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ConnexionBill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
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Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
dilibon Mer 2 Mar 2011 - 19:00
‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’ The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Video: "The Cosby Crusade" Ta-Nehisi Coates explores Bill Cosby's transformation from TV dad to outspoken social critic.
Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Some were there with their sons. Some were there in wheelchairs. The audience was packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to capture the overflow. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. Clutching a cordless mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared remarks and comic ad-libs. A row of old black men, community elders, sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. The rest of the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man! Teach!”
He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”
Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.
“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’
“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”
Cosby was wearing his standard uniform—dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher learning. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”
From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.
It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. F. Hutton, Kodak, and Jell-O Pudding Pops. And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results. Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Indeed, we are now enjoying a moment of national self-congratulation over racial progress, with a black man running for president as the very realization of King’s dream. Barack Obama defied efforts by the Clinton campaign to pigeonhole him as a “black” candidate, casting himself instead as the symbol of a society that has moved beyond lazy categories of race.
Black America does not entirely share the euphoria, though. The civil-rights generation is exiting the American stage—not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the country to black America’s fate. In that climate, Cosby’s gospel of discipline, moral reform, and self-reliance offers a way out—a promise that one need not cure America of its original sin in order to succeed. Racism may not be extinguished, but it can be beaten.
Has Dr. Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved television households, seen the truth: that the dream of integration should never supplant the pursuit of self-respect; that blacks should worry more about judging themselves and less about whether whites are judging them on the content of their character? Or has he lost his mind?
From the moment he registered in the American popular consciousness, as the Oxford-educated Alexander Scott in the NBC adventure series I Spy, Cosby proffered the idea of an America that transcended race. The series, which started in 1965, was the first weekly show to feature an African American in a lead role, but it rarely factored race into dialogue or plots. Race was also mostly inconspicuous in Cosby’s performances as a hugely popular stand-up comedian. “I don’t spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act,” Cosby told Playboy in 1969. He also said that he didn’t “have time to sit around and worry whether all the black people of the world make it because of me. I have my own gig to worry about.” His crowning artistic and commercial achievement—The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992—was seemingly a monument to that understated sensibility.
In fact, blackness was never absent from the show or from Bill Cosby. Plots involved black artists like Stevie Wonder or Dizzy Gillespie. The Huxtables’ home was decorated with the works of black artists like Annie Lee, and the show featured black theater veterans such as Roscoe Lee Brown and Moses Gunn. Behind the scenes, Cosby hired the Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint to make sure that the show never trafficked in stereotypes and that it depicted blacks in a dignified light. Picking up Cosby’s fixation on education, Poussaint had writers insert references to black schools. “If the script mentioned Oberlin, Texas Tech, or Yale, we’d circle it and tell them to mention a black college,” Poussaint told me in a phone interview last year. “I remember going to work the next day and white people saying, ‘What’s the school called Morehouse?’” In 1985, Cosby riled NBC by placing an anti-apartheid sign in his Huxtable son’s bedroom. The network wanted no part of the debate. “There may be two sides to apartheid in Archie Bunker’s house,” the Toronto Star quoted Cosby as saying. “But it’s impossible that the Huxtables would be on any side but one. That sign will stay on that door. And I’ve told NBC that if they still want it down, or if they try to edit it out, there will be no show.” The sign stayed.
Offstage, Cosby’s philanthropy won him support among the civil-rights crowd. He made his biggest splash in 1988, when he and his wife gave $20 million to Spelman College, the largest individual donation ever given to a black college. “Two million would have been fantastic; 20 million, to use the language of the hip-hop generation, was off the chain,” says Johnnetta Cole, who was then president of Spelman. Race again came to the fore in 1997, when Cosby’s son was randomly shot and killed while fixing a flat on a Los Angeles freeway. His wife wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that white racism lay behind her son’s death. “All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors,” she wrote. “Most people know that facing the truth brings about healing and growth. When is America going to face its historical and current racial realities so it can be what it says it is?”
The column caused a minor row, but most of white America took little notice. To them, Cosby was still America’s Dad. But those close to Cosby were not surprised. Cosby was an avowed race man, who, like much of his generation, had come to feel that black America had lost its way. The crisis of absentee fathers, the rise of black-on-black crime, and the spread of hip-hop all led Cosby to believe that, after the achievements of the 1960s, the black community was committing cultural suicide.
His anger and frustration erupted into public view during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. At that moment, the shades of mortality and irrelevance seemed to be drawing over the civil-rights generation. Its matriarchs, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, would be dead within two years. The NAACP’s membership rolls had been shrinking; within months, its president, Kweisi Mfume, would resign (it was later revealed that he was under investigation by the NAACP for sexual harassment and nepotism—allegations that he denied). Other movement leaders were drifting into self-parody: Al Sharpton would soon be hosting a reality show and, a year later, would be doing ads for a predatory loan company; Sharpton and Jesse Jackson had recently asked MGM to issue an apology for the hit movie Barbershop.
That night, Cosby was one of the last honorees to take the podium. He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”
There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. “The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” he told the audience. Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”
Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa— with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock. After what has come to be known as “the Pound Cake speech”—it has its own Wikipedia entry—Cosby came under attack from various quarters of the black establishment. The playwright August Wilson commented, “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” One of the gala’s hosts, Ted Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, called his comments “a harsh attack on poor black people in particular.” Dubbing Cosby an “Afristocrat in Winter,” the Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson came out with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, that took issue with Cosby’s bleak assessment of black progress and belittled his transformation from vanilla humorist to social critic and moral arbiter. “While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle,” argued Dyson, “he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table.”
But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. Outsiders may have heard haranguing in Cosby’s language and tone. But much of black America heard instead the possibility of changing their communities without having to wait on the consciences and attention spans of policy makers who might not have their interests at heart. Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment. Cosby’s argument has resonated with the black mainstream for just that reason.
From Atlantic Unbound:
"The Awakening of the Negro" (September 1896)
"Friction between the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world." By Booker T. Washington
The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the 20th century, Washington married a defense of the white South with a call for black self-reliance and became the most prominent black leader of his day. He argued that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land.
From Atlantic Unbound:
"Strivings of the Negro People" (August 1897)
"The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world... This is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to husband and use his best powers." By W.E.B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the black vote was heretical. History ultimately rendered half of Washington’s argument moot. His famous Atlanta Compromise—in which he endorsed segregation as a temporary means of making peace with southerners—was answered by lynchings, land theft, and general racial terrorism. But Washington’s appeal to black self-sufficiency endured.
After Washington’s death, in 1915, the black conservative tradition he had fathered found a permanent and natural home in the emerging ideology of Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, its patron saint, turned the Atlanta Compromise on its head, implicitly endorsing segregation not as an olive branch to whites but as a statement of black supremacy. Black Nationalists scorned the Du Boisian integrationists as stooges or traitors, content to beg for help from people who hated them.
Garvey argued that blacks had rendered themselves unworthy of the white man’s respect. “The greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself,” wrote Garvey. “The monkey wrench of destruction as thrown into the cog of Negro Progress, is not thrown so much by the outsider as by the very fellow who is in our fold, and who should be the first to grease the wheel of progress rather than seeking to impede.” Decades later, Malcolm X echoed that sentiment, faulting blacks for failing to take charge of their destinies. “The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” Malcolm said. “But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.”
Black conservatives like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, have at times allied themselves with black liberals. But in general, they have upheld a core of beliefs laid out by Garvey almost a century ago: a skepticism of (white) government as a mediating force in the “Negro problem,” a strong belief in the singular will of black people, and a fixation on a supposedly glorious black past.
Those beliefs also animate Come On People, the manifesto that Cosby and Poussaint published last fall. Although it does not totally dismiss government programs, the book mostly advocates solutions from within as a cure for black America’s dismal vital statistics. “Once we find our bearings,” they write, “we can move forward, as we have always done, on the path from victims to victors.” Come On People is heavy on black pride (“no group of people has had the impact on the culture of the whole world that African Americans have had, and much of that impact has been for the good”), and heavier on the idea of the Great Fall—the theory, in this case, that post–Jim Crow blacks have lost touch with the cultural traditions that enabled them to persevere through centuries of oppression.
“For all the woes of segregation, there were some good things to come out of it,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “One was that it forced us to take care of ourselves. When restaurants, laundries, hotels, theaters, groceries, and clothing stores were segregated, black people opened and ran their own. Black life insurance companies and banks thrived, as well as black funeral homes … Such successes provided jobs and strength to black economic well-being. They also gave black people that gratifying sense of an interdependent community.” Although the authors take pains to put some distance between themselves and the Nation of Islam, they approvingly quote one of its ministers who spoke at a call-out in Compton, California: “I went to Koreatown today and I met with the Korean merchants,” the minister told the crowd. “I love them. You know why? They got a place called what? Koreatown. When I left them, I went to Chinatown. They got a place called what? Chinatown. Where is your town?”
