Imus and History

Imus is already last week's news, though his face adorns the cover of Newsweek. But there remain a few angles that unfortunately have not been addressed.

First, is the curious attitude of his apologists to history. In their rush to defend Imus from attacks that he's a racist they frequently omit his pattern of racism. Though they concede that he frequently "came up to the line" and perhaps on occasion "crossed it"--for some reason the vocabulary of the Old West and football seem to come naturally to the apologists--they refuse to admit the evidence amounted to a pattern. What he said about the Rutgers women's basketball team therefore was sui generis. This is a vital point to the apologists, as is easily explained.

Most of the apologists seem to have appeared at one time or another on his show. It is therefore important to them to insist that what he had said in the past was in a different category than the comment he made this time. Their skirts are clean if it can be demonstrated that his past behavior was different from his present behavior.

This is a strange way to think of history, however. The usual approach, one employed in graduate schools across this country, is to find patterns that help explain why things happen. While many events seem to "just happen," and contingency plays a role in events, all events have a history of some kind or another unless you subscribe to the theory that God is directing events. As Eric Foner has aptly put it, one of the obligations of the historian is to show why events are not surprises even if they are sometimes shocking. By treating events historically one can see the patterns that help make them understandable. One of the virtues of history indeed is to make what happens around us understandable.

By insisting that the most recent example of racism is sui generis his apologists can convincingly make the claim, as Tim Russert did this past week on Meet the Press, that a sincere apology from Imus is all that's needed for redemption. But what if Imus not only had a pattern of making racist comments but also a pattern of making apologies when caught, which happens to be the case. He is in fact a serial apologizer. A pattern of apologies would suggest that he is in fact insincere. Russert did not mention Imus's past apologies, however. Doing so would undermine the claim that this latest instance of racism is unique. In other words, history doesn't matter. All that counts is the present.

I admit to personal bias in this matter. In my prior career as a journalist I served as the editor of TomPaine.com. In 2000 we featured a series of searing reports about Imus by Philip Nobile, who took the trouble to document week after week Imus's flagrant racial stereotyping. It troubles me that the pile of evidence Nobile accumulated seems never to have made much of an impression on the people who went on his show. As long as he didn't say something offensive while they were at the microphone it was ok.

Among the people who appeared regularly on the show were a select group of famous historians including Michael Beschloss, Douglas Brinkley and Doris Kearns Goodwin. It pains me to note this.