by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
The educational prospects of black folk have suffered as well, but one may have never picked this up by listening to Cosby’s comments. There is a direct link between the social and economic status of the most vulnerable and the quality of education they receive. As Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond has eloquently argued, disparities in wealth and resources result in a significantly unequal education for the poorest members of society, especially minority students.
[E]ducational outcomes for students of color are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race. In fact, the United States educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10% of school districts in the United States spend nearly ten times more than the poorest 10%, and spending ratios of three to one are common within states. These disparities reinforce the wide inequalities in income among families, with the most resources being spent on children from the wealthiest communities, and the fewest on the children of the poor, especially in high-minority communities.15
The profound gulf between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society affects a huge portion of the black population and stretches between suburban schools and urban schools, where minorities account for between 95 and 99 percent of the student body.16 As Jonathan Kozol showed in Savage Inequalities, there are telling differences between how much money suburban and urban schools spend on each student: In 1989, Chicago public schools spent a little more than $5,000 per student, while Niles Township High School, in a nearby suburb, spent $9,371 per student; central city Camden, New Jersey, schools expended $3,500 per student, while each student in suburban Princeton enjoyed an expenditure of $7,725; and in 1990 New York City schools invested $7,300 in each student, while schools in suburban Manhasset and Great Neck spent over $15,000 per student, even though they didn’t have nearly as many special needs.17
As a result of the wide disparity in wealth in school districts—since schools often get revenue from the local property tax, the wealthier the district and the higher its property values the more resources it has—and huge differences in expenditures on each student, there are corresponding differences between suburban and urban schools, especially in the quality of teachers (higher paid and more experienced in the suburbs), the courses presented (smaller class size and more offerings in the suburbs), curriculum materials (out of date in urban schools) and equipment and facilities (up to date in the suburbs). In most suburban schools, computer technology is cutting edge; in many urban schools, it is barebones. Textbooks are often in wretched condition in urban schools, offering outdated material—for example, in a Chicago elementary school, fifteen-year-old textbooks were used, which led to the impression that Richard Nixon was still in office— and in many cases can’t be taken home by students because there are barely enough to go around. The infrastructures of urban schools are often in grave disrepair, featuring toilets that don’t work, rooms without air conditioning and poor heating, and cracked or missing ceiling tiles in recreation rooms.
In the end, the huge wealth disparity not only enables white students to enjoy superior primary and secondary education but gives them an enormous advantage in the college sweepstakes.
In higher education, wealth confers stunning prerogatives and advantages. Affluent families can sidestep poor-quality education by sending their children to high-quality private schools. This gives them a major leg up for admission to our most prestigious universities. Judicial rulings that command an equalizing of expenditures on public schools have been consistently ignored… . These resource differences give students in the white districts a very big head start in the competition for places at quality colleges and universities. On top of this, it is students from affluent families who are able to afford $1,000 test-coaching seminars that typically improve a student’s performance on the Scholastic Assessment Test by 100 points or more. Students from affluent families are more likely to have computers in the home and have broadband access to the Internet. These tools can give students very great advantages in preparing for the standardized tests that count so much in college applications.18
The wide resource gulf between suburban and urban schools is exacerbated by the profound resegregation of American schools.19 Although Brown was to have destroyed the vicious segregation of American schools, patterns of disturbing neoapartheid have endured, bringing in their wake substantive inequalities. More than 70 percent of black students in the country attend schools that are composed largely of minority students. Even though the segregation of black students falls more than 25 points below its level in 1969, the existence of financially strapped, resource-starved, technologically underserved predominantly minority schools is a rebuke to the judicial mandate to integrate students, and, it was thought, resources, in schools attended by all races. But the mythology of either resource sharing or true integration lapses in the face of current trends. White students usually attend schools where less than 20 percent of the student body is drawn from races other than their own, while black and brown students attend schools composed of 53 to 55 percent of their own race. In some cases, the percentage is much higher, as more than a third of them attend schools with a 90 to 100 percent minority population. 20 As black and brown students get concentrated in knots of ethnicity, and often poverty, in central city schools, their educational resources are, likewise, increasingly depleted, resulting in gross inequities between white students and their black and brown peers. If Cosby was aware of this disturbing trend, he gave little indication as he railed against the poor parents and their children who are victims of resegregation.