The notion of the Great Fall, and the attendant theory that segregation gave rise to some “good things,” are the stock-in-trade of what Christopher Alan Bracey, a law professor at Washington University, calls (in his book, Saviors or Sellouts) the “organic” black conservative tradition: conservatives who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention, but whose black-nationalist leanings make them anathema to the Heritage Foundation and Rush Limbaugh. When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him. This is the audience that flocks to Cosby: culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.
“There are things that we did not see coming,” Cosby told me over lunch in Manhattan last year. “Like, you could see the Klan, but because these things were not on a horse, because there was no white sheet, and the people doing the deed were not white, we saw things in the light of family and forgiveness … We didn’t pay attention to the dropout rate. We didn’t pay attention to the fathers, to the self-esteem of our boys.”
Given the state of black America, it is hard to quarrel with that analysis. Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet black men account for 49 percent of America’s murder victims and 41 percent of the prison population. The teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000, more than double the rate for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group measured by the Census, making only 61 percent of the median income of white families.
Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”
The rise of the organic black conservative tradition is also a response to America’s retreat from its second attempt at Reconstruction. Blacks have watched as the courts have weakened affirmative action, arguably the country’s greatest symbol of state-sponsored inclusion. They’ve seen a fraudulent war on drugs that, judging by the casualties, looks like a war on black people. They’ve seen themselves bandied about as playthings in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan (with his 1980 invocation of states’ rights” in Mississippi), George Bush (Willie Horton), Bill Clinton (Sister Souljah), and George W. Bush (McCain’s fabled black love-child). They’ve seen the utter failures of school busing and housing desegregation, as well as the horrors of Katrina. The result is a broad distrust of government as the primary tool for black progress.
In May 2004, just one day before Cosby’s Pound Cake speech, TheNew York Times visited Louisville, Kentucky, once ground zero in the fight to integrate schools. But TheTimes found that sides had switched, and that black parents were more interested in educational progress than in racial parity. “Integration? What was it good for?” one parent asked. “They were just setting up our babies to fail.”
In response to these perceived failures, many black activists have turned their efforts inward. Geoffrey Canada’s ambitious Harlem Children’s Zone project pushes black students to change their study habits and improve their home life. In cities like Baltimore and New York, community groups are focusing on turning black men into active fathers. In Philadelphia last October, thousands of black men packed the Liacouras Center, pledging to patrol their neighborhoods and help combat the rising murder rate. When Cosby came to St. Paul Church in Detroit, one local judge got up and urged Cosby and other black celebrities to donate more money to advance the cause. “I didn’t fly out here to write a check,” Cosby retorted. “I’m not writing a check in Houston, Detroit, or Philadelphia. Leave these athletes alone. All you know is Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson. Forget about a check … This is how we lost to the white man. ‘Judge said Bill Cosby is gonna write a check, but until then … ’”
Instead of waiting for handouts or outside help, Cosby argues, disadvantaged blacks should start by purging their own culture of noxious elements like gangsta rap, a favorite target. “What do record producers think when they churn out that gangsta rap with antisocial, women-hating messages?,” Cosby and Poussaint ask in their book. “Do they think that black male youth won’t act out what they have repeated since they were old enough to listen?” Cosby’s rhetoric on culture echoes—and amplifies—a swelling strain of black opinion: last November’s Pew study reported that 71 percent of blacks feel that rap is a bad influence.
The strain of black conservatism that Cosby evokes has also surfaced in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Early on, some commentators speculated that Obama’s Cosby-esque appeals to personal responsibility would cost him black votes. But if his admonishments for black kids to turn off the PlayStation and for black fathers to do their jobs did him any damage, it was not reflected at the polls. In fact, this sort of rhetoric amounts to something of a racial double play, allowing Obama and Cosby to cater both to culturally conservative blacks and to whites who are convinced that black America is a bastion of decadence. (Curiously, Cosby is noncommittal verging on prickly when it comes to Obama. When Larry King asked him whether he supported Obama, he bristled: “Do you ask white people this question? … I want to know why this fellow especially is brought up in such a special way. How many Americans in the media really take him seriously, or do they look at him like some prize brown baby?” The exchange ended with Cosby professing admiration for Dennis Kucinich. Months later, he rebuffed my requests for his views on Obama’s candidacy.)
The shift in focus from white racism to black culture is not as new as some social commentators make it out to be. Standing in St. Paul Church on that July evening listening to Cosby, I remembered the last time The Street felt like this: in the summer of 1994, after Louis Farrakhan announced the Million Man March. Farrakhan barnstormed the country holding “men only” meetings (but much larger). I saw him in my native Baltimore, while home from Howard University on vacation. The march itself was cathartic. I walked with four or five other black men, and all along the way black women stood on porches or out on the street, shouting, clapping, cheering. For us, Farrakhan’s opinions on the Jews mostly seemed beside the point; what stuck was the chance to assert our humanity and our manhood by marching on the Mall, and not acting like we were all fresh out of San Quentin. We lived in the shadow of the ’80s crack era. So many of us had been jailed or were on our way. So many of us were fathers in biology only. We believed ourselves disgraced and clung to the march as a public statement: the time had come to grow up.
Black conservatives have been dipping into this well of lost black honor since the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, vintage black nationalists have harked back to a golden age of black Africa, where mighty empires sprawled and everyone was a king. Meanwhile, populist black conservatives like Cosby point to pre-1968 black America as an era when blacks were united in the struggle: men were men, and a girl who got pregnant without getting married would find herself bundled off to Grandpa’s farm.
What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.
Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments. “The early effort of middle-class blacks to respond to segregation was, aside from a political agenda, focused on a social-reform agenda,” says Khalil G. Muhammad, a professor of American history at Indiana University. “The National Association of Colored Women, Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro, all shared a sense of anxiety that African Americans were not presenting their best selves to the world. There was the sense that they were committing crimes and needed to keep their sexuality in check.” Adds William Jelani Cobb, a professor of American history at Spelman College: “The same kind of people who were advocating for social reform were denigrating people because they didn’t play piano. They often saw themselves as reluctant caretakers of the less enlightened.”
In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil-rights movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.
At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? “The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,” wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, “are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police.”
Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there’s still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you’d have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop’s popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too—many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
“I don’t know how to measure culture. I don’t know how to test its effects, and I’m not sure anyone else does,” says the Georgetown economist Harry Holzer. “There’s a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there’s another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can’t prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.” Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn’t preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more-rigorous conditions.
The accepted wisdom is that such studies are a comfort to black people, allowing them to wallow in their misery. In fact, the opposite is true—the liberal notion that blacks are still, after a century of struggle, victims of pervasive discrimination is the ultimate collective buzz-kill. It effectively means that African Americans must, on some level, accept that their children will be “less than” until some point in the future when white racism miraculously abates. That’s not the sort of future that any black person eagerly awaits, nor does it make for particularly motivating talking points.
Last summer, I watched Cosby give a moving commencement speech to a group of Connecticut inmates who’d just received their GEDs. Before the speech, at eight in the morning, Cosby quizzed correctional officials on the conditions and characteristics of their inmate population. I wished, then, that my 7-year-old son could have seen Cosby there, to take in the same basic message that I endeavor to serve him every day—that manhood means more than virility and strut, that it calls for discipline and dutiful stewardship. That the ultimate fate of black people lies in their own hands, not in the hands of their antagonists. That as an African American, he has a duty to his family, his community, and his ancestors.
If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights. He chides activists for pushing to reform the criminal-justice system, despite solid evidence that the criminal-justice system needs reform. His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations. After the Million Man March, black men embraced a sense of hope and promise. We were supposed to return to our communities and families inspired by a new feeling of responsibility. Yet here we are again, almost 15 years later, with seemingly little tangible change. I’d take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
On the day last summer when Cosby met me for lunch in the West Village, it was raining, as it had been all week, and New York was experiencing a record-cold August. Cosby had just come from Max Roach’s funeral and was dressed in a natty three-piece suit. Despite the weather, the occasion, and the oddly empty dining room, Cosby was energized. He had spent the previous day in Philadelphia, where he spoke to a group in a housing project, met with state health officials, and participated in a community march against crime. Grassroots black activists in his hometown were embracing his call. He planned, over the coming year, to continue his call-outs and release a hip-hop album. (He has also noted, however, that there won’t be any profanity on it.)
