by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
It is clear from social science research that many black folk are capable of sustaining two apparently contradictory views: recognizing that individual responsibility for personal destiny is enormously important to the culture, while at the same time acknowledging the structural barriers that prevent both social justice and self-realization. Most successful black folk appear to recognize that while they have worked hard, applied themselves diligently and taken advantage of every opportunity to enhance their God-given talents, other black folk may not be as fortunate as they are in laying claim to their educational and employment aspirations. The sensitivity among gainfully employed black folk to the plight of less fortunate members of the race contrasts with the beliefs of most whites, who lean far too heavily on individual responsibility as the nearly exclusive determinant of social status. Since the bulk of blacks embrace structural explanations for poverty while leaving room for personal agency—and while the black poor themselves often seek to exercise to the best of their ability individual responsibility in the midst of incredibly difficult circumstances—it stands to reason that prominent and fortunate blacks have a responsibility to acknowledge that complexity while putting forth arguments that defend the most vulnerable of the race. This holds even for conservative members of the race. Although newfangled black neoconservatives have often forgotten this lesson, black conservatives from the past were more willing to acknowledge structural barriers while emphasizing personal initiative.
Bill Cosby has forsaken these insights, the result of centuries of struggle, to embrace in his public comments a callous disposition to the poor that resembles the most extreme and acid views promulgated by some conservative white critics. Cosby has clearly spurned formal empathy and embraced almost exclusively an individualistic framework, leaving behind the close attention to structural features—poor housing, terrible classrooms and tough neighborhoods—that he so ably explored in his Playboy interview. Just as in his comedy Cosby has consistently sought to appeal to a white audience, his recent views certainly play to the preference among most whites to explain their situation and, therefore, the situation of all others, in terms of initiative and personal responsibility. Cosby undoubtedly is aware of the conservative cultural and moral values that are widely shared in most black communities, even among the poor, a fact that not only contradicts the image his public harangues present—that most poor blacks have lost their moral compass—but also suggests that calls for personal responsibility are ethically redundant. It is not that such calls are not useful, and to a large degree predictable, given that, in a certain view of these matters, the train of moral enlightenment glides on tracks of sheer repetition. But that is different from dissing an entire group of folk—a fact that is hardly mitigated by Cosby’s insistence after his attacks that he doesn’t mean all poor black folk, the verbal equivalent of a “wink-wink” to the knowing—for not possessing the very thing he knows is abundant, a moral sensibility that is far richer than their material circumstances.
Cosby’s views of the black poor are so bent out of shape by his apparent aggravation that he is led to deny the rigid racial realities that make it extremely difficult, and in some cases impossible, for poor black folk to flesh out their desires to be educated, gainfully employed and free from the despotic empire of want and penury. There is significant disadvantage still to black skin in an American culture that proclaims the virtues of individualism while denying to blacks, as a group, the means to fulfill their individual potential. Not only does Cosby discount the white racial privilege he so honestly confronted in his Playboy interview, but he underplays the persistent racism that affects blacks of every class level, but especially poorer blacks. To adapt an old saying in black America in explaining the relative impact of social forces, if well-to-do blacks have a cold, then poor blacks surely have pneumonia. The reason Cosby can be relatively dismissive of structural racism may have to do with his relative freedom from the constraints of social prejudice as a globally recognized celebrity, and his failure to fully account for the structural economic injustice faced by poor people may have something to do with his freedom from want, and from the severe psychological and personal penalties it imposes on the most vulnerable. While most of us are disturbed by self-destructive behavior among poor folk, we must also have a clearer grasp of the social and economic landscape for the poor, and what extreme poverty does to individuals trapped in situations of acute desperation.
None of this suggests a black disinterest in responsibility, but it does suggest a widening of our understanding of just what responsibility is, who has it, and how it functions in a more complex vision of social justice for all Americans. I suggest that we hold in mind several dimensions of responsibility, summarized in the dynamic, reciprocal relation between three interrelated types of responsibility: personal and social responsibility, moral and intellectual responsibility, and immediate and ultimate responsibility. Personal responsibility involves the individual’s being accountable for her actions and acting in a moral fashion that is helpful to herself and to the members of her family, community and society. Social responsibility involves the society’s exercising collective accountability to its citizens by acting, through agencies (social services, psychological services and the like), institutions (schools, religious organizations, government and the like), and spheres (private and public employment and the like) to enhance their well-being, especially the most vulnerable. To speak of personal responsibility without understanding its relationship to the social order is to miscalculate what we may reasonably expect from human beings in a given situation. On the other hand, to speak of social responsibility without factoring in the roles and duties of individuals is to misjudge the extent of accountability we can reasonably expect from our society.
