Keyboard Quarterbacks

By Karen Bailis

If a black comic makes a racist, sexist joke about Rutgers’ women’s basketball team in the forest of late-night TV, does it make a sound in the mass-media landscape? Apparently not.

Comedian D.L. Hughley appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” Wednesday night and was prompted by the host to talk about the Don Imus-Rutgers women’s basketball controversy. While saying the issue was about free speech, that Imus shouldn’t have apologized and that people “can laugh at anything you want to,” Hughley went right to the women’s appearance.

“They weren’t ho’s, but there were some nappy-headed women on that team,” Hughley said as the studio audience gasped – and laughed. “Shut up. I’m gonna say it. I don’t give a damn if y’all like it or not, you know it's true. Them is some of the ugliest women I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Leno appeared a bit uncomfortable, even saying “Thank you, good night everybody. Thank you,” as if he were ending the show at that point. Yet he laughed throughout.

Hughley continued: “If you can palm a basketball and braid your own hair, somebody is going to say something about you. The first time they had makeup on was the press conference.”

Um, excuse me, but any serious athlete is not on the court to look hot, she’s there to kick butt. She ties her hair back to keep it out of her face, and she doesn’t wear makeup because it will run as she speeds up and down the court and clog her pores like the big girls clog the lane. And she wears sweatbands because she, well, sweats. A lot. It’s a satisfying sweat, knowing you’re pushing yourself to the limits to win. And that’s what the game is about.

But to misogynists like Hughley, it’s all about looks.

To be fair, he attacked the looks of Imus and the Rev. Al Sharpton, too. It doesn’t make what he said about the women of Rutgers OK. And he doesn’t get a pass on the “nappy-headed” racism because he’s black, despite his claims that “the only cool thing about being black is you can say things other people can’t say.” If anything, it gives the words more hurtful credence, and feeds into the hip-hop hook of putting down black women.

So where’s Sharpton? Where’s the National Association of Black Journalists? After all, Hughley was appearing on and is employed by NBC, which was the first network to censure Imus when he said what he said. As I write this, no other news outlet has acknowledged Hughley’s comments beyond a Tulsa TV station web site mentioning his observations on Imus and Sharpton, not the Rutgers women.

OK, there’s a difference: Hughley is a comedian and Imus is considered a news commentator. Imus frequently would have the biggest newsmakers of the day on his show. Then again, so does Leno. In fact, Hughley followed presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday night’s show. So, perhaps, the onus is put on NBC, since Leno’s show is taped hours before it airs. Someone could have raised the scarlet red flag to Hughley’s racist, sexist joke and edited it out.

But that would have been ironic, considering the point Hughley was trying to make about free speech. In arguing that Imus had the right to say what he did, Hughley said people tend to stop laughing at something when it’s deemed politically incorrect. “You can laugh at anything you want to,” he said.

He said that firing Imus doesn’t address greater problems in the black community, such as black-on-black crime and illiteracy. He riffed on the satisfaction after Imus’ firing: “We finally got the one guy who was holding us back … Thank God stuff will get better now.”

But he could have made his point more powerfully had he not demeaned the women of Rutgers – again.