NO ONE ANSWERS the telephone at Washington, D.C., radio station WARW these days. It just rings and rings, for about 30 to 40 times, and then a busy signal kicks in. Folks at WARW must not be in a talking mood.
Until the end of February, Doug Tracht worked at WARW. He was a shock jock known as "Greaseman." The day after the Grammy Awards show, Greaseman played a sound bite of one of hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill's songs. At the end of the bite, Greaseman said, "No wonder people drag them behind trucks."
The reaction was swift. Tracht was canned within days. His statement was racist, bigoted, stupid and puerile. If Greaseman was out to prove he was the dumbest white man in America, he went a couple of hundred light years above and beyond the call of duty.
In other words, Tracht's disgusting comment was perfect for shock-jock radio. He said exactly what the now mercifully silent WARW managers were paying him to say. The problem isn't so much Tracht. He's an idiot. He just did what came naturally to him.
The problem is the shock-jock format. Those of you looking for villains in this pathetic incident and who are jumping with glee because Greaseman was fired are settling for a cheap victory. The entire management of WARW should resign, and the station be shut down. Either that, or they need to get a new format.
"I'm a shock jock," Tracht said Wednesday on WOL and WOLB, the Radio One talk show station that serves Washington and Baltimore and targets a predominantly black audience. "I'm on the edge."
Well, not anymore he isn't. But his point was valid. He got paid to shock. What he said certainly did that. WARW is a rock, not a hip-hop, station. Whoever's running the shop there inserted Lauryn Hill's music into the show knowing pretty much what Greaseman was going to say. Then, when he said it, they feigned righteous indignation and gave him the boot to cover their own pathetic butts.
Tracht appeared on Joe Madison's afternoon show. Critics charged that Madison gave Tracht a free forum. Far from it. Madison subjected Greaseman to a third-degree some homicide detectives might learn lessons from. When Tracht apologized, asked forgiveness and confessed his stupidity, Madison reminded him of a similar quote he made in 1986 in response to the establishment of a Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.
"Kill four more and we can take a week off," the insipidly witty Greaseman quipped then. At the time, Tracht said, he thought that joke was funny. He'd heard it around, laughed at it and repeated it on his show. Only recently -- like in the last two weeks -- has Greaseman realized that such "humor" caters to a certain racist element in society.
"People need to evaluate the kind of jokes they tell, listen to and laugh at," Tracht told Madison and boxing promoter Rock Newman. "You can have a racist corner you don't know exists."
It's refreshing to hear someone in 1990s America apply the R-word to himself. Nobody admits to bigotry or racism. That includes whites, blacks and every racial and ethnic group in between. Pick out anybody on the streets in these 1990s, and that person will swear that he or she doesn't have a bigoted bone in his or her body.
But by eerie coincidence, the very night that Hill won five Grammy awards -- which no doubt prompted Tracht's racist gibe the next morning -- Ted Koppel's "Nightline" broadcast was dedicated to an experiment in which 700 doctors listened to two actors describe the exact same symptoms indicating heart trouble. One actor was white, the other black. The doctors were asked to give each a diagnosis and recommend treatment. By a 2-to-1 margin, the doctors recommended better treatment for the white "patient."
California state Sen. Tom Hayden told a group in Los Angeles the next day that the experiment proved what Tract said one week later: that whites may be racist and not even know it. Racism and bigotry may hit whites at a subconscious level, allowing them to make evaluations not unlike those of the doctors in the experiment. Or to find humor in a "joke" that makes light of a lynching.
The latent racism may run so deep that we now have to ask whether the four New York City police officers -- all white -- who shot unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo 19 times "for making a gesture" -- might have harbored some subconscious anti-black prejudices. If it can afflict doctors -- supposedly among the better educated -- it can affect police officers. We've already had one shock jock admit he's infected.
And we shouldn't be surprised if a similar ailment has attacked management at a certain radio station where the phone just rings and rings and rings.
Pub Date: 3/06/99