Mar 09 2009
I’m Boycotting Tom Joyner… well not really
This morning, my radio was tuned to Tom Joyner becauseI was listening to oldies yesterday afternoon. Just as I was about to turn to talk radio, I heard my friend’s brainy boo, Roland S. Martin, so I listened in. I must say that I was disappointed in what I heard.
Apparently some Barnes & Noble Bookstore in Coral Gables, FL had a display of Barack Obama books and some IGNORAMUS placed a monkey book in the middle of the display. *sigh*
Roland was upset because Barnes & Noble apparently turned down an initial interview. Then, when the interview was granted, they didn’t like the man’s answers. A member of Tom Joyner crew’s (Sybill I think) ”solution” was to block off all the displays in all the bookstores to prevent this from happening again. The man’s solution was to have security on the windows at THAT store because this was an ISOLATED incident. That wasn’t good enough & they were talking boycott. That is when I got out of the car, I couldn’t take it. What more do they want them to do over an ISOLATED incident? It wasn’t as if someone who WORKS for them did it. I am tired of the hypervigilance over the race issue. I understand that more & more there are racist things going on more BLATANT and institutional than this… but come ON!
I began having stereotypical thoughts MYSELF. I was thinking too the people talking boycott: “Oh, so now you will buy your ‘hood lit’ elsewhere? Now when you want to buy some self-published NONSENSE book about sex, drugs and money you have to go to Borders or Books-a-million because you didn’t support the small black bookstores that used to try and EDUCATE our people? Did you even READ any of the Barack Obama books? How long was the display up before someone noticed?”
There is a such thing as overanalyzing & I think that that is the case here. I am not saying that racism is ok or racist foolishness should just be brushed off, but in THIS instance, for THIS ISOLATED incident, it was handled properly. DONE & DONE… But I am no Roland martin or Tom Joyner, so that is just my humble opinion…. *shrug*
I’m not hating, I’m just stating!
