Upon hearing that an African-American professor of Afro-American literature and culture at the University of Michigan has written a book called “"Burying Don Imus"” (University of Minnesota Press), it’s possible that you’ll form a pretty clear and immediate picture of what that book has to say. And it’s also quite probable that the conjured picture is wrong — unless you happen to catch Michael Awkward’s subtitle, dripping vertically in red down the cover: “Anatomy of a Scapegoat.”

For anyone who had the blessed opportunity to sleep through April 2007 — possibly the only way to have avoided this airwave scandal — that was when the host of the “Imus in the Morning” nationally syndicated radio program, also simulcast on MSNBC, referred to members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” in the course of a conversation with producer Bernie McGuirk. Less than two weeks later, Imus was out of a job: The clip played on “that endless television loop reserved for the currently disgraced and the recently deceased,” as Awkward puts it in the book; Al Sharpton invited Imus to his own show for a scolding; Oprah hosted the slandered players and coaches; advertiser support dropped like a rock; the radio show was suspended; MSNBC dropped the simulcast; and CBS Radio finally pulled the plug on “Imus in the Morning” altogether.

To those of us who only followed the controversy to the extent that it seemed to be discussed in every known corner of the universe, it looked basically clear cut. A crusty white guy who was rude on general principle had finally not only stepped over the line but come crashing down on the other side of it, using gratuitous racial and misogynistic terms to talk about a bunch of young women who weren’t doing anything but striving for greatness in their particular endeavor. So it seemed reasonable and a bit satisfying for many to see him publicly dressed down and summarily fired — a small measure of justice given the state of the world’s problems, but surely one headed in the right direction. Right?

This is the reading of the incident that drove Awkward — black man, feminist scholar, professor of African American cultural studies and “Imus in the Morning” fan — to his keyboard.

“I listened to Don Imus for about six years or so, and when the controversy started about what he said, it seemed that a lot of the people who were talking about who he was, what he represented and what his comments meant were not people who listened to him,” said Awkward. “I hoped I had something to say that broadened the context.”

And indeed, nearly everything in this 174 pages does just that. Awkward discusses humor, hate speech, the trauma of racial violence, Imus’ good works, misogyny, hip hop and hair politics, making the case in new ways each time that the particular circumstances to which we think we’re responding are generally less informative than the response itself. Presenting a wealth of what he calls “overblown contemporary national racial skirmishes” over “seemingly offensive words and actions of whites,” Awkward posits that this “ritual” of discrediting a public figure with the nearly indelible stamp of “racist” is the inevitable fruit of our failure to either address or atone for the “racially motivated sins” of slavery and Jim Crow in any meaningful way.

As it happened, I finished reading the book on the morning that the “endless television loop” was buzzing with former president Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the role of race in the vocal opposition to President Obama, and the public dialogue struck me as fitting almost perfectly into the well-worn grooves Awkward highlights in his book. Are we, I asked him, having the same conversation over and over again?

“Yeah, you say Jimmy Carter and I say Robert Louis Gates,” he answered, referring to the black Harvard professor recently arrested by a white police officer while trying to get into his own home. “I think that part of why the Imus book was so important to me to do, and both so difficult and so easy, was that the narrative never changes. We are always aware of the fact that we’re embroiled in these issues of racism, and there’s this legacy or history that we know is there, that we claim to want to confront, but … I always think of it in the context of Chuck E. Cheese.” What?! “There’s this game where you have a mallet and you try and hit this thing, but it keeps popping back up…”

“Whack-a-mole?” The image is both wholly unexpected and utterly descriptive.

“Yeah. And you know you can’t win it, but we keep coming back to it … and going around and coming back to it. … (Imus) uttered the phrase ‘nappy-headed hos,’ which was seen as sufficient reason to take him off the air. Yet in every single news report about that, the news reporters uttered the phrase over and over and over again. So there’s a recognition that it’s not a phrase so offensive that the FCC would keep people from saying it. On the other hand, it was because he was seen as speaking for himself, that he was a racist and sexist. And because he was made to pay the price for his personal actions, then we don’t have to examine ourselves at all. I don’t think this was a wise way to go, since we just said we don’t learn (and that we’ve) had this conversation over and over and over again.”

