A Note on Sexism in Rap

Imus has been getting defended by people who say that rap music and Black culture says the word ho, so therefore Imus should be allowed to say the word ho.

To be fair, rap music does say ho. Quite a lot in fact. They also say bitch, slut, trick, skeezer, whore, and other offensive terms towards women. Snoop has tried to defend his use of the term ho, saying it was a woman who was never going to amount to anything. It also is a term used in the Black community a lot as well. But that makes my point even easier for me.

The term ho is unacceptable for anyone to use. The presence of hypermasculinity and misogyny in rap has been frequently campaigned against for years. Queen Latifah even wrote a song about it back in the mid-1990's:



As it was noted on Huffington Post, much of rap is controlled by white people. Black people have to watch out with their own language. We have to stop this negative language towards ourselves. Hip-hop's international and cross-cultural. What was once said amongst Blacks is now disseminated amongst millions of white, black, latino, asian, and african people. This has to be recognized and respected; the language has to get cleaned up because White America is not going to do it for us, as can clearly be seen by the release of the truly offensive Tip Drill by Nelly. I have posted the video below for demonstrative purposes.



Imus should be a wake-up to Black America that it is an influence and that it needs to clean up to keep up from looking like a bunch of shuckin'-n'-jivin' jiggaboos. Oh wait, it's too late for that. But, we were able to recover from minstrels. We can recover from inarticulateness as well.