Imus and New York's dirty little secret

Imagine what the media coverage during the last few weeks would have been like if Don Imus had spent the last twenty-eight years broadcasting out of Atlanta, instead of New York. We would have been bombarded with stereotypes about how everyone in the South is racist, and with self-serving comparisons of the North and South via the woefully simplistic "Red State/Blue State" dichotomy. Instead, because Imus lives in Manhattan, the media controversy over his comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team has had a narrow focus on the man himself. In fact, I don't think I've come across a single column talking about where Imus lives, and whether comments like his are commonplace in New York and its suburbs.

The real lesson the media should be taking away from the Imus controversy - and from the recent Michael Richards ("Kramer" from Seinfeld) controversy - is that racism has no geographic boundaries, and that it is as much of a problem in New York as it is anywhere. I lived in New York City for six years, and I can honestly say that I believe that racism is as common in Big Apple as it is in my hometown of Raleigh, and just might be more common. Don't think that I'm giving the South, or the Tar Heel State, a free pass - to the contrary, I constantly encourage everyone I know to read Tim Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name, a shockingly painful reminder of how bad things were in my father's hometown just a few decades ago.

But that's the difference - the South, or at least "Our Other South" (to borrow a term from Tyson's book), has spent the last few decades trying to face up to the racism in its past, and trying to be better than that. North Carolina's state Senate officially apologized for slavery and Jim Crow last week, and while it's definitely fair to say that it's about time, the recent trend of official apologies shows that racism is something white Southerners are still very concerned about.

In contrast, New Yorkers often have absolutely no filter when it comes to making awkward, and even offensive, comments about race. Once, my close friend Will, who is white, was visiting me in Brooklyn, and we drove out to one of the beaches on Long Island for the afternoon. He was wearing a Duke shirt, and when we walked into a pizza place, the guy behind the counter said, "Duke, that's in Durham . . . [and then, disapprovingly] lotta blacks there." (Really? There are a lot of black people in Durham? Thanks for clearing that up - as Triangle natives we had no idea that Durham had a large black population.) What the guy in the pizza place didn't know was that Will's wife (then his fiancee) is black. He shrugged off the comment, but as soon as we left, he turned to me and said "wow, now I understand what you were saying about how New Yorkers are about race."

During law school, I took a course titled "Race and the Law." Not surprisingly, much of the course dealt with government-sanctioned discrimination against blacks over the course of American history. After the course, one guy kept coming up to me and accusing me of trying to be politically correct, and trying to kiss up to the teacher, for expressing liberal views about civil rights during the course. On three or four occasions, he came up to me out of the blue and said things like "now that I know what blacks complain about, I hate them more than I already did." (What, like slavery? Jim Crow? The well-documented discrimination practices that existed in employment, banking, and almost every other aspect of life?!)

As you can imagine, I was shocked. But experiences like these are the reason I wasn't shocked when I heard what Imus said about the Rutgers women's basketball team last week.