I’m sure by now that most of you have caught up with the news about US shock jock Don Imus, who was sacked last week after referring to the Black American members of a female college basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” on his radio show.

It strikes me as rather strange that Don Imus has been sacked for doing something that most Black American rappers and entertainers do on a daily basis.

Women are regularly profaned and degraded in Gansta Rap music, in hip-hop movies and the comedy routines of many Black American comedians, and not only is there no public outcry but in fact there is massive financial and ratings support for such obscene behaviour.

Words such as “ho”; “bitch”; “bootylicious”; “shorty”; “smack that” and “pimping” are all words regularly used in rap songs about women.

In fact, apart from the odd rarity, you will never hear a hip-hop or gansta rap song refer to a woman in anything other than derogatory terms. Even when hip-hop artists do attempt to refer to women in a more flattering manner (like “Dear Mama” by the late Tupac Shakur) their attempts ring completely hollow when compared to the majority of their other music which is completely degrading to women.

Then there is the word “nigger”, or the gansta derivative: “nigga”, which has become so common in rap and hip-hop music, and Black comedy and movies, that it is now shocking to find such material which doesn’t feature this word.

Last year I read the book LAbyrinth, an expose of the corruption in the L.A.P.D. and the hip-hop scene, especially around the time of the murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. It was truly frightening to discover just how engrained the gansta philosophy has become in many Black American neighbourhoods.

But this isn’t just a US problem.

Take a look around your local NZ neighbourhood or CD store and you’ll discover that this alarming trend is plaguing our culture as well. Even kiwi hip-hop artists have begun to imitate the fashion, the attitudes and philosophies of US gansta rap.

It’s easy to feel righteous indignation and make Don Imus a scapegoat, but the fact is that he merely reflects a cultural sickness that is everyday practise, and is almost certain to be financed by the very media corporation that sacked Don Imus.

But it’s not just Hollywood and the music industry that is sponsoring this normalisation of racism and degradation of women, it’s all of us. The reality is that the music and movie industry is merely producing product that we are more than happy to purchase and finance.

Before you go saying “I don’t buy gansta rap”, stop and think about whether you’ve hired or purchased tickets to movies like Get rich or die trying, 8 Mile; whether you’ve frequented night clubs and bars (where hip-hop makes up a major share of the music played); or whether you’ve purchased compilation CDs which feature tracks by artists like 50 Cent, Snoop Dog, P-Diddy, Akon, Eminem, and others.

It’s about time that hip-hop culture was subject to serious scrutiny, and that has started to happen in the last week or so since the Don Imus incident hit the headlines, but sadly I suspect that this scrutiny is nothing more than meaningless media hype which will come to an end well before Don Imus is rehired by another hip-hop supporting media outlet.