Cosby was feeling warm and nostalgic. He asked why I had not brought my son, and I instantly regretted dropping him off at my partner’s workplace for a couple of hours. He talked about breaking his shoulder playing school football, after his grandfather had tried to get him to quit. “Granddad Cosby got on the trolley and came over to the apartment,” he recalled. “I was so embarrassed. I was laid out on the sofa. He was talking to my parents, and I was waiting for the moment when he would say, ‘See, I told you, Junior.’ He came back and reached in his pocket and gave me a quarter. He said, ‘Go to the corner and get some ice cream. It has calcium in it.’”
Much pop psychology has been devoted to Cosby’s transformation into such a high-octane, high-profile activist. His nemesis Dyson says that Cosby, in his later years, is following in the dishonorable tradition of upper-class African Americans who denounce their less fortunate brethren. Others have suggested more-sinister motivations—that Cosby is covering for his own alleged transgressions. (In 2006, Cosby settled a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that he had sexually assaulted her; other women have come forward with similar allegations that have not gone to court.) But the depth of his commitment would seem to belie such suspicions, and in any case, they do not seem to have affected his hold on his audience: in the November Pew survey, 85 percent of all African American respondents considered him a “good influence” on the black community, above Obama (76 percent) and second only to Oprah Winfrey (87 percent).
Part of what drives Cosby’s activism, and reinforces his message, is the rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred. As the comedian Chris Rock put it in one of his infamous routines, “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … It’s like a civil war going on with black people, and it’s two sides—there’s black people and there’s niggas, and niggas have got to go … Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I’d do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.” (Rock stopped performing the routine when he noticed that his white fans were laughing a little too hard.) Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain. Like the people he preaches to, Cosby has grown tired of hanging his head.
This disquiet spans generations, but it is most acute among those of the civil-rights era. “I don’t know a better term than angst,” says Johnnetta Cole. “I refuse to categorize every young African American with the same language, but there are some ‘young’uns’—and some of us who are not ‘young’uns’—who must turn around and look at where we are, because where we’re headed isn’t pretty.” Like many of the stars of the civil-rights movement, Cole has gifts that go beyond social activism. She rose out of the segregated South and went to college at age 15, eventually earning a bachelor’s from Oberlin and a doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern. That same sort of dynamism exists today among many younger blacks, but what troubles the older generation is that their energy seems directed at other pursuits besides social uplift.
Cosby is fond of saying that sacrifices of the ’60s weren’t made so that rappers and young people could repeatedly use the word nigger. But that’s exactly why they were made. After all, chief among all individual rights awarded Americans is the right to be mediocre, crass, and juvenile—in other words, the right to be human. But Cosby is aiming for something superhuman—twice as good, as the elders used to say—and his homily to a hazy black past seems like an effort to redeem something more than the present.
When people hear Bill Cosby’s message, many assume that he is the product of the sort of family he’s promoting—two caring parents, a stable home life, a working father. In fact, like many of the men he admonishes, Cosby was born into a troubled home. He was raised by his mother because his father, who joined the Navy, abandoned the family when Cosby was a child. Speaking to me of his youth, Cosby said, “People told me I was bright, but nobody stayed on me. My mother was too busy trying to feed and clothe us.” He was smart enough to be admitted to Central High School, a magnet school in Philadelphia, but transferred and then dropped out in 10th grade and followed his father into the service.
But the twists and turns of that reality seem secondary to the tidier, more appealing world that Cosby is trying to create. Toward the end of our lunch, in a long, rambling monologue, Cosby told me, “If you looked at me and said, ‘Why is he doing this? Why right now?,’ you could probably say, ‘He’s having a resurgence of his childhood.’ What do I need if I am a child today? I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change. I need people to stop saying I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. They say that’s a myth. But these other people have their mythical stories—why can’t we have our own?”
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/05/-8216-this-is-how-we-lost-to-the-white-man-8217/6774/
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
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Video: "The Cosby Crusade" Ta-Nehisi Coates explores Bill Cosby's transformation from TV dad to outspoken social critic.
Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Some were there with their sons. Some were there in wheelchairs. The audience was packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to capture the overflow. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. Clutching a cordless mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared remarks and comic ad-libs. A row of old black men, community elders, sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. The rest of the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man! Teach!”
He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”
Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.
“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’
“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”
Cosby was wearing his standard uniform—dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher learning. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”
From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.
It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. F. Hutton, Kodak, and Jell-O Pudding Pops. And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results. Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Indeed, we are now enjoying a moment of national self-congratulation over racial progress, with a black man running for president as the very realization of King’s dream. Barack Obama defied efforts by the Clinton campaign to pigeonhole him as a “black” candidate, casting himself instead as the symbol of a society that has moved beyond lazy categories of race.
Black America does not entirely share the euphoria, though. The civil-rights generation is exiting the American stage—not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the country to black America’s fate. In that climate, Cosby’s gospel of discipline, moral reform, and self-reliance offers a way out—a promise that one need not cure America of its original sin in order to succeed. Racism may not be extinguished, but it can be beaten.
Has Dr. Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved television households, seen the truth: that the dream of integration should never supplant the pursuit of self-respect; that blacks should worry more about judging themselves and less about whether whites are judging them on the content of their character? Or has he lost his mind?
From the moment he registered in the American popular consciousness, as the Oxford-educated Alexander Scott in the NBC adventure series I Spy, Cosby proffered the idea of an America that transcended race. The series, which started in 1965, was the first weekly show to feature an African American in a lead role, but it rarely factored race into dialogue or plots. Race was also mostly inconspicuous in Cosby’s performances as a hugely popular stand-up comedian. “I don’t spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act,” Cosby told Playboy in 1969. He also said that he didn’t “have time to sit around and worry whether all the black people of the world make it because of me. I have my own gig to worry about.” His crowning artistic and commercial achievement—The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992—was seemingly a monument to that understated sensibility.
In fact, blackness was never absent from the show or from Bill Cosby. Plots involved black artists like Stevie Wonder or Dizzy Gillespie. The Huxtables’ home was decorated with the works of black artists like Annie Lee, and the show featured black theater veterans such as Roscoe Lee Brown and Moses Gunn. Behind the scenes, Cosby hired the Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint to make sure that the show never trafficked in stereotypes and that it depicted blacks in a dignified light. Picking up Cosby’s fixation on education, Poussaint had writers insert references to black schools. “If the script mentioned Oberlin, Texas Tech, or Yale, we’d circle it and tell them to mention a black college,” Poussaint told me in a phone interview last year. “I remember going to work the next day and white people saying, ‘What’s the school called Morehouse?’” In 1985, Cosby riled NBC by placing an anti-apartheid sign in his Huxtable son’s bedroom. The network wanted no part of the debate. “There may be two sides to apartheid in Archie Bunker’s house,” the Toronto Star quoted Cosby as saying. “But it’s impossible that the Huxtables would be on any side but one. That sign will stay on that door. And I’ve told NBC that if they still want it down, or if they try to edit it out, there will be no show.” The sign stayed.
Offstage, Cosby’s philanthropy won him support among the civil-rights crowd. He made his biggest splash in 1988, when he and his wife gave $20 million to Spelman College, the largest individual donation ever given to a black college. “Two million would have been fantastic; 20 million, to use the language of the hip-hop generation, was off the chain,” says Johnnetta Cole, who was then president of Spelman. Race again came to the fore in 1997, when Cosby’s son was randomly shot and killed while fixing a flat on a Los Angeles freeway. His wife wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that white racism lay behind her son’s death. “All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors,” she wrote. “Most people know that facing the truth brings about healing and growth. When is America going to face its historical and current racial realities so it can be what it says it is?”
The column caused a minor row, but most of white America took little notice. To them, Cosby was still America’s Dad. But those close to Cosby were not surprised. Cosby was an avowed race man, who, like much of his generation, had come to feel that black America had lost its way. The crisis of absentee fathers, the rise of black-on-black crime, and the spread of hip-hop all led Cosby to believe that, after the achievements of the 1960s, the black community was committing cultural suicide.
His anger and frustration erupted into public view during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. At that moment, the shades of mortality and irrelevance seemed to be drawing over the civil-rights generation. Its matriarchs, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, would be dead within two years. The NAACP’s membership rolls had been shrinking; within months, its president, Kweisi Mfume, would resign (it was later revealed that he was under investigation by the NAACP for sexual harassment and nepotism—allegations that he denied). Other movement leaders were drifting into self-parody: Al Sharpton would soon be hosting a reality show and, a year later, would be doing ads for a predatory loan company; Sharpton and Jesse Jackson had recently asked MGM to issue an apology for the hit movie Barbershop.
