Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The reaction was swift and justifiably angry to radio host Don Imus’s latest racist crack that players on the Rutgers women’s basketball team were “nappy-headed hos.” Imus didn’t step over the line of racial incorrectness — he obliterated it. He then straddled the repentance line with his kind-of-sort-of apology, in which he did not say “I” — only “we.” The careful phrasing turned the “apology” into generic pabulum, and was tantamount to personal absolution.

But even if Imus had made a sincere, heartfelt apology, it wouldn’t amount to much. That’s the standard ploy that shock jocks, GOP big wigs and assorted public personalities employ when they get caught with their racial pants down.

On a few occasions, the offenders have been reprimanded, suspended and even dumped. However, that’s rare. Imus’s act has been syndicated on dozens of stations for years, and simulcasted on television for more than a decade by MSNBC. Though the network gently distanced itself from Imus, it won’t likely show him the broadcast door.

There are two reasons why, and they tell much about why loudmouths like Imus can prattle off foul remarks about gays, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims and women and still skip away after a caressing hand slap.

The first is that these guys ramp up ratings, and that makes the station’s cash registers jingle. Since January, Imus’s MSNBC show has drawn an average of more than 350,000 viewers. Nielson Media Research says that’s a leap of nearly 40 percent over the same period in 2006.

The other reason it’s virtually impossible to permanently muzzle Imus and others that talk race trash is the sphinx-like silence of top politicians, broadcast industry leaders and corporate sponsors.

Ex-Massachusetts governor and current GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry bantered with Imus on his show in recent weeks. Romney hasn’t uttered a word condemning Imus, and Kerry issued a tepid statement in which he merely branded it “a stupid comment” and praised Imus for owning up to it.

While Kerry and Romney are two of the better-known politicians to recently go on Imus’s show, a steady parade of politicians and personalities have trooped to Imus’s microphones over the years. And not all of them are hard-line GOP conservatives. Sens. Joseph Lieberman and John McCain leaped over each other to get a spot with Imus, and we haven’t a heard a peep from any of them about his remarks.

The problem of the silence, or perfunctory belated criticism, by higher-ups surfaced a few years ago following then-Senate Majority Leader-Designate Trent Lott’s veiled tout of segregation. It touched off a furor, and ultimately Lott stepped down from the post, but it took nearly a week for President Bush to make a stumbling and weak disavowal of him.

The silence from top politicians and industry leaders to public racism was even more deafening a couple of years ago when William Bennett, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, said that aborting black babies could reduce crime. Even as calls were made from the usual circles — almost always blacks and liberal Democrats — for an apology, or his firing from his syndicated national radio show, neither Bush nor any other top GOP leader said a mumbling word about Bennett.

There’s another reason for their silence. Over the last two decades, many Americans have become much too comfortable using code language to bash and denigrate blacks.

In the 1970s, the vocabulary of covert racially loaded terms such as “law and order,” “crime in the streets,” “permissive society,” “welfare cheats” and “subculture of violence” seeped into the American lexicon about blacks.

In the 1980s, new terms like “crime-prone,” “war zone,” “gang-infested,” “crack-plagued,” “violence-scarred” and “ghetto poverty syndrome” were shoved into public discourse. These covert racial code terms further reinforced the negative image of young black males as dope dealers, drive-by shooters and educational cripples. Ditto for the image of young black women as a dysfunctional collection of “bitches” and “hos” and “welfare queens.”

The Rutgers ladies attend a solid academic institution, worked hard to get to the top of the basketball heap and have not posed discipline problems — yet vile racial typecasting still made them fair game for ridicule.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the National Association of Black Journalists and a handful of sports columnists will continue to loudly demand that MSNBC and radio stations give Imus the ax, and they should. But they won’t. There’s simply too much money in racial trash talk, and too much silence from the higher-ups that sends a tacit signal condoning it. That silence is Imus’s ultimate trump card.

BlackNews.com columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author, political analyst and social issues commentator.