The right thing to do? Should the public decide when the line has been crossed? Yes

The recent Michael Richards and Don Imus episodes, assaulting historical Black sensibilities by using offensive terms like the N-word and h*, has caused the nation to reassess what language is appropriate enough for the public domain. Understand that the airwaves where we now hear and view many of the social assaults, and subsequent insults, are not owned by the large multimedia conglomerates. They are public airwaves.

The American public sets decency (and obscenity) standards. This should be the launch point about hurtful language--not censorship. This conversation is not about what people should be allowed to say. It's about what society feels is appropriate enough to say on federally regulated airwaves. The censorship argument only convolutes the conversation.

This is not a new conversation. It's one that takes place every 20 years or so. It is the cyclical conflict that pits every generation's desire for radicalized change against traditional social customs, and every generation's attempt to defy authority in establishing a new social culture. Whether it was staying above Elvis' waist or bleeping out Lenny Bruce in the 1950s, the "censors" have always been present to uphold public decency standards. Countercultural behavior has always been present, as has indecent music, blue comedy and adult reading materials. They just didn't have public airwaves and commercial venues to mainstream their consumption.

Where the lines have become blurred is when film, record and pay-for-cable industries used commercial speech protections to produce provocative content that adult consumers had a right to purchase and desired to consume. The U.S. vs. Larry Flyntcase law says the government cannot regulate taste, even if it's distasteful. As television and radio sought to compete for the audiences that these pay venues were siphoning off, television/radio content became more "shocking" and even more indecent, slowly eroding public decency standards. It's a slippery slope that society, for the most part, has resisted--until it met the ultimate countercultural, antiauthority expression: rap music. No other commercial venture has assaulted public decency standards like rap. Influencing everything from fashion dress to Madison Avenue advertising to suburban youth, rap blew up decency standards. Attempts to ban the more degrading forms of rap began in the early 1990s.

Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the underground network blew the cap off public decency standards, showing that rap couldn't be shut down as grassroots "radicals" found a vehicle for expressing their pain, their rage and their misogyny. "Shock talk" radio was a spin-off of the unabridged "free speech" mantle that emerged by the mid-1990s. Both were opposite forms of the radical ideological expression perfect storm that was brewing: the counter cultural radicals on the left using rap to defy authority, while the conservative radicals on the right were using nee-racial "talk" to enforce traditional authority. Enter the N-word, b**** and h*. Each word is a part of America's historical denigration of African-Americans, and with racism still interwoven throughout present-day American culture, it is a mistake by a new generation's "rap culture" to try to de-empower these hurtful terms by using them in reverse syntax (terms of endearment). It's not working--not when Black people can still be insulted with these words. The dual usage of these words is most injurious to Blacks. No matter how you use them, they are offensive AND indecent. Similar words like "Kike," "Dago" and "Chink" have been banned and are not played on the radio or used in the public domain.

Other races and ethnicities are the defenders of their own cultural dignity and the "censors" against the destruction of their own social identities. Only in the Black community do terms that assault the dignity of the race have to be debated and actions of the obscene have to be defended. The profiteers know this. We must become our own censors in defending our dignity and societal identities. Even if the assaulters are within our own race. We cannot be conflicted, or selective, in whom we admonish. If concern is where does the language ban stop, it stops where the public draws the line to what is socially acceptable. It's all of our collective responsibility to uphold public decency standards.

Anthony Asadullag Samad, Ph.D., is a national columnist and author of the new book, Saving The Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Johnson Publishing Co.
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