That night, Cosby was one of the last honorees to take the podium. He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”
There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. “The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” he told the audience. Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”
Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa— with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock. After what has come to be known as “the Pound Cake speech”—it has its own Wikipedia entry—Cosby came under attack from various quarters of the black establishment. The playwright August Wilson commented, “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” One of the gala’s hosts, Ted Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, called his comments “a harsh attack on poor black people in particular.” Dubbing Cosby an “Afristocrat in Winter,” the Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson came out with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, that took issue with Cosby’s bleak assessment of black progress and belittled his transformation from vanilla humorist to social critic and moral arbiter. “While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle,” argued Dyson, “he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table.”
But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. Outsiders may have heard haranguing in Cosby’s language and tone. But much of black America heard instead the possibility of changing their communities without having to wait on the consciences and attention spans of policy makers who might not have their interests at heart. Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment. Cosby’s argument has resonated with the black mainstream for just that reason.
From Atlantic Unbound:
"The Awakening of the Negro" (September 1896)
"Friction between the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world." By Booker T. Washington
The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the 20th century, Washington married a defense of the white South with a call for black self-reliance and became the most prominent black leader of his day. He argued that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land.
From Atlantic Unbound:
"Strivings of the Negro People" (August 1897)
"The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world... This is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to husband and use his best powers." By W.E.B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the black vote was heretical. History ultimately rendered half of Washington’s argument moot. His famous Atlanta Compromise—in which he endorsed segregation as a temporary means of making peace with southerners—was answered by lynchings, land theft, and general racial terrorism. But Washington’s appeal to black self-sufficiency endured.
After Washington’s death, in 1915, the black conservative tradition he had fathered found a permanent and natural home in the emerging ideology of Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, its patron saint, turned the Atlanta Compromise on its head, implicitly endorsing segregation not as an olive branch to whites but as a statement of black supremacy. Black Nationalists scorned the Du Boisian integrationists as stooges or traitors, content to beg for help from people who hated them.
Garvey argued that blacks had rendered themselves unworthy of the white man’s respect. “The greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself,” wrote Garvey. “The monkey wrench of destruction as thrown into the cog of Negro Progress, is not thrown so much by the outsider as by the very fellow who is in our fold, and who should be the first to grease the wheel of progress rather than seeking to impede.” Decades later, Malcolm X echoed that sentiment, faulting blacks for failing to take charge of their destinies. “The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” Malcolm said. “But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.”
Black conservatives like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, have at times allied themselves with black liberals. But in general, they have upheld a core of beliefs laid out by Garvey almost a century ago: a skepticism of (white) government as a mediating force in the “Negro problem,” a strong belief in the singular will of black people, and a fixation on a supposedly glorious black past.
Those beliefs also animate Come On People, the manifesto that Cosby and Poussaint published last fall. Although it does not totally dismiss government programs, the book mostly advocates solutions from within as a cure for black America’s dismal vital statistics. “Once we find our bearings,” they write, “we can move forward, as we have always done, on the path from victims to victors.” Come On People is heavy on black pride (“no group of people has had the impact on the culture of the whole world that African Americans have had, and much of that impact has been for the good”), and heavier on the idea of the Great Fall—the theory, in this case, that post–Jim Crow blacks have lost touch with the cultural traditions that enabled them to persevere through centuries of oppression.
“For all the woes of segregation, there were some good things to come out of it,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “One was that it forced us to take care of ourselves. When restaurants, laundries, hotels, theaters, groceries, and clothing stores were segregated, black people opened and ran their own. Black life insurance companies and banks thrived, as well as black funeral homes … Such successes provided jobs and strength to black economic well-being. They also gave black people that gratifying sense of an interdependent community.” Although the authors take pains to put some distance between themselves and the Nation of Islam, they approvingly quote one of its ministers who spoke at a call-out in Compton, California: “I went to Koreatown today and I met with the Korean merchants,” the minister told the crowd. “I love them. You know why? They got a place called what? Koreatown. When I left them, I went to Chinatown. They got a place called what? Chinatown. Where is your town?”
The notion of the Great Fall, and the attendant theory that segregation gave rise to some “good things,” are the stock-in-trade of what Christopher Alan Bracey, a law professor at Washington University, calls (in his book, Saviors or Sellouts) the “organic” black conservative tradition: conservatives who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention, but whose black-nationalist leanings make them anathema to the Heritage Foundation and Rush Limbaugh. When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him. This is the audience that flocks to Cosby: culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.
“There are things that we did not see coming,” Cosby told me over lunch in Manhattan last year. “Like, you could see the Klan, but because these things were not on a horse, because there was no white sheet, and the people doing the deed were not white, we saw things in the light of family and forgiveness … We didn’t pay attention to the dropout rate. We didn’t pay attention to the fathers, to the self-esteem of our boys.”
Given the state of black America, it is hard to quarrel with that analysis. Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet black men account for 49 percent of America’s murder victims and 41 percent of the prison population. The teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000, more than double the rate for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group measured by the Census, making only 61 percent of the median income of white families.
Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”
The rise of the organic black conservative tradition is also a response to America’s retreat from its second attempt at Reconstruction. Blacks have watched as the courts have weakened affirmative action, arguably the country’s greatest symbol of state-sponsored inclusion. They’ve seen a fraudulent war on drugs that, judging by the casualties, looks like a war on black people. They’ve seen themselves bandied about as playthings in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan (with his 1980 invocation of states’ rights” in Mississippi), George Bush (Willie Horton), Bill Clinton (Sister Souljah), and George W. Bush (McCain’s fabled black love-child). They’ve seen the utter failures of school busing and housing desegregation, as well as the horrors of Katrina. The result is a broad distrust of government as the primary tool for black progress.
In May 2004, just one day before Cosby’s Pound Cake speech, TheNew York Times visited Louisville, Kentucky, once ground zero in the fight to integrate schools. But TheTimes found that sides had switched, and that black parents were more interested in educational progress than in racial parity. “Integration? What was it good for?” one parent asked. “They were just setting up our babies to fail.”
In response to these perceived failures, many black activists have turned their efforts inward. Geoffrey Canada’s ambitious Harlem Children’s Zone project pushes black students to change their study habits and improve their home life. In cities like Baltimore and New York, community groups are focusing on turning black men into active fathers. In Philadelphia last October, thousands of black men packed the Liacouras Center, pledging to patrol their neighborhoods and help combat the rising murder rate. When Cosby came to St. Paul Church in Detroit, one local judge got up and urged Cosby and other black celebrities to donate more money to advance the cause. “I didn’t fly out here to write a check,” Cosby retorted. “I’m not writing a check in Houston, Detroit, or Philadelphia. Leave these athletes alone. All you know is Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson. Forget about a check … This is how we lost to the white man. ‘Judge said Bill Cosby is gonna write a check, but until then … ’”
Instead of waiting for handouts or outside help, Cosby argues, disadvantaged blacks should start by purging their own culture of noxious elements like gangsta rap, a favorite target. “What do record producers think when they churn out that gangsta rap with antisocial, women-hating messages?,” Cosby and Poussaint ask in their book. “Do they think that black male youth won’t act out what they have repeated since they were old enough to listen?” Cosby’s rhetoric on culture echoes—and amplifies—a swelling strain of black opinion: last November’s Pew study reported that 71 percent of blacks feel that rap is a bad influence.
The strain of black conservatism that Cosby evokes has also surfaced in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Early on, some commentators speculated that Obama’s Cosby-esque appeals to personal responsibility would cost him black votes. But if his admonishments for black kids to turn off the PlayStation and for black fathers to do their jobs did him any damage, it was not reflected at the polls. In fact, this sort of rhetoric amounts to something of a racial double play, allowing Obama and Cosby to cater both to culturally conservative blacks and to whites who are convinced that black America is a bastion of decadence. (Curiously, Cosby is noncommittal verging on prickly when it comes to Obama. When Larry King asked him whether he supported Obama, he bristled: “Do you ask white people this question? … I want to know why this fellow especially is brought up in such a special way. How many Americans in the media really take him seriously, or do they look at him like some prize brown baby?” The exchange ended with Cosby professing admiration for Dennis Kucinich. Months later, he rebuffed my requests for his views on Obama’s candidacy.)
