During the course of this seemingly endless presidential campaign, the American people have been recipients of a number of offensive remarks by supporters of various candidates, remarks aimed at one or another minority group. Barack Obama has had to distance himself from remarks by both Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright that were said to be anti-Semitic and anti-white, and Hillary Clinton has had to account for her husband’s apparently racial interpretation of Obama’s victory in South Carolina.

However, the most publicized recent case of offensive speech was not connected to any political campaign. I’m talking here about Don Imus’ cruel and baseless description of the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Psychologists agree that destructive remarks like those made by Mr. Imus can cause great emotional damage, not only to the Rutgers women specifically, but to Black women generally, diminishing their self image and self confidence.

Have you heard what Imus said about these women? Chances are, you have. (We won’t repeat it here.) Did you hear it from Imus directly, by listening to his show, or from the mainstream media that reprinted and rebroadcast his remarks nearly continuously? If you’re like most of the people on this planet, you learned the content of Mr. Imus’ remarks from the media.

If we wish to condemn and hold accountable those responsible for offensive speech, we need to ask ourselves: Just who is responsible? The dictionary defines “responsible” as “being a source or cause.” By that definition, 99% of the responsibility resides with reporters and anchorpeople, who furrow their brows and feign righteous indignation, saying the offensive words over and over again while trying to look “objective” – as if they are not the primary cause (and beneficiaries, through higher ratings) of the resultant harm. When the media does confront the question of responsibility, it is usually to conclude that responsibility resides with the person who commits the initial offense, not with those who repeat it.

That seems a peculiar argument, given that most bigots aren’t especially creative people. They traffic in stereotype, which by its nature lives through repetition. The swastikas painted on temples today closely resemble those drawn by the Nazis seventy years ago; even so, we hold today’s vandals accountable for their handiwork. If a bank robber were to shoot a teller, then drop his gun and flee, and a customer were to pick up the gun and shoot nine more people, the arithmetic would be fairly clear to us: 10% harm caused by the robber, 90% caused by the customer.

What if we saw the Imus situation in the same way? The damage suffered by Black women who listened to Imus’s show that day was probably close to zero. The harm suffered by Black women everywhere at the hands of the mainstream media — nearly 100% of those who were harmed.

Today’s heightened focus on ethics and compliance tells us that it is no longer acceptable to excuse our own or someone else’s bad behavior on the grounds that “everyone else was doing it.” Perhaps the day will also arrive when “all I did was repeat what someone else said” becomes an equally unacceptable excuse.

Last 5 posts by Steve Kerr
• Inspiring When There's Less to Invest - July 14th, 2009
• Hypocrite or Human? - October 17th, 2007