by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
In Goldberg’s eyes, Cosby’s politics of shame, glimpsed in his relentless assaults on poor blacks, represent an exemplary moral, and political, response to poverty, when in fact Cosby’s approach, as we’ve seen, is much more deeply rooted in destructive class politics than most critics seem to realize. What is clear is that Cosby’s stance has emboldened white conservative interests in their public attacks on poor blacks. Cosby thinks that such unsolicited—but, surely, it can’t be claimed, unforeseen—support may be the price he has to pay to get a hearing in the culture. “If I have to make a choice between keeping quiet so that conservative media does not speak negatively, or ringing the bell to galvanize those who want change in the lower economic community, then I choose to be a bell ringer,” Cosby said in a statement. “I think it is time for concerned African-Americans to march, galvanize and raise the awareness about the epidemic to transform our helplessness, frustration and righteous indignation into a sense of shared responsibility and action.”44
The effect of white conservatives on Cosby’s thinking is unmistakable, especially as he lashes out at leaders and thinkers with a more complex vision of how one truly helps the poor. “The poverty pimps and the victim pimps keep telling the victim to stay where they are,” Cosby told an audience in Detroit in January 2005. “You’re crippled, you can’t walk, you can’t get up, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. And I’m saying, you’d better get up.” That quip so pleased conservatives that it made both The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes on the Fox News Network.45 Of course, if Cosby were willing to actually explore the social responsibility for the suffering of the black poor, and to stop telling a narrow truth about them, such a statement might signal the possibility of helpful, hopeful dialogue—and put to rest his need for off-the-cuff ranting and raving. Even a Cosby defender, Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, had to admit that “it’s much easier for a black multimillionaire to dismiss white people’s opinions than it is for a black man or woman living paycheck to paycheck.”46
Many in the black community have come to Cosby’s aid, suggesting that his “airing dirty laundry,” even at the risk of offending the poor, was both a valiant departure from tradition and a necessary safeguard of just the sort of free speech that might help us confront grave social crises. I, for one, applaud the move away from quarantining black discourse in supposedly private black quarters, which were ostensibly open to most black folk but in truth were relatively closed and antidemocratic spaces. What was usually meant by hashing things out in private was gatherings of the leaders of black organizations, or on the convention floors, platforms and meeting halls of groups to which the masses of blacks were not necessarily invited. Open, democratic, honest dialogue is best. That, for sure, is not what is occurring with Cosby’s tirades; they are one-sided, intimidating displays of rhetorical bluster and misdirected passion that have the effect of quelling, not sparking, true, robust, open-ended, just and democratic conversation. Besides, these same folk failed to defend the producers of the film Barbershop, which, it was believed, soiled the reputation and savaged the images of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. No one claimed that the charges about King—that he had extramarital affairs—were wrong. Most folk simply argued that such charges should not be irresponsibly portrayed in a film piped to sections of a white world that looked to seize on any negative information about a beloved black leader, in fact, the most beloved leader of all, to justify their racist attacks. The message seems to be that while it’s horrible, perhaps even racist, to pounce on King’s reputation and image, it’s just fine to beat up on poor blacks in an equally “irresponsible” fashion.
Other black critics argue that Cosby said the right thing, but at the wrong time in the wrong place. Others say that Cosby was saying little more than what we hear regularly, in equally unvarnished manner, in the barber’s chair or on the street corner. I think a more accurate analogy is that Cosby is like the person who sounds good to himself singing in the shower but, when he hits the stage, he’s lost all the conditions that made his song soar: the claustrophobic acoustics of a confined space; the protection of privacy; the guarantee of a positive, if subjective, assessment of one’s skill; and the lack of a critical audience to offer feedback. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., asked why “the huge flap over Bill Cosby’s insistence that black teenagers do their homework, stay in school, master standard English and stop having babies? Any black person who frequents a barbershop or beauty parlor in the inner city knows that Mr. Cosby was only echoing sentiments widely shared in the black community.”47 Except most brothers in the barber’s chair aren’t invited to appear on CNN to spread their views, and neither does that qualify them to take a position—or, for that matter, to be offered one—on Professor Gates’s black studies faculty at Harvard.
While white conservatives embraced Cosby’s comments lashing out at poor blacks, the same conservative establishment pilloried his wife, Camille, when she bravely penned an op-ed in the aftermath of their son Ennis’s murder by an immigrant from the Ukraine. Camille Cosby, who, like her husband, earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, was as blunt as her husband, except her righteous indignation and impassioned reasoning were directed at white racism.
