,” E. Faye Williams, chair of the National Congress of Black Women, said in prepared remarks, according to Associated Press.

“This hearing is not anti-hip hop,” AP has Rush, the founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, saying. “I am a fan of hip hop,” but there was a need to, “address the issue of violence, hate and degradation that has reduced too many of our youngsters to automatons”.

Record company executives defended the parental guidance labels and edited versions they said keep the more controversial material away from children and stressed that uniform standards or censorship won’t work, adds the story.

Imus was fired, but Rosenberg, if he was the one who indeed initiated the remark, survived unscathed.

CORRECTION:

According to a Readers Write, the off-camera remark was made not by Rosenberg, but by the show’s ex-producer, Bernard McGuirk.

We do, of course, apologise to Rosenberg.

Slashdot it!
Also See:
Media Matters – Imus called women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos”, 2007
Associated Press – House panel debates hip-hop lyrics, September 25, 2007

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.