What would have to happen in order to stop? “I try to pose some solutions (in the book) that I don’t feel particularly convinced about," admits Awkward. "But I do think that the first thing we need to do is acknowledge that slavery happened and that it has certain implications. I think there is a kind of guilt on the part of people who are white and have acknowledged that it happened (and) what it means and… I think that being a member of a race of people who not only were enslaved but then suffered for a hundred years under Jim Crow, there’s always a skepticism about white people and why they do what they do. Obviously it’s being solved on one level but then we keep having these moments where we feel like it’s going nowhere. One of the things that needs to happen is for the nation, like other nations that have committed atrocities, is to say that it’s wrong and that it still impacts the world. What that will do besides get that issue on the table, I’m not sure, but as a first step it seems like a pretty fundamental one.”

As if it the challenge of using all the wrong questions to confront a real-life, seemingly eternal version of a futile kids' game wasn’t frustrating enough, a discussion of race only covers half of Imus’ three-word offensive: “hos” takes aim not at skin color but at reproductive organs. Here, Awkward has a perspective that few in the world share, since by the time he started watching “Imus in the Morning” in 2000, his 15 years of published work had offered feminist analyses of gender representations in art created by black Americans. A male feminist, quite frankly, doesn’t have an easy job. Scholarly discussions can be contentious in any case, and temperatures really rise when the subject is how half of the world has been mistreated, and when the person offering the opinion is a member of the “mistreating” class, well… Suffice it to say that after a decade and a half, Awkward confesses in the book that he’d “lost the wherewithal to continue to be treated as a whipping boy for those who saw my efforts as those of either a treacherous outsider or a singular black male exception.” So he wrote a swan song of sorts to his focus on feminism, the memoir “Scenes of Instruction,” and when he stumbled upon the lily-white boys’ club at “Imus in the Morning,” he “found its male exclusivity strangely comforting.” It was nice to be where dudes were just dudes.

Perhaps at least mildly ironic, then, that this escape landed him right back in the middle of a contentious discussion about race and gender. “It was a full-circle moment in some respects, but it was one I could choose to participate in or not participate in. I knew it was a kind of racy show,” said Awkward. “I knew that it was a sort of politically incorrect show in all sorts of ways, and I think that part of what interested me … is that it was something satirically comical or having a controversial take on the events that were going on. … I’ve always loved comedy, and I figured that there was nothing better to do than to wake up to something that made me laugh. … It landed me (in the middle of that discussion) because I wanted it to.”

In another sense, though, he admits that he’s not sure he could have written this book had he not begun dis-embroiling himself in feminism and its politics. “I think if I was trying to be a doctrinaire feminist, I maybe wouldn’t have been able to take that position; I would have been aware of all of the problems with it. It reflected a moment of my time, but I’m still as good or bad a feminist as I ever was.”

I wondered if he had to spend any time explaining that, either personally or professionally, since it seemed plenty reasonable that there would be a few folks who’d really prefer he not go sticking up for a rich, crabby white guy. “(I haven't taken any) personal heat, yet. I’ve had a lot of professional conversations with people who think I’ve gone off the deep end or that my politics have changed significantly" — the smile in his voice is almost a chuckle here — "asking why it’s so important to me to intervene in this way. For me, I guess I felt it was necessary because so many times I’ve felt it’s easier to stick my head in the sand, but in this case I felt that the book is as much about why we respond to these issues in the way that we do as it is about this particular issue. ... People wonder about it, and I suspect and they’re concerned about my psyche and mental health, but it seemed to me that because I know his show so well, I see it as performing a valuable service. At the very least, I wanted to in this case suggest the ways in which that show and how a more complicated look at it could help with these sorts of issues, and maybe — I don’t claim to know — try to heal from it.”

Michael Awkward will be at Nicola's Books at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 5 for a reading and discussion of "Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat," an appearance that his publicist tells us will also be attended by C-SPAN2's "Book TV." In an interesting coincidence, that's also the day "Imus in the Morning" returns to television — this time on the Fox Business Network.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer for AnnArbor.com.