It wasn’t always the case that Cosby blamed poor parents and students for their plight while ignoring the structural features of educational inequality. In his doctoral thesis, entitled, in the unwieldy fashion common to most dissertations, An Integration of the Visual Media Via Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning, Cosby got right to the heart of the matter as he argued that two fundamental issues had to be addressed if educators were to ensure equal education for all students: the development of a curriculum that would help students reach their full potential, but before that, “the need to eliminate institutional racism.”21 Cosby lucidly characterized his view of institutional racism when he elaborated on how schools instill harmful beliefs in black children.
Schools are supposed to be the vehicle by which children are equipped with the skills and attitudes necessary to enter society. But a black child, because of the inherent racism in American schools will be ill prepared to meet the challenges of an adult future. The “American Dream” of upward mobility is just another myth… . Far from being prepared to move along an established career lattice, black children are trained to occupy those same positions held by their parents in a society economically dominated and maintained by a white status quo. Through a series of subtly inflicted failures black children are taught early not to aspire to or compete with their white counterparts for those “esteemed” jobs… . It has become increasingly difficult to reconcile the urban child to his education… . Inner-city children not only dislike school but tend to be dissatisfied with themselves. They react negatively to the entire educational process for the simple reason that school does not provide them with successful and rewarding experiences. Further, school curricula lacks congruence with the realities of their world.22
It is evident from his dissertation that Cosby saw schools as hotbeds of ideology and politics that are transmitted through the curriculum, and more subtly through the attitudes of teachers as they interact with black students. Cosby also insisted on the link between systemic inequities and the diminished self-esteem of the student; he refused to un
fairly blame black children for lacking the desire to succeed when the classroom passed along diseased ideas about black identity. Cosby argued that the “American Dream” is a myth—a myth, however, that he eagerly embraced a decade later, especially when he defended his Cosby Show family against critics who claimed that the Huxtables were insufficiently black. “To say they are not black enough is a denial of the American dream and the American way of life. My point is that this is an American family—an American family—and if you want to live like they do, and you’re willing to work, the opportunity is there.”23 In his dissertation, however, Cosby acknowledged that such a dream was denied to black children taught to mark time by filling the jobs their parents filled before them, a way to preserve white privilege.
Cosby also spoke passionately in his dissertation about the reasons black students fail: because of the urban school’s indifference to changing learning conditions; because they have had the right to fail removed; because they are bored, due to the unimaginative methods of teachers interested in controlling the student; and because little of what goes on in class makes sense. Cosby argued that the failure black children experienced would only reinforce “the debilitating sense of worthlessness whites convey in a variety of ways,” feeding the self-hatred of the black student.24 Cosby pleaded with urban schools to give urban children a sense of competence to ward off attitudes and behaviors that would destroy their character and intelligence. Thus, the urban schools had to develop a curriculum to fight institutional racism. Cosby concluded that blacks were not “the only victims” of racism, although they “bear the deepest scars of time-worn racial and intellectual inferiority myth preaching”; in his mind, “whites suffer in a more subtle way.”25 Cosby argued that the myth of black inferiority and white superiority was equally disastrous for black and white children. He said that whites
are raised with a counter myth of white supremacy (power and domination) and intellectual superiority (by which to assert their power and domination)… . Neither myth is healthy. Each breeds a negative ego position. On the one hand, there is a feeling of abject failure and pronounced inferiority, while on the other, there exists a super ego fed by continuous and demonstrated successes leading to an aggrandized sense of superiority. In combination they are combustible ingredients of a divided society.26
When Cosby raged against poor black parents and children in his recent comments, he forgot the lessons he had eloquently expressed nearly thirty years before. When he demanded, “What the hell good is Brown v. the Board of Education if nobody wants it?” he forgot what he had understood earlier: that desire is the child of environment, that vision is the gift of context, and, as he said, black “children are taught early not to aspire to or compete with their white counterparts” for jobs, or, we might add, for education either.