I believe America taught our son’s killer to hate African-Americans. After Mikhail Markhasev killed Ennis William Cosby on Jan. 16, 1997, he said to his friends, “I shot a nigger. It’s all over the news.” … Presumably, Markhasev did not learn to hate black people in his native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero. Nor was he likely to see America’s intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the Soviet Union before the killer and his family moved to America in the late 1980s… . Yes, racism and prejudice are omnipresent and eternalized in America’s institutions, media and myriad entities… . Ennis William Cosby was shot and killed in a middle- to upper-middle income, predominately white community. The misperception immortalized daily by the media and other entities is that crimes are committed in poor neighborhoods inhabited by dark people. All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors. Sadly, my family and I experienced that to be one of America’s racial truths. 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?48
Predictably, Mrs. Cosby’s comments were met with harsh resistance from the white conservative press, and from some black conservatives. Although she wasn’t nearly as visible as her husband in his crusade, Mrs. Cosby did respond briefly in writing to the critiques of her commentary, insisting that “racism is at the heart of America’s past and present histories, and all of us have been stung by it.” Then she made a structural link that her husband had made in his Playboy interview, but which he had wholly neglected in his comments about the poor. “America’s institutions have a fundamental responsibility to be just, unprejudiced and truthful to all of its people.” She wrote that racism “continues to divide our country; therefore, constructive dialogue and action are needed for America to have a healthy populace.” Mrs. Cosby also stated that the “focal point [of my article] was institutional racism—that is, entities in both the public and private sectors which have practiced, influenced and sustained biased values that Black people are inferior.”49
Camille Cosby’s provocative essay set off quite a different media firestorm than the one that blazes around her husband. It was, too, a much more courageous commentary than the one offered by Bill Cosby. Camille Cosby’s commentary was surely much more likely to offend deep-pocketed private and public interests in the white mainstream. Camille Cosby’s views cut across the amnesia and dishonesty that fuel the continued distortion of race in America. And she used her perch as one of the wealthiest and most beloved black women in the nation to identify with the masses
of black folk, including the poor, fighting the vicious legacy of white supremacy. And her insistence on the social responsibility the country owes to its citizens to educate them about racism, and to confront its brutal consequences in American life, was especially powerful. Unlike her husband in his recent comments, Camille Cosby sought to speak directly to the sources of so much suffering among black folk in the country.
One of the most dishonest effects of elevating Cosby as a spokesman of black interests is that conservative commentators pretend that he is the first prominent black leader to call for personal responsibility. By being portrayed as distinctive in his views, Cosby is made morally exceptional, and hence viewed as an exemplar to the masses of black folk and our leaders and used to chide those who haven’t caught on to the need for personal responsibility. One conservative white columnist praised Cosby’s bravery for airing dirty laundry while decrying the “complete breakdown of leadership within the [black] community,” claiming that folk like Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson have “spent the past 20 years telling the black community that their problems are due to the white man keeping them down.” He asked, when “was the last time any of those men looked within the black community and said there is a problem?”50 Black conservative activist Star Parker asked, “If Cosby’s appeal for personal responsibility among African Americans is not news for black leadership, then one must ask why this leadership opposes every reform that attempts to recognize these points, turn back government and return choice and responsibility to black citizens.”51 Farrakhan, of course, has been promoting a gospel of black self-help for decades, and while he assaults white supremacy, he recognizes the virtue of black folk, including the black poor, assuming responsibility for their destinies. After all, the call for a million men to converge on Washington, D.C., a decade ago rested on the argument that black males should take greater responsibility in their homes and communities. Sharpton has constantly applauded the virtues of hard work and self-determining action for black folk. And Jesse Jackson is in a long list of leaders who have understood the dynamic relationship between personal and social responsibility.
