I have a question. Don Imus and his supporters have been running around saying they learned the phrase “nappy-headed Hos” from rap music. They said hip-hop made them feel it was okay to joke that way. So I gotta ask folks: What rapper ever referred to sistas as nappy-headed hos?

I recall the group Nappy Roots? I heard Ludacris say he has “hos in different area codes,” but exactly what song or group was Don Imus listening to when he was inspired to this particular rhetorical flourish?

In truth, it’s not surprising. When I was growing up, the comedians Richard Pryor and Red Foxx were dissing women and using the word “nigger.” I remember Blowfly, who was doing rated-x raps back in the mid 70s, although he had no connection to hip-hop as it was emerging in the Bronx.

I heard the raunchy songs of Millie Jackson 25 years before Lil Kim showed up. And long before Too Short or Snoop started pimping or moving keys, I had Superfly and the Mack lacing me up about those insidious trades.

Heck even further back, when I was a kid in the second and third grade out in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, I’d be called “Nigger Charley” by white kids after the posters on the subways for the movie Nigger Charley and its sequel The Return of Nigger Charley. Some of y’all reading this are old enough to know what I’m talking about. These were actual ads in the form of posters on the subway stations throughout New York.

What’s interesting is that while our parents were listening to albums by Pryor and Foxx that had the word “nigger” in the title, or reading the book by activist Dick Gregory called Nigger, a young Afrika Bambaataa was running around the Bronx bestowing titles like “king” and “queen” on folks to make them feel good. Like Bam used to say, “If I start calling brothers and sisters king and queen perhaps they’ll behave like kings and queens!” This was the mid-seventies.

Now Don Imus has been around since the seventies. He also made a name for himself by playing popular black music. So he’s full of shit when he says he picked up all that “nappy headed ho” jargon from rappers. If anything, he was more likely to pick it up from the Al Sharpton- and Jesse Jackson-generation. After all, they were grown men fighting for our liberation when those Nigger Charley posters were adorning our subways without objection. Members of the hip-hop generation were only kids then or yet to be born.

One of differences between then and now, is that I don’t recall well-known radio jocks such as Frankie Crocker, Jocko Henderson, Mad Hatter or Ken Webb calling women hos on the radio. Words like that would have been bleeped out. Station owners like Percy Sutton and others had his jocks be more civil and conduct themselves with class. All that changed in the eighties and nineties, though. Suddenly it wasn’t cool to be civil. In fact it was considered weak. How did that happen?

Back in the late-eighties, I remember that many black radio stations refused to play groups such as Public Enemy, KRS, Brand Nubian. Those Afrocentric groups were considered noise. Does anyone recall when we had R&B stations bragging in their jingles that they didn’t play rap? I remember that clearly. I also recall white dance music stations and Top 40 stations changing format and embracing hip-hop around that time. I’m talking about Hot 97 in New York, KMEL in San Francisco, Power 106 in Los Angeles. Was that the beginning of the end? I do recall KMEL in San Francisco playing NWA with jingles saying “keeping it true to the streets.”

By the time people like C. Delores Tucker and Calvin Butts raised a stink about the lack of civility, so-called gangsta rap had been on the radio for five years. These activists came out against 2Pac and Snoop Dogg and totally missed the previous years where stations found they could garner number one ratings playing NWA. As I look back at the time period, I saw only one objection: a boycott in 1989 against NWA that was led by hip-hop shows on college and community stations KPOO, KALX and KZSU, under the banner Bay Area Hip Hop Coalition. The New York Times covered that boycott. Outside of that, though, there wasn’t much discussion about the issues that led to the boycott. Where was Tipper Gore? If anything, there was resistance from white college programmers who felt that a boycott was censorship. They made it a point to play the NWA records in spite of the fact that the boycott was being led by black jocks.

Since the seventies, we been calling women bitches and hos and calling each other nigger in very public spaces. How did this happen? How has it continued to happen for thirty years? Where did we drop the ball? It’s ironic to me that our parents blame us for something they should’ve nipped in the bud back in the day, a full generation ago. In this whole Imus ugliness, that’s something to ponder…

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Davey D is a hip-hop historian, journalist, dj and community activist. This essay originally appeared at Davey D’s hip-hop corner. It has been edited for length and style.