Panel debates how hip-hop portrays women in wake of Imus scandal

CHICAGO — A panel discussion titled “Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?” drew more than 400 people last Saturday — a sign that the furor that erupted over Don Imus’ comments isn’t over yet.

As Imus struggled in vain to keep his radio job earlier this month, he claimed that rappers routinely “defame and demean black women” and call them “worse names than I ever did.” That led to some music-industry navel-gazing, but too little action, some panelists at the University of Chicago said.

Some criticized music executives for failing to make a strong statement against violent and demeaning language in mainstream rap music when they met earlier this month in New York.

Others blasted hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons for not doing enough when he called this week for the recording and broadcast industries to ban three words — “bitch,” “ho” and “nigger” — from all so-called clean versions of rap songs.

“How is no one saying to Russell, ‘Yo, we already bleep out those words?’” said Joan Morgan, an author and commentator on hip-hop and feminism.

Others at the event said hip-hop shouldn’t be made a scapegoat for what’s wrong in America.

“We allow this language to go on,” said Amina Norman-Hawkins, a Chicago hip-hop emcee and executive director of the Chicago Hip-Hop Initiative. “As a community, we aren’t responsible for our children. So we don’t teach our little boys how to grow up to be men and respect women. We allow them to learn from the street what’s acceptable.”

Some said Imus’ April 12 firing by CBS Radio over a slur he used to describe Rutgers University’s women’s basketball team has provided a new opportunity to galvanize public opinion on the issue.

“Sexism is too convenient within the black community for black men,” said David Ikard, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee. “This issue of Imus came up and I asked the black men in my hip-hop course what were their stakes in it. They were like, ‘Well, we don’t really have any stakes in it. It seems trivial.’”

Supreme Court Justice Breyer stresses civil liberties

WASHINGTON — Justice Stephen Breyer last Saturday stressed the role of the Supreme Court in protecting civil liberties in an age of terrorism.

At a public appearance in Brussels, Belgium, the justice said the high court made a mistake in World War II when it said the relocation of Japanese Americans in internment camps was constitutional.

Believing a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was possible, President Roosevelt set the program in motion.

“We should have a tough law protecting civil liberties; and if the president thinks that it has to be broken, save the country, he’ll break it,” Breyer said. “I used to rather sympathize with that point of view, but I don’t anymore.”

Breyer did not mention President Bush or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the site of a U.S. prison where nearly 400 detainees have been held indefinitely, some for five years.

In its 6-3 decision in 1944, the Supreme Court said it is permissible to curtail civil rights of a racial group when there is a pressing public necessity.

Breyer related the history of the internment of the Japanese Americans from personal knowledge. Breyer, who was born in San Francisco in 1938, said he was 6 years old when his mother pointed and said, “That’s where they held the Japanese.”

Also appearing with Breyer was Georgetown law professor Viet Dinh, who drafted the original Patriot Act in 2001 while serving in the Justice Department shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Army chief wants to speed up troop hike

SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii — The Army’s new chief of staff says he wants to accelerate by two years a plan to increase the nation’s active-duty soldiers by 65,000.

The Army has set 2012 as its target date for a force expansion to 547,000 troops, but Gen. George Casey said last Saturday that he has told his staff to have the soldiers ready earlier.

“I said that’s too long. Go back and tell me what it would take to get it done faster,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press during a stop in Hawaii.

Casey became the Army’s chief of staff on April 12 after serving as the top U.S. commander in Iraq for two-and-a-half years. He visited Hawaii for a few days in a Pacific region tour to talk with soldiers and their families. He next heads to Japan, South Korea and Alaska.

Casey said his staff has submitted a proposal for the accelerated timeline but that he has yet to approve the plan. He said the Army was stretched and would remain that way until the additional troops were trained and equipped.

Casey told a group of soldiers’ spouses that one of his tasks is to try to limit the impact of the strain on soldiers and their families.

“We live in a difficult period for the Army because the demand for our forces exceeds the supply,” he said.

A woman in the group asked Casey if her husband’s deployments would stop getting longer. She said they used to last for six months in the 1990s but then started lasting nine months and 12 months. Two weeks ago, she heard the Army’s announcement that deployments would be extended as long as 15 months.

“Do you honestly foresee this spiral, in effect, stopping?” she asked.

Casey said the Army wants to keep deployments to 15 months, but “I cannot look at you in the eye and guarantee that it would not go beyond.”

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