Of course, on some matters, Cosby in his recent statements was plain misinformed. He said more than once that 50 percent of black students drop out of high school. That is simply not true. Cosby was nowhere near the facts on this one, since the dropout rate for blacks is 17 percent.27 And while the white dropout rate is 9 percent, the dropout rate for black high school students has actually declined 44 percent since 1968, while the white dropout rate has slightly increased over the same period.28 In 1960, only 20.1 percent of black adults had completed high school; today it is nearly 79 percent, compared to 89 percent for whites.29 Despite the brutal obstacles blacks have faced, and which Cosby outlined in his dissertation, they have fought to become educated in far greater numbers than the generation he applauds, a fact that Cosby fails to recognize when he says that the black poor “don’t want to accept that they have to study to get an education.” Thus, contemporary blacks have not failed the civil rights generation; neither have they failed to extend the legacy of literacy we have created since our time here as slaves.30
Cosby also asserted that black youth—referring to them with the objectifying, abstracting, thing-like “it,” not a new practice with Cosby, to be sure, but no less disconcerting in any case—“can’t speak English,” that “[i]t doesn’t want to speak English,” that Cosby can’t speak like them (his speech, one supposes, notwithstanding), and that everyone knows “it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads.” It is utterly remarkable that Cosby, after the mountain of scholarship on Ebonics (coined by Robert Williams in the ’70s, Ebony + Phonics = Ebonics) and Black English, could with one wave of his Ebonics-indebted rhetorical wand dismiss what he has so brilliantly deployed, and commercially exploited, over the years.31 Black English captures the beautiful cadences, sensuous tones, kinetic rhythms, forensic articulations, and idiosyncrasies of expression that form the black vernacular voice. Bad grammar does not Black English make; it is a rhetorical practice laden with complex and technical rules—for instance, the use in Black English of zero copulas, or forms of the verb “to be.” To say “I am going” is one thing, suggesting a present activity; but to say “I be going” in Black English is something else, suggesting a habitual practice, a repeated action.
Black English grows out of the fierce linguisticality of black existence, the insistence by blacks of carving a speech of their own from the remnants of African languages and piecing and stitching those remnants together in the New World with extant patterns of English for the purpose of communication and survival. Of course, much of that communication had to be masked through ranges and intensities of signifying, in terms of not only the content of black speech but its very form as well. Thus, complex linguistic rules emerged from the existential and political exigencies that shaped black destiny: speaking about white folk in their face without doing so in a way that resulted in punishment or perhaps death, leading to verbal hiccups, grammatical hesitations and linguistic lapses; articulating the moral certainties of black worldviews without compromising the ability to transmit them in the linguistic forms that best suited their expression, while adapting them to the religious passions of the white world; capturing in sound the seismic shifts in being and meaning of New World blacks that came in staccato phrases or elongated syllables; unleashing through the palette a percussive sense of time peculiar to the negotiation of an ever-evolving identity with grace and humor (when I was in grad school, my German professor said about a certain phrase, “the tense can only be translated in the Black English terms, ‘It bes like that’”); and situating the absurdity of modern blackness through the constantly modulating forms of diction that lent a protective veneer of spontaneous rationality to rapidly evolving patterns of speech.
And by their creative linguistic transformations, black slaves inflected, and infected, the speech of their masters. As one observer proclaimed, “It must be confessed, to the shame of the white population of the South, that they perpetuate many of these pronunciations in common with their Negro dependents.”32 For Cosby to dismiss that, the very kernel of black life in Black English, verges on self-denial; for him to ridicule its most vulnerable practitioners borders on racial disdain. As James Baldwin argued in his powerful essay “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” black English
is the creation of the black diaspora… . A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey… . There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long… . Now if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) “sheer intelligence,” this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by “history” … if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not i
ndicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.33
Cosby has over the years, despite his rabid resistance to Black English, deployed its rhythms, tics and habits of speech. As linguist John McWhorter recently commented, “Bill Cosby speaks more ebonics than he knows … and people don’t want to hear it. It’s not their favorite flavor.”34 The theme song to The Bill Cosby Show included a string of nonsensical articulations, such as “flizzum flazzum,” that owed their spirit of playful verbal invention, if not their content, to Ebonics. The speech Cosby gave damning poor black parents and their children is loaded with Ebonics, from its inflections, intonations, diction and stylistic flourishes to its grammatical eliminations (of syllables) and, simultaneously, its vernacular substitutions. That’s also why it was especially troubling at the 2003 Emmys when comedienne Wanda Sykes, in all of her vernacular splendor and her animated shtick, asked an obviously peeved Cosby the secret of his and other early black comics’ success, and he stared at her with menacing intensity and fatal scowl and said, icily, “We spoke English.”35
