Snoop Dogg told MTV that Imus deserved to be fired but rappers can keep talking about “ho’s.” That’s because the Rutgers players are upwardly-mobile athletes, Snoop said, but rappers are referring to “ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing sh–.”
“It’s a completely different scenario,” said Snoop. “[Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing sh–, that’s trying to get a n—a for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them mutha—-as say we in the same league as him.”
So I guess slurs are fine as long as they come straight from the heart.
But seriously, listen to Gwen Ifill on Meet the Press yesterday, via Feministing. (When Ifill was a New York Times reporter, Imus called her “the cleaning lady.”) It’s great to see her look straight at David Brooks and Tim Russert when she talks about complicity–among journalists who appeared regularly on the show–in a culture of “casual slurs and insults.”
