NY Times op-ed: 'Why the Imus-Coulter disparity?'

NY Times op-ed: 'Why the Imus-Coulter disparity?'

Ron Brynaert Published: Saturday April 14, 2007

"Why the Imus-Couter disparity?" asks Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv, in a guest column in Saturday's New York Times.

A few days after radio host Don Imus was fired by CBS, Wright notes, "There has to be an Imus event every once in a while. Ethnicity being the volatile thing it is, gratuitously inflammatory remarks have to be discouraged, so bounds of acceptable speech have to be clarified. Clarity comes when, inevitably, someone oversteps and gets slapped down."

However, Wright wonders, "Do African-Americans get more protection than Muslim Americans?"

"In a speech last year before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Coulter used the word 'raghead,'" Wright continues. "This is a dual-use slur, applied to both Arabs and Muslims, but she was talking about an Iranian, so presumably she was focusing on the religious dimension (consistent with her post-9/11 advice that we 'invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.') The word raghead -- whose only function is to denigrate -- seems as legitimately offensive to Muslims as Imus' utterance was to blacks. The difference is that Coulter didn't apologize."

Compared to the treatment done to Imus, "Brace yourself for the seismic damage done to her career," Wright continues.

"The leaders of CPAC reassessed their relationship with her and invited her back to speak this year, an occasion she used to trot out the word 'faggot,'" writes Wright. "And Coulter continued to be interviewed respectfully on CNN and (again and again) on Fox News -- treatment that presumably wouldn't be accorded a pundit who used the 'n-word' without apology."

Wright adds, "Why the Imus-Coulter disparity? Maybe part of it is that Coulter isn't as structurally susceptible to sanction as Imus. She doesn't have her own radio or TV show, so advertisers on CNN and Fox have two degrees of separation from bigotry. Still, there are pressure points big enough for an Al Sharpton to find. Coulter's column appears in newspapers with major advertisers."

Wright includes a "full disclosure" in his column, revealing the 'history' between himself and his subject.

"Coulter once cited an Op-Ed essay I wrote for this newspaper about the Danish cartoon controversy as evidence that people like me had 'affection' for terrorists," Wright notes. "Thus ended any claim I might have to evaluate her work objectively. If you want a subject on which I report and you decide, today's not your day."

Wright has "battled" with Slate's Mickey Kaus over whether or not Coulter should be "repudiated" a number of times. On one Bloggingheads video, Kaus asked Wright why he was willing "bend over backwards - rightly - to understand" the world views of terrorists but couldn't do the same to "understand where she's coming from" or her world view.

"Because it's more baffling and pernicious, just kidding, of course," Wright responded.

Excerpts from New York Times op-ed:

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I'm not making a moral argument. If I were, I would get into homophobia and anti-Semitism and other varieties of bigotry. This is a pragmatic argument about social cohesion. By my lights, the two American fault lines most likely to become chasms in the long run are between blacks and whites and between Muslims and non-Muslims.

And if anything, I'd say that the second fault line is the more treacherous. America has already done things abroad that are helping to make the "clash of civilizations" thesis a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let's not make that kind of mistake at home.

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