The shift in focus from white racism to black culture is not as new as some social commentators make it out to be. Standing in St. Paul Church on that July evening listening to Cosby, I remembered the last time The Street felt like this: in the summer of 1994, after Louis Farrakhan announced the Million Man March. Farrakhan barnstormed the country holding “men only” meetings (but much larger). I saw him in my native Baltimore, while home from Howard University on vacation. The march itself was cathartic. I walked with four or five other black men, and all along the way black women stood on porches or out on the street, shouting, clapping, cheering. For us, Farrakhan’s opinions on the Jews mostly seemed beside the point; what stuck was the chance to assert our humanity and our manhood by marching on the Mall, and not acting like we were all fresh out of San Quentin. We lived in the shadow of the ’80s crack era. So many of us had been jailed or were on our way. So many of us were fathers in biology only. We believed ourselves disgraced and clung to the march as a public statement: the time had come to grow up.
Black conservatives have been dipping into this well of lost black honor since the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, vintage black nationalists have harked back to a golden age of black Africa, where mighty empires sprawled and everyone was a king. Meanwhile, populist black conservatives like Cosby point to pre-1968 black America as an era when blacks were united in the struggle: men were men, and a girl who got pregnant without getting married would find herself bundled off to Grandpa’s farm.
What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.
Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments. “The early effort of middle-class blacks to respond to segregation was, aside from a political agenda, focused on a social-reform agenda,” says Khalil G. Muhammad, a professor of American history at Indiana University. “The National Association of Colored Women, Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro, all shared a sense of anxiety that African Americans were not presenting their best selves to the world. There was the sense that they were committing crimes and needed to keep their sexuality in check.” Adds William Jelani Cobb, a professor of American history at Spelman College: “The same kind of people who were advocating for social reform were denigrating people because they didn’t play piano. They often saw themselves as reluctant caretakers of the less enlightened.”
In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil-rights movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.
At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? “The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,” wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, “are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police.”
Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there’s still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you’d have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop’s popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too—many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
“I don’t know how to measure culture. I don’t know how to test its effects, and I’m not sure anyone else does,” says the Georgetown economist Harry Holzer. “There’s a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there’s another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can’t prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.” Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn’t preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more-rigorous conditions.
The accepted wisdom is that such studies are a comfort to black people, allowing them to wallow in their misery. In fact, the opposite is true—the liberal notion that blacks are still, after a century of struggle, victims of pervasive discrimination is the ultimate collective buzz-kill. It effectively means that African Americans must, on some level, accept that their children will be “less than” until some point in the future when white racism miraculously abates. That’s not the sort of future that any black person eagerly awaits, nor does it make for particularly motivating talking points.
Last summer, I watched Cosby give a moving commencement speech to a group of Connecticut inmates who’d just received their GEDs. Before the speech, at eight in the morning, Cosby quizzed correctional officials on the conditions and characteristics of their inmate population. I wished, then, that my 7-year-old son could have seen Cosby there, to take in the same basic message that I endeavor to serve him every day—that manhood means more than virility and strut, that it calls for discipline and dutiful stewardship. That the ultimate fate of black people lies in their own hands, not in the hands of their antagonists. That as an African American, he has a duty to his family, his community, and his ancestors.
If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights. He chides activists for pushing to reform the criminal-justice system, despite solid evidence that the criminal-justice system needs reform. His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations. After the Million Man March, black men embraced a sense of hope and promise. We were supposed to return to our communities and families inspired by a new feeling of responsibility. Yet here we are again, almost 15 years later, with seemingly little tangible change. I’d take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
On the day last summer when Cosby met me for lunch in the West Village, it was raining, as it had been all week, and New York was experiencing a record-cold August. Cosby had just come from Max Roach’s funeral and was dressed in a natty three-piece suit. Despite the weather, the occasion, and the oddly empty dining room, Cosby was energized. He had spent the previous day in Philadelphia, where he spoke to a group in a housing project, met with state health officials, and participated in a community march against crime. Grassroots black activists in his hometown were embracing his call. He planned, over the coming year, to continue his call-outs and release a hip-hop album. (He has also noted, however, that there won’t be any profanity on it.)
Cosby was feeling warm and nostalgic. He asked why I had not brought my son, and I instantly regretted dropping him off at my partner’s workplace for a couple of hours. He talked about breaking his shoulder playing school football, after his grandfather had tried to get him to quit. “Granddad Cosby got on the trolley and came over to the apartment,” he recalled. “I was so embarrassed. I was laid out on the sofa. He was talking to my parents, and I was waiting for the moment when he would say, ‘See, I told you, Junior.’ He came back and reached in his pocket and gave me a quarter. He said, ‘Go to the corner and get some ice cream. It has calcium in it.’”
Much pop psychology has been devoted to Cosby’s transformation into such a high-octane, high-profile activist. His nemesis Dyson says that Cosby, in his later years, is following in the dishonorable tradition of upper-class African Americans who denounce their less fortunate brethren. Others have suggested more-sinister motivations—that Cosby is covering for his own alleged transgressions. (In 2006, Cosby settled a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that he had sexually assaulted her; other women have come forward with similar allegations that have not gone to court.) But the depth of his commitment would seem to belie such suspicions, and in any case, they do not seem to have affected his hold on his audience: in the November Pew survey, 85 percent of all African American respondents considered him a “good influence” on the black community, above Obama (76 percent) and second only to Oprah Winfrey (87 percent).
Part of what drives Cosby’s activism, and reinforces his message, is the rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred. As the comedian Chris Rock put it in one of his infamous routines, “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … It’s like a civil war going on with black people, and it’s two sides—there’s black people and there’s niggas, and niggas have got to go … Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I’d do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.” (Rock stopped performing the routine when he noticed that his white fans were laughing a little too hard.) Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain. Like the people he preaches to, Cosby has grown tired of hanging his head.
This disquiet spans generations, but it is most acute among those of the civil-rights era. “I don’t know a better term than angst,” says Johnnetta Cole. “I refuse to categorize every young African American with the same language, but there are some ‘young’uns’—and some of us who are not ‘young’uns’—who must turn around and look at where we are, because where we’re headed isn’t pretty.” Like many of the stars of the civil-rights movement, Cole has gifts that go beyond social activism. She rose out of the segregated South and went to college at age 15, eventually earning a bachelor’s from Oberlin and a doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern. That same sort of dynamism exists today among many younger blacks, but what troubles the older generation is that their energy seems directed at other pursuits besides social uplift.
Cosby is fond of saying that sacrifices of the ’60s weren’t made so that rappers and young people could repeatedly use the word nigger. But that’s exactly why they were made. After all, chief among all individual rights awarded Americans is the right to be mediocre, crass, and juvenile—in other words, the right to be human. But Cosby is aiming for something superhuman—twice as good, as the elders used to say—and his homily to a hazy black past seems like an effort to redeem something more than the present.
When people hear Bill Cosby’s message, many assume that he is the product of the sort of family he’s promoting—two caring parents, a stable home life, a working father. In fact, like many of the men he admonishes, Cosby was born into a troubled home. He was raised by his mother because his father, who joined the Navy, abandoned the family when Cosby was a child. Speaking to me of his youth, Cosby said, “People told me I was bright, but nobody stayed on me. My mother was too busy trying to feed and clothe us.” He was smart enough to be admitted to Central High School, a magnet school in Philadelphia, but transferred and then dropped out in 10th grade and followed his father into the service.
But the twists and turns of that reality seem secondary to the tidier, more appealing world that Cosby is trying to create. Toward the end of our lunch, in a long, rambling monologue, Cosby told me, “If you looked at me and said, ‘Why is he doing this? Why right now?,’ you could probably say, ‘He’s having a resurgence of his childhood.’ What do I need if I am a child today? I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change. I need people to stop saying I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. They say that’s a myth. But these other people have their mythical stories—why can’t we have our own?”
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/05/-8216-this-is-how-we-lost-to-the-white-man-8217/6774/
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/coma/images/issues/200805/cosby.jpg
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
dilibon Mer 2 Mar 2011 - 19:04
Is Bill Cosby racist against his own race?
I've heard Bill Cosby speak on several ocassions. Boy, let me tell you, he lays it down straight to the black community!! He doesn't tip toe around about anything! He tells them that the way they destroy our English language is ridiculous, he tells them to stop relying on welfare and get an education, he puts the blame for a lot of their problems right back into their own laps to own and take responsibility for. He tells them to stop playing the race card because "other races are fed up with all their crying and complaining about not being treated fairly" He tells them to step up and contribute to society in a respectable and educated manner. The first time I heard him speak like this, I was blown away. I wasn't expecting it at all. I have to say, I can't argue with him....what do you all think?