Moral responsibility involves self- and other-regarding behavior that aims to realize the good intentions, and maximize the just actions, of persons and societies. Intellectual responsibility involves the exercise of mental faculty for the purpose of self-development and the development of society. To speak of moral responsibility without understanding its constitutive relation to the intellectual goals, and possibilities, of individuals and societies is to misjudge what we can reasonably expect from either. To speak of intellectual responsibility without understanding the ethical ideals and moral properties that constitute and govern intellectual pursuit—and the social conditions that make it possible—is to miscalculate the relation of thought to behavior.
Immediate responsibility involves persons and societies acting accountably to address issues, ideas and problems in the present time and environment. Ultimate responsibility involves persons and societies acting accountably to address issues, ideas and problems with an eye on their personal and social impact in the long run. There is another meaning as well: Ultimate responsibility involves assigning culpability for actions, and consequences, that may appear to lie with particular individuals but that in fact is determined by larger and perhaps more distant (in time) forces. To speak of immediate responsibility without figuring in ultimate responsibility in both senses is to minimize the role of more distant and daunting factors that shape the choices at hand. To speak of ultimate responsibility, in both senses, without understanding how immediate responsibility may still alter personal and social outcomes is to posit a determinism that dishonors individual effort and social transformation.
These meanings of responsibility should be kept in mind as we make demands for the poor to be more responsible. Too often we fail to give them credit for how they are already being personally and morally responsible, given the conditions they confront in the home, in the neighborhood, in the school and in society. We have at the same time failed to calculate, or to as aggressively demand, social responsibility toward the poor. And with both targeted and indiscriminant assaults on the poor, and Cosby fits the latter bill, we have failed to act in an intellectually responsible fashion to use the wealth of research we have at our disposal to relieve, rather than rei
nforce, their suffering. And we surely haven’t used our resources to retard the personal and collective demons that gnaw at the souls and flesh of the poor. Neither have we accepted our ultimate societal responsibility for the problems—racism, class and caste prejudice, with all of their attendant ills, which the poor didn’t invent—they grapple with daily. As with Cosby, we have given far too much emphasis to the personal responsibility of the poor without speaking of our social, intellectual, moral and, yes, ultimate, responsibility to the poor. This is more than a philosophical category mistake; it has fatal consequences for how we view the poor and what resources we are willing to place at their disposal to more fully enable them to escape their plight. Our irresponsibility in this matter far outweighs whatever irresponsibility we might impute to the poor.
We have acted, as a society, in an intellectually and morally irresponsible fashion when we assign too much weight to personal responsibility of the poor without figuring out whether they can even respond honorably and reasonably with the resources at hand to the challenges they face, challenges rooted in finite factors that have in large part been constructed by, and in, the social order. But perhaps one of the biggest disservices, and one of the greatest acts of intellectual irresponsibility, is to believe (and to demand the poor believe it too) by assuming personal responsibility, the poor could in any significant way alter their social plight. As Bishop T. D. Jakes said in response to Cosby’s comments:
Mr. Cosby’s comments now stir blacks to ask whether we are strong enough to be publicly vulnerable. Unquestionably, we care about and take responsibility to shape the futures of our beloved children. It is a challenge. Within those challenges, some believe racism is not a factor. But if credentials, performance and good grammar could end bias and injustice, Danny Glover would have no trouble hailing a cab in New York. If brains and competence always earned their due, women in corporations would not find a glass ceiling, and the Jewish community would never trip over disrespect. While black education and eloquence are critical, they alone don’t ensure access to the American dream. Conditions for blacks are drastically improved; and as overt racism recedes, blacks increasingly have the light to more clearly distinguish our self-inflicted wounds from the social bruising of our bludgeoned history. But while black introspection is crucial to healing, it is one-half of the solution. The greater solution is for all Americans to look inside and root out the lingering attitudes and bias that continue to fuel injustice.39
The poor cannot erase the blight of white supremacy by behaving better, no matter what advocates of racial uplift or personal responsibility like Bill Cosby suggest. Assuming personal responsibility cannot remove vicious structural barriers to economic mobility. Exercising personal responsibility cannot prevent the postindustrial decline in major northeastern cities, nor can it fix the crumbling infrastructure that continues to keep the poor, well, poor. Being personally responsible can’t stop job flight, structural shifts in the political economy, the increasing technological monopoly of work, downsizing, or outsourcing, problems that middle-class folk, who are presumed to be more personally responsible than the poor, face in abundance these days. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley observes:
The reality is, all the self-help in the world will not eliminate poverty or create the number of good jobs needed to employ the African American community. Multinational corporations control 70 percent of world trade, and about one-third of world trade consists of transfers within the 350 largest global corporations. Rather than merely exploit Third World labor to extract or cultivate raw materials, increasingly we have witnessed the export of whole production processes as corporations seek to take advantage of cheaper labor, relatively lower taxes, and a deregulated environment… . Well-paying jobs made possible by decades of union struggle disappeared. By 1979, for example, 94 percent of the profits of the Ford Motor Company and 63 percent of the profits from Coca-Cola came from overseas operations. Between 1973 and 1980, at least 4 million U.S. jobs were lost to firms moving to foreign countries. And during the decade of the 1970s, at least 32 million jobs were lost as a result of shutdowns, relocations, and scaling back operations. Moreover, the economy we are dealing with is not only global and transnational but depends on state intervention to help keep it afloat—a state, by the way, we fund with our tax dollars.40