It may be because many black leaders and thinkers have been unwilling to blame black people, especially the black poor, for their problems, even as they value personal responsibility—and social, intellectual, moral, immediate and ultimate responsibility as well—that their contributions are so easily ignored. At their best, black thinkers and leaders have rarely isolated self-help philosophy from a simultaneous damning of the white supremacy that makes it necessary. Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born activist who organized and led the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest black nationalist movement in the nation’s history, emphasized political resistance and a brand of self-reliance that might have made Emerson proud. Garvey deplored the systemic racism that prevented blacks’ flourishing. 52 Acknowledging that black folk are treated equally to whites “nowhere in the world, with few exceptions,” Garvey argued that “there should be an equitable distribution and apportionment of all such things, and in consideration of the fact that as a race we are now deprived of those things that are morally and legally ours, we believe it right that all such things should be acquired and held by whatsoever means possible.” At the same time, Garvey and the UNIA promoted “self-help and self-reliance,” eschewing slavish dependence on other races, with the admonition that “[p]rayer alone is not going to improve our condition, nor the policy of watchful waiting,” thus encouraging black folk to take their destinies into their own hands.53
W.E.B. Du Bois, an advocate of engaged thought and aggressive social action, agreed in principle with Garvey’s move to join sustained resistance to white supremacy and racial self-help. Du Bois linked self-help to self-regard, and to the willingness to associate with other blacks, cautioning blacks against “affront[ing] our own self-respect by accepting a proffered equality which is not equality, or submitting to discrimination simply because it does not involve actual and open segregation; and above all, let us not sit down and do nothing for self-defense and self-organization just because we are too stupid or too distrustful of ourselves to take vigorous and decisive action.”54
Martin Luther King, Jr., the most valiant freedom fighter of the twentieth century, argued that “if first-class citizenship is to become a reality for the Negro he must assume the primary responsibility for making it so.”55 King contended that the Negro “must not be victimized with the delusion of thinking that others should be more concerned than himself about his citizenship rights.” King was quick, however, to insist that black folk “must continue to break down the barrier of segregation,” and to “resist all forms of racial injustice.” Nonviolent social resistance was the collective expression of black self-help, as King urged black folk to “take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act.”56 At the same time, King insisted that one of the “sure signs of maturity is the ability to rise to the point of self-criticism.”57 King admitted that some blacks had “lost that something called initiative,” and that some had used their oppression to excuse mediocrity. But King anticipated the racist use of his words, concluding that the “only answer that we can give to those who through blindness and fear would question our readiness and capability is that our lagging standards exist because of the legacy of slavery and segregation, inferior schools, slums, and second-class citizenship, and not because of an inherent inferiority.”58
Finally, Jesse Jackson, the most gifted social activist and public moralist of our times, has consistently over his forty-year career in public service sought to eradicate racism and economic inequality while preaching a gospel of self-help. As head of Operation PUSH, and then the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Jackson has encouraged his followers to reject alcohol, teenage sex, and drugs (“get the dope out of your veins and hope in your brains”); to war against misogynistic lyrics and violence in hip-hop culture; and to become deeply involved in their children’s education. In the 1970s, Jackson launched the Push for Excellence (EXCEL) program, devoted to bridging generational and cultural gaps by bringing together parents, students and teachers in pursuit of educational excellence across the nation. Over five hundred public school districts invited Jackson to help them implement his program. When Jackson appeared on 60 Minutes, the program recorded his intriguing mix of self-help philosophy, down-home vernacular, and folksy-country-preacher-meets-big-city-activist as he chided and challenged his black listeners in a speech.
You know, I look at a lot of these theories that many social workers come up with, like, “Now the reason the Negro can’t learn is his Daddy’s gone, his Momma is pitiful, there’s no food in the refrigerator, it’s rats all in his house … and that’s the reason he can’t learn.” Then we go to school and the teacher—standing there reeling the guilties—says, “These poor and pitiful Negroes got all these trials and tribulations. Now I have to stand up here and teach them how to read and write and count.” Well, if we can run faster, jump higher and shoot a basketball straighter off of inadequate diets, then we can read, write, count and think off of those same diets. The challenge is mobility.59
Nearly two decades later, after a murder outside of his kitchen, the shooting of his grocer across the street, a triple murder down the block and the burglary of his house while his mother-in-law was present, Jackson launched what he termed a “victim-led revolution,” which brought together a network of local churches to provide mentoring to first-time offenders who had no family to guide them. Jackson has also worked tirelessly to erase social injustice and the structural inequalities that prevent blacks and other poor people from enjoying the opportunity to exercise their full citizenship. Jackson, for example, appeared before the National Press Club in 1994 to criticize President Clinton’s budget plans, which, during a widely touted economic recovery, slashed crucial programs for young people, the working classes and the poor.
The third year of recovery [and the] unemployment of African Americans
is going up, not down. Unemployment for America generally is down to 6.4 percent. For African Americans, [it’s] 13 percent and rising. Race rhetoric is offensive. Race discrimination is deadly. Young African Americans who drop out of school [are unemployed at a rate of] 43.5 percent. For those who played by the rules, high school graduates, unemployment [is] 25 percent. Young African Americans who have some college suffer an unemployment rate [of] 18 percent. College graduates [are] unemployed [at] 11.3 percent. And this is the third year of the recovery. We need a plan for jobs in this country. The president hails the recovery and the jobs being created. But in January alone, major companies announced 100,000 new lay-offs. The jobs that are going are generally better than the jobs that are coming. One in seven jobs last year was provided by a temporary help company. We need an urban policy and an economic development plan. Instead, we are going the other way. This year’s budget features high visibility cuts in urban programs. Bus and subway fares will go up as mass transit subsidies are slashed. Libraries will close. The young and old will be left in the cold as home heating aid is cut. The crisis in affordable housing, [is] met by slashing [the] public housing budget $3 billion. Badly funded training programs for disadvantaged young people [are] eliminated to pay for a badly funded training program for disadvantaged workers.60