I've heard Bill Cosby speak on several ocassions. Boy, let me tell you, he lays it down straight to the black community!! He doesn't tip toe around about anything! He tells them that the way they destroy our English language is ridiculous, he tells them to stop relying on welfare and get an education, he puts the blame for a lot of their problems right back into their own laps to own and take responsibility for. He tells them to stop playing the race card because "other races are fed up with all their crying and complaining about not being treated fairly" He tells them to step up and contribute to society in a respectable and educated manner. The first time I heard him speak like this, I was blown away. I wasn't expecting it at all. I have to say, I can't argue with him....what do you all think?
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
Le gros roseau Mer 2 Mar 2011 - 21:19
I don't want to condone the conducts of some black men who abandon their children,but it is hypocritical to label this problem as a black problem.White, asian, spanish also abandon their children.Granted the problem is more prevalent in the black communities.But one must consider the problem in the context of the ramifications of slavery on the minds of the black men in America.When you are the last to be hired and the first to be fired,and you don't know the ABC of personal finance because of your poor education it is not difficult to understand the behaviors of the black men in the United States. Responsibility is not an innate quality that we all possess since our birth.It is a quality that is cultivated by education.When there is discrimination in the schools system where the better schools are located in the suburbs because of integration,one must understand the reasons why there are so many black men in jail.How many vocational schools are there in the cities where our youth can learn a trade?Is there an apprentice program where they can learn a trade?When you're living in a culture where Coby bryant is more admired than benjamin Gordon.where excellence ,dilligence and self respect are not taught in your schools and at home;where Myke Tyson and all the drug addicts and rapists are celebrities then one can understand why education is not a priority for the youth .
Some of us have realized the american dream,but we should not ignore the plights of our less fortunate brothers and sisters.It takes a lot of courage to get up in the morning not knowing where you 're going to find a job to feed your family and stay in that home looking at your children deprived of the basic necessities of life.Yes we need to invest in the education of our people by building our own primary and secondary schools,vocational schools ,banks ,factories, and universities.We need good doctors. good lawyers, Good bankers, good scientists,good nurses ,good engineers,but we also need good carpenters, good electricians,good bricklayers,good cabinet makers, good mechanics, good plumbers, good air conditionning technicians ;good electronic technicians,good barbers ,good shoemakers, good tailors ,good fishermen,good famers also.
Some of us have realized the american dream,but we should not ignore the plights of our less fortunate brothers and sisters.It takes a lot of courage to get up in the morning not knowing where you 're going to find a job to feed your family and stay in that home looking at your children deprived of the basic necessities of life.Yes we need to invest in the education of our people by building our own primary and secondary schools,vocational schools ,banks ,factories, and universities.We need good doctors. good lawyers, Good bankers, good scientists,good nurses ,good engineers,but we also need good carpenters, good electricians,good bricklayers,good cabinet makers, good mechanics, good plumbers, good air conditionning technicians ;good electronic technicians,good barbers ,good shoemakers, good tailors ,good fishermen,good famers also.
Dernière édition par Le gros roseau le Ven 4 Mar 2011 - 0:03, édité 1 fois
Le gros roseau- Super Star
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
Invité Jeu 3 Mar 2011 - 0:04
There is no slavery in Haiti, that is physical slavery backed up by institutional powers that run and define every facet of life of the citizenry...However, there exists a situation of black men impregnating black women and leaving them to fend off on their own at the child's birth .Shall we say that the white man and slavery are responsible for the phenomenon amongst us?
When will they not be the culprits assuming that we as human beings have an inner core of dignity ,the so-called libre-arbitre or free will ?On the one hand shall we want to be free and pretend ,on the other hand , at the very same time , that the black man is the white man’s burden ? As far as I am concerned, I find that there is racism at the bottom of the bundles of comfort that liberalism grants to the able bodied male downtrodden and every social misfit .What is more racism than accepting that an important segment of the population lacks the chromosomes that determine intelligence and proper civilized behavior?
Look at what the ways of dependency are doing to the psyche of Haitians living in tent cities! We are building a welfare class. Yes, Haitians are being trained to live through the handouts of charity while they are being robbed of their sense of self-worth.
The liberal notion of laissez-faire with the concomitant moral value that that society is responsible of all the ills of man has to be revisited again and again for it provides, in the absolute, a bouncy platform from which springs a sense of general irresponsibility .Such a cozy relationship with exculpatory social philosophy allows the beast that lives deep within each one of us to lurch forward and demean the importance of the human self.
I recall that Mayor Giuliani of the city of New York decided to stop buying into those ideas of wishy-washy human empathy that cuddle criminal elements within the city for one reason or another. The defenders of third class citizenry cried wolf! Wolf! Wolf! New York City felt a lot better as the noise died down...Today you can walk up and down Forty-Second Street without the fear of being mugged by a social parasite.
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
Le gros roseau Jeu 3 Mar 2011 - 11:39
"But one must consider the problem in the context of the ramifications of slavery on the minds of black men in America.When you are the last to be hired and the first to be fired,and you don't know the ABC of personal finance"
Maybe you did not pay any attention to the word "ramifications"which means a related or derived problems.To say that there is no salvery in haiti therefore one can not blame the white men for the conducts of some haitians is ludicrous.Why do you think they have sexual education in the schools nowadays.How can you expect an illiterate man or woman to be a responsible citizen of his or her coummunity?Did you ever read any book or see any movie about slavery?
Yes we can not keep blaming the white man for our failures to educate our people.But to ignore the ramifications of salvery on the psyche of the black man is like saying that the money we paid to France and the three centuries of salvery have nothing to do with the underdevelopment of haiti.I dont blame Bill Crosby for his crusade against some black men ireresponsibility toward their children ,but this problem is not only a black problem;after all Jefferson was not a black man;it is a social problem that is also prevalent in white, asian, spanish communities.One must remember in many african countries and in some arabs culture a monogamus realtionship is not the norm.The president of South Africa has three wives.Mr.Obama ,the father of the President of the United states was a well educated man.He abandoned his first wife and his son to return to Kneya where he has other children.Was he a delinquant?Is John Edouard a delinquant?How many white men are not paying child suport to their ex wife or mistress?When I wrote "ramification" I am talking about education, unemployment ,crimes ,lack of self esteem in the black communities which are the consequences of slavery. .
Maybe you did not pay any attention to the word "ramifications"which means a related or derived problems.To say that there is no salvery in haiti therefore one can not blame the white men for the conducts of some haitians is ludicrous.Why do you think they have sexual education in the schools nowadays.How can you expect an illiterate man or woman to be a responsible citizen of his or her coummunity?Did you ever read any book or see any movie about slavery?
Yes we can not keep blaming the white man for our failures to educate our people.But to ignore the ramifications of salvery on the psyche of the black man is like saying that the money we paid to France and the three centuries of salvery have nothing to do with the underdevelopment of haiti.I dont blame Bill Crosby for his crusade against some black men ireresponsibility toward their children ,but this problem is not only a black problem;after all Jefferson was not a black man;it is a social problem that is also prevalent in white, asian, spanish communities.One must remember in many african countries and in some arabs culture a monogamus realtionship is not the norm.The president of South Africa has three wives.Mr.Obama ,the father of the President of the United states was a well educated man.He abandoned his first wife and his son to return to Kneya where he has other children.Was he a delinquant?Is John Edouard a delinquant?How many white men are not paying child suport to their ex wife or mistress?When I wrote "ramification" I am talking about education, unemployment ,crimes ,lack of self esteem in the black communities which are the consequences of slavery. .
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
Invité Jeu 3 Mar 2011 - 12:39
How can you expect an illiterate man or woman to be a responsible citizen of his or her coummunity?
I am amazed at the incapacity of the lavalass minds to handle logical and critical reasoning : On the one hand, we cannot expect the citizen to be responsible to the community but we demand, on the other hand, that he be knowledgeable enough to pick out the leadership of a country that will confront the challenges that nations will encounter as they tiptoe into the twenty-first century? Is this the new definition of insanity?
Ramifications?
Hogwash !Balderdash.Well,ramification .Just like the path of a brook it can change with the will of man.Ramification is not always the negative outcome that champion those who are in charge of oiling the the doom machine of of powelessness .
Why can there not be positive reinforcement of our successes to achieve our goals? We had a moment of victory at the birth of the nation. Why can we not hark back to that model ?Why should “ramifications “ be only that that sustain the grumblings of helplessness and powerlessness .Surely ,if there is a choice to be made, where real choices do exist , even an illiterate citizen will pick success over defeat .I say, this poor reasoning does not hold water .
Why do you think they have sexual education in the schools nowadays??