And, in an act of supreme intellectual and moral irresponsibility, we have as a society—hence, we have been socially irresponsible as well—enlarged the myth of individualism that holds that most folk who make it in our culture have done so on merit and talent alone, that they have been personally responsible, denying that they have also benefited from skin color, social class and gender preference, social forces that put individuals of predictable pedigree in the right place at the right time either to enhance their innate gifts or to have their mediocre skills overlooked in a social order that favors them despite their deficits. And many black folk who have climbed upward are morally and intellectually irresponsible when they benefit from affirmative action—not because they lack talent, but because they possess it but have been historically denied the opportunity to exercise it—and then blast the black poor who have not received the slightest benefit from this measure of compensatory justice. Moreover, huge corporations benefit from their own variety of welfare, as do the rich in the form of untold subsidies and tax breaks. We hold the poor immediately responsible for mastering their domain, and yet society bears the ultimate responsibility for making their social environment a cruel obstacle course of severely limited options while virtually assuring their failure with poorly arranged alternatives to their suffering. This is not to deny the need for the poor to exercise personal responsibility; it is simply a demand that we not be intellectually and morally irresponsible by overemphasizing its role in removing the barriers they confront, barriers that have a relationship to their ability to thrive. To paraphrase Dorothy Day, the great Catholic social activist who spent her life working with and loving the poor, but not pitying them, we must work toward a world in which it is easier for the poor to behave decently.41
Cosby’s rabid insistence on personal responsibility to the exclusion of every other variety of responsibility has predictably won him plaudits from black and white conservatives, from Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and Star Parker to the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and assorted online ideologues. Of course, Cosby was widely celebrated by black columnists of every ideological stripe for his views about personal responsibility, while only a few of them insisted on broadening the view to include at least a nod to social responsibility. For the most part, the black press, and blacks in the press—with the notable exception of a few online writers like William Jelani Cobb, Time magazine’s Christopher John Farley, and the Village Voice’s Ta-Nehisi Coates—did little more than rubber-stamp Cosby’s opinions, evoking unsettling memories, if not in tone then at least in effect, of their elitist kin from the last century.44 As disappointing as the capitulation of the black press was—and, quite frankly, so was the fawning, or silent, surrender of most black intellectuals, pundits and public figures, even those who might have openly disagreed with a celebrity of lesser wattage, or one not so beloved in the race—it is perhaps the affirming signal that Cosby’s vicious assaults send to equally vicious right-wing interests that is most damaging. Cosby’s insistence on self-help lets society off the hook, including governmental bodies, segments of private industry and certainly racist quarters of the culture that have like vultures picked at the bones of the black suffering that they, or their ideological predecessors, helped to impose. It is intellectually irresponsible for Cosby to spout his gospel of self-help and personal responsibility without paying strict attention to the social forces that have pulverized the black families he now attacks in terms that are, he unapologetically admits, “vulgar.”42
In the aftermath of his comments, Cosby has been heralded by the white folk, including conservatives, he claims not to care about. But the dead giveaway that Cosby truly cares abo
ut what whites think is his contention during his speech that “The white man, he’s laughing, got to be laughing.” I think it is Cosby’s embarrassment for the poor in the sight of “the white man” that has caused him to go off on the poor. As a result, Cosby has been embraced by white pundits and critics. Not only have they heaped praise on his head, but they have heaped scorn on the black poor, and other black leaders, in the name of the freedom to emote that Cosby’s comments gave rise to. As Jonah Goldberg stated in the National Review:
Conservatives have long argued that the best thing for the black community is, in the late Pat Moynihan’s celebrated (though misunderstood) phrase, a policy of “benign neglect.” Most people faced with the choice of sinking or swimming will swim. And there’s no reason to believe, conservatives argued, that blacks wouldn’t swim like anybody else if they had to. Many immigrants come to this country far poorer than the average poor black but still work their way into the middle class, because they bring with them a set of values our society tends to reward. They also usually have an ethnic social network waiting for them, which helps them get on their feet. Why should blacks be any different? If blacks were cut off without a dime from the federal government, non-racist conservatives argued, blacks would develop individually and as a community, the habits and institutions necessary for as decent a life as anybody could expect—much as they had, ironically, during segregation. That’s not an argument for segregation, of course, but for the sort of self-help blacks relied on before the government started “helping” them. As countless callers to black radio point out, that self-help involved shaming those who were letting the rest of the community down… . Bill Cosby knows the answer, and he should be congratulated for shaming those who deserve—and need—to be shamed.43
