I've alluded to it before, but here's a better summary of the issues. Money quote:
Don Imus doesn't think he's a racist. He says, over and over again, that he's "a good person who said a bad thing." At times he has even seemed outraged that anyone could think he's a racist, and his defenders seem even more outraged. I heard Tony Blankley on NPR last night insist that anyone who knows Imus has no doubt that he's not a racist.
I believe them. Or at least I believe that they believe it themselves.
The endless rehashing of this issue in the media has, of course, paid a lot of attention to the race gap: A lot of whites don't get why blacks are so upset by Imus, and a lot of blacks don't get how whites could be so dense. But the under-reported and under-analyzed part of the Imus story isn't the race gap, it's how the race gap combines with the generation gap.