Help me there O my dear Lord! Shall I attempt to say that it is done to help soothe the minds of blacks from the transitional burdens of slavery? What an example of non sequitur!
One must remember in many African countries and in some Arabs culture a monogamous relationship is not the norm.
What a confused mind! Of course it is so. And it is also proven that monogamous relationship has contributed to the success of the western world .Indeed, successful countries seem to be those which have opted for monogamous relationships. Moreover, it does not mean that one successful society with functional norms should adopt the normative values of culture that seem to be stagnant .What is your point?
I am not going to stop being a westerner because I am aware that other continents exist with different customs and normative values Well, if you are one of those Haitians who are not properly anchored in your cultural environment you can contemplate such evasion of responsibility to self .You can afford to do it for it’s easier to bluff oneself into an ideological straitjacket than being a doer , a creator of goods and services at the level of one’s culture .I guess speeches are still louder than ...actions.Brrrrrrrr…
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
Le gros roseau Jeu 3 Mar 2011 - 16:19
What do I have to do with this "coalminer in hell,"to repeat the great Martine.Can't you understand the meaning of the word"ramifications"?If you were poorly educated or not educated in the Judeo Christian culture would you know that you don't suppose to have more than one wife?
Now you want to deny the illiterate people of haiti their human rights to choose the president of their choice based on your assumption that they do not know enough to make the right choice.Joel told you before In India where there are more than one hundred dialects and the illiteracy rate is as high as in haiti the poor indians have been voted to elect their leaders since the independance of their country.To have illigetimate children is not a crime as far as I know in Haiti.Why can't you see the hypocrisy of this condemnation of the black men.Did anybody criticize the Prime Minister of Italy.Jefferson also has children with one of his salves;are you willing to condemn him for abandoning these children?To say that the successes of the western countries are based on the monogamus relationship of their citizens is a lie . The miseries that existed in these countries before the industrial revolution were they the consequences of polygamous relationships?When the Irish ,the Italians were imigrated to the United States was it beause they didn't want to live in a polygamous society?
Bill Cosby should thank God for his sucesses.How many talented young comedians didn't make it?Again I am not condoning lazyness,drug addiction ,crimes, irresponsibility of any human being: black, white ,asian,or whatever.But it is too simplistic to blame the poverty of the black peopple in the United States and in haiti simply on their behavior without taking into consideration the discriminations that existed in this country and in Haiti.It is time for this" charbonnier de l'enfer"ah ah ah ah (lol)to assume the responsibilities of the malfeasances and crimes of his ancestors.That's all folks.
Now you want to deny the illiterate people of haiti their human rights to choose the president of their choice based on your assumption that they do not know enough to make the right choice.Joel told you before In India where there are more than one hundred dialects and the illiteracy rate is as high as in haiti the poor indians have been voted to elect their leaders since the independance of their country.To have illigetimate children is not a crime as far as I know in Haiti.Why can't you see the hypocrisy of this condemnation of the black men.Did anybody criticize the Prime Minister of Italy.Jefferson also has children with one of his salves;are you willing to condemn him for abandoning these children?To say that the successes of the western countries are based on the monogamus relationship of their citizens is a lie . The miseries that existed in these countries before the industrial revolution were they the consequences of polygamous relationships?When the Irish ,the Italians were imigrated to the United States was it beause they didn't want to live in a polygamous society?
Bill Cosby should thank God for his sucesses.How many talented young comedians didn't make it?Again I am not condoning lazyness,drug addiction ,crimes, irresponsibility of any human being: black, white ,asian,or whatever.But it is too simplistic to blame the poverty of the black peopple in the United States and in haiti simply on their behavior without taking into consideration the discriminations that existed in this country and in Haiti.It is time for this" charbonnier de l'enfer"ah ah ah ah (lol)to assume the responsibilities of the malfeasances and crimes of his ancestors.That's all folks.
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
ainsi ne soit-il Jeu 3 Mar 2011 - 22:59
Bill Cosby n'est pas à l'abri de tout soupçon. N'a-t-il pas déjà été accusé d'avoir drogué une jeune femme pour profiter d'elle. Quelle qu'ait été la fin de l'histoire, il a bel et bien eu des écarts de conduite. Cette affaire rendue publique n'en est qu'une parmi d'autres.
La communauté noire a besoin d'un break comme on dit. Pourquoi ne pas la laisser s'inspirer un peu d'un certain couple au lieu de la fesser.
La polygamie reste un problème, il est vrai, mais elle n'est pas à blâmer pour la grande pauvreté en Haïti. Alors que dire de ces familles monogames dont les conditions de vie sont aussi précaires? La pauvreté n'est ni une vertu ni un péché. Il y a eu et il existe encore de telles situations inacceptables même au Canada et aux États-Unis. Le malheur c'est quand la société s'en fiche, c'est quand les gouvernements passent sous silence ces anomalies ou leur tournent le dos.
La beauté des laids se voit sans délai. Hum!
La communauté noire a besoin d'un break comme on dit. Pourquoi ne pas la laisser s'inspirer un peu d'un certain couple au lieu de la fesser.
La polygamie reste un problème, il est vrai, mais elle n'est pas à blâmer pour la grande pauvreté en Haïti. Alors que dire de ces familles monogames dont les conditions de vie sont aussi précaires? La pauvreté n'est ni une vertu ni un péché. Il y a eu et il existe encore de telles situations inacceptables même au Canada et aux États-Unis. Le malheur c'est quand la société s'en fiche, c'est quand les gouvernements passent sous silence ces anomalies ou leur tournent le dos.
La beauté des laids se voit sans délai. Hum!
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
Le gros roseau Jeu 3 Mar 2011 - 23:44
Martine.
merci de m'avoir rappelé l'infidelité de Bill Cosby;J'avais oublié cette affaire qu'il a eue avec cette blanche.Qui sait reellement si la fille n'est pas sa fille illegitime vu qu'il a les moyens d'acheter n'importe quel laboratoire.Certains noirs ont cette mauvaise habitude: du fait qu'ils ont pu gravir les echelons de l'echelle sociale ils meprisent ceux qui sont restés au bas de l'echelle.Michael Jackson fut l'un de ces noirs qui meprisent la race noire;est-ce pourquoi il a blanchi sa peau;il a preferé adopter des enfants blancs au lieu d'adopter des petits enfants noirs.
Les reproches de Bill Cosby sont trop prejudiciables aux noirs pour avoir une valeur morale.
merci de m'avoir rappelé l'infidelité de Bill Cosby;J'avais oublié cette affaire qu'il a eue avec cette blanche.Qui sait reellement si la fille n'est pas sa fille illegitime vu qu'il a les moyens d'acheter n'importe quel laboratoire.Certains noirs ont cette mauvaise habitude: du fait qu'ils ont pu gravir les echelons de l'echelle sociale ils meprisent ceux qui sont restés au bas de l'echelle.Michael Jackson fut l'un de ces noirs qui meprisent la race noire;est-ce pourquoi il a blanchi sa peau;il a preferé adopter des enfants blancs au lieu d'adopter des petits enfants noirs.
Les reproches de Bill Cosby sont trop prejudiciables aux noirs pour avoir une valeur morale.
Le gros roseau- Super Star
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
ainsi ne soit-il Ven 4 Mar 2011 - 1:39
Hé! vous m'en rappelez une bonne soit cette affaire de la fille dont il a nié la paternité. Ce qui est dommage c'est cette question d'extorsion mais s'il avait connu la fille et qu'il était devenu une figure paternelle pour elle, il est aussi à blâmer pour l'avoir abandonnée. Mais, que voulez-vous, aux États-Unis, mentir pour de l'argent est le geste immoral le moins condamné.
Je suis un peu peiné pour Bill Cosby alors que son grand camarade Quincy Jones est populaire auprès de ceux qu'il se permet de condamner. Je n'ai pas vécu aux États-Unis, le plus long temps continu que j'ai passé dans ce pays c'est cing semaines durant lesquelles j'ai appris mille fois moins que quand je vivais en Haïti. J'aurais pu continuer à développer des préjugés par rapport aux Afro-Américains parce que je venais d'une culture moins violente mais heureusement, je ne connais pas un autre peuple minoritaire et opprimé aussi créatif ayant autant marqué la culture moderne.de son pays.
