Calling Toussaint a 'Dumb Coconut'

Here we go again: Less than a year after pissing off much of the known world with the tasteless "Tsunami Song"—and nearly losing her job in the process—Hot 97 DJ Miss Jones stuck her foot in her mouth once more. Lashing out on December 21 at at New York City's striking Transit Workers Union, Jones proceeded to denounce the union members as undereducated, overpaid failures, then called its president, Trinidad-born Roger Toussaint, a "dumb coconut who probably don't have a green card."

The slurs might have remained relatively obscure, but for Playthell Benjamin's December 23 opinion piece in the Daily News, in which he called her comments "a performance that could well aggravate the already troubled relations between the African-American and Caribbean communities."

The uproar caused by her comments has paled in comparison to the furor over the "Tsunami Song," in which she sang about "screaming chinks" running from the killer waves, but City Councilmember Yvette D. Clarke issued a harsh response Wednesday, demanding not only an apology to the entire Caribbean community, but that Hot 97 fire Jones once and for all. Clarke, a Jamaican American who represents parts of Crown Heights and Flatbush, two communities with large Caribbean populations, called the comments a "distasteful display of self-hatred and bigotry" and referred to Jones's "long history of foot-in-mouth disease" and "unique talent for spewing garbage."

Says Clarke: "It is my intention to bring this issue to my colleagues in the City Council and introduce a resolution calling for the permanent removal of the Miss Jones in The Morning show and the economic boycott of Hot 97 and its advertisers."

Stay tuned.