Je ne suis pas dans le fond de la pensée de Bill Cosby car c'est possible qu'il veuille encourager ses pairs à plus d'actions positives car on n'accomplit rien sans le pouvoir. J'ai entendu de nombreux commentaires à savoir que les Noirs veulent prendre le dessus sur je ne sais quoi. Au Canada, les femmes blanches anglo-saxonnes n'aiment pas toutes Barack Obama parce qu'elles sont tout simplement jalouses de Michou. Or, je suis persuadé qu'aucune épouse blanche ne l'aurait mené jusque là. (Ça, c'est un débat plus profond). Vous savez, peu de chose m'échappe dans les médias surtout à la télévision. Il est peut être temps que l'Amérique se débarasse de cette tendance mythique judaïque...
La communauté noire est la mieux placée pour défendre les valeurs grandes de ce pays car ses acquis ne sentent rien que la sueur de ses membres. Il reste d'autres barrières à renverser. Comme ce bébé a chanté chez Oprah hier, ''amazing grace... I was blind now I see.''
Cela dit, moi qui tiens tant aux nobles principes parfois conservateurs, je ne peux pas comprendre certains agissements chez des Afro-Américains comme quand Bill Cosby fustige les rappers qui dénoncent l'ignorance et la brutalité policière, les hommes noirs victimes d'iniquités visant en fait à perdre leur progéniture. Quant à Michael Jackson, il reste un mégalomane, un bizarroïde. Son fils adoptif le plus âgé montre déjà les signes de... Il croit sans doute encore que son père est blanc. Ha! ha! ha! Au fond, si Catherine est sereine comme toutes les mères universelles, Joe, lui, est assez direct: ''en effet, Michael est très particulier''. Hum! De toute façon, la famille Jackson est assez fuckée comme ça.
Pour revenir à Bill Cosby, n'oubliez pas qu'il est un élitiste. Il veut peut être épurer la race savante afro-américaine. Cela a déjà transforme des individus en monstres... (lol)
Je suis un peu peiné pour Bill Cosby alors que son grand camarade Quincy Jones est populaire auprès de ceux qu'il se permet de condamner. Je n'ai pas vécu aux États-Unis, le plus long temps continu que j'ai passé dans ce pays c'est cing semaines durant lesquelles j'ai appris mille fois moins que quand je vivais en Haïti. J'aurais pu continuer à développer des préjugés par rapport aux Afro-Américains parce que je venais d'une culture moins violente mais heureusement, je ne connais pas un autre peuple minoritaire et opprimé aussi créatif ayant autant marqué la culture moderne.de son pays.
Je ne suis pas dans le fond de la pensée de Bill Cosby car c'est possible qu'il veuille encourager ses pairs à plus d'actions positives car on n'accomplit rien sans le pouvoir. J'ai entendu de nombreux commentaires à savoir que les Noirs veulent prendre le dessus sur je ne sais quoi. Au Canada, les femmes blanches anglo-saxonnes n'aiment pas toutes Barack Obama parce qu'elles sont tout simplement jalouses de Michou. Or, je suis persuadé qu'aucune épouse blanche ne l'aurait mené jusque là. (Ça, c'est un débat plus profond). Vous savez, peu de chose m'échappe dans les médias surtout à la télévision. Il est peut être temps que l'Amérique se débarasse de cette tendance mythique judaïque...
La communauté noire est la mieux placée pour défendre les valeurs grandes de ce pays car ses acquis ne sentent rien que la sueur de ses membres. Il reste d'autres barrières à renverser. Comme ce bébé a chanté chez Oprah hier, ''amazing grace... I was blind now I see.''
Cela dit, moi qui tiens tant aux nobles principes parfois conservateurs, je ne peux pas comprendre certains agissements chez des Afro-Américains comme quand Bill Cosby fustige les rappers qui dénoncent l'ignorance et la brutalité policière, les hommes noirs victimes d'iniquités visant en fait à perdre leur progéniture. Quant à Michael Jackson, il reste un mégalomane, un bizarroïde. Son fils adoptif le plus âgé montre déjà les signes de... Il croit sans doute encore que son père est blanc. Ha! ha! ha! Au fond, si Catherine est sereine comme toutes les mères universelles, Joe, lui, est assez direct: ''en effet, Michael est très particulier''. Hum! De toute façon, la famille Jackson est assez fuckée comme ça.
Pour revenir à Bill Cosby, n'oubliez pas qu'il est un élitiste. Il veut peut être épurer la race savante afro-américaine. Cela a déjà transforme des individus en monstres... (lol)
ainsi ne soit-il- Super Star
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
Joel Ven 4 Mar 2011 - 8:27
Pou moun ki ap kontinye ak enbesilite ke analfabèt pa ka chwazi dirijan yo ;m ap repete e kontinye mande yo ke poukisa LEND an 1947 deside lan vwa DEMOKRATIK ;jis jounen jodi yo pa janm manke yon eleksyon.
Ann END,yo fè de fason ke tout moun ki vle vote ,vote ;eleksyon yo dire 3 semèn.Pa bliye tou ke se yon peyi kote yo prale 200 lang diferan ;an menm tan tou lè LEND te endepandan an 1947;sèlman 20% popilasyon an te konn li ak ekri.
Se pou nou raple tou ,malgre derapaj ,tankou asasinasyon ;poko janm gen yon koudeta militè ann END.
Kowole ,demokrasi ak moun ki konn li ak pa konn li ;paka kenbe ;paske lan 1930s yo peyi ann EWÒP ke yo te konsidere ki pi avanse sou planèt lan ,kiltirèlman ,syantifikman ;mwen vle pale de LALMAY ,se te kote ke te genyen youn lan diktati pi fewòs yo ak dezas ki rezilte de sa.
Zafè de pèp analfabèt paka chwazi dirijan ,dwe depase ;se pa vre,;sispann lan sòt refleksyon sa a .
Si nou kwè sa ,mande pou yon program alfabetizasyon ;men mwen sispèk ke menm nèg sa yo ;si tout moun ann AYITI te konn vin li ak ekri ,ap vin fè menm jan ak sa rasis lan SID lan te konn fè anvan lwa""VOTING RIGHTS ACT""yo.
Lè yon nwa te konn vini pou anrejistre pou yo vote ,lan ETA SID yo,yo te konn ouvri konstitisyon an e mande pou moun lan di ki amandman ,tèl ou tèl sitasyon ye.
Gen peyi lan zòn lan ki gen kont analfabèt yo ,peyi tankou GUATEMALA kote nèg te konn fè menm agiman yo ,men yo pa fè sa ankò.
5
Ann END,yo fè de fason ke tout moun ki vle vote ,vote ;eleksyon yo dire 3 semèn.Pa bliye tou ke se yon peyi kote yo prale 200 lang diferan ;an menm tan tou lè LEND te endepandan an 1947;sèlman 20% popilasyon an te konn li ak ekri.
Se pou nou raple tou ,malgre derapaj ,tankou asasinasyon ;poko janm gen yon koudeta militè ann END.
Kowole ,demokrasi ak moun ki konn li ak pa konn li ;paka kenbe ;paske lan 1930s yo peyi ann EWÒP ke yo te konsidere ki pi avanse sou planèt lan ,kiltirèlman ,syantifikman ;mwen vle pale de LALMAY ,se te kote ke te genyen youn lan diktati pi fewòs yo ak dezas ki rezilte de sa.
Zafè de pèp analfabèt paka chwazi dirijan ,dwe depase ;se pa vre,;sispann lan sòt refleksyon sa a .
Si nou kwè sa ,mande pou yon program alfabetizasyon ;men mwen sispèk ke menm nèg sa yo ;si tout moun ann AYITI te konn vin li ak ekri ,ap vin fè menm jan ak sa rasis lan SID lan te konn fè anvan lwa""VOTING RIGHTS ACT""yo.
Lè yon nwa te konn vini pou anrejistre pou yo vote ,lan ETA SID yo,yo te konn ouvri konstitisyon an e mande pou moun lan di ki amandman ,tèl ou tèl sitasyon ye.
Gen peyi lan zòn lan ki gen kont analfabèt yo ,peyi tankou GUATEMALA kote nèg te konn fè menm agiman yo ,men yo pa fè sa ankò.
5
Joel- Super Star
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Re: Bill Cosby, Le plus grand raciste pour avoir dit la verite aux noirs?
ed428 Ven 4 Mar 2011 - 12:50
Mr. Cosby is right and exact!!! There are very few men (fathers) black, white, etc... who have accepted the responsibility that comes with fatherhood. But, the problem is more aggravated in the black community and black boys have very few positive role models to emulate. It appears as if a lot men prefer to pay child support instead of staying home and be real fathers. Right on Bill !!! "Keep the faith baby"
PS. This problem facing the black community is deeply rooted in the institution of slavery.
PS. This problem facing the black community is deeply rooted in the institution of slavery.
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