Grumpy old man

Goddamn kids need to get off my lawn

Bill Cosby Strikes Again

by Julie Keller
Jul 2, 2004, 10:30 AM PT

The Cos has a new cause, and we aren't talking Jell-O Pudding Pops.

Just a few months after he made headlines for lambasting the black community, Bill Cosby has spoken out again, this time sounding off on poorly educated children, deadbeat dads and more during a Thursday appearance at Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference in Chicago.

Cosby had piped up in May during a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, saying that many members of the African-American community were not taking advantage of the opportunities that were fought for by civil rights activists. The remarks were polarizing, drawing both attacks and praise from African-American groups.

During Thursday's speech, Cosby said his detractors were not facing the facts about poor black communities and were just trying to cover up what he called their "dirty laundry."

"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other nigger as they're walking up and down the street," he said.

Cosby continued railing about the state of black youth in America. "They think they're hip," he said. "They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."

To African-American men, Cosby ranted, "Stop beating up your women because you can't find a job."

He complained about rap music: "When you put on a record, and that record is yelling 'nigger this' and 'nigger that' and cursing all over the thing and you got your little six-year-old and seven-year-old sitting in the back seat of the car--those children hear that. And I am telling you when you put the CD on and then you get up and dance to it, what are you saying to your children?"

It's funny, I hadn't given much thought to Bill Cosby's rant until this morning. I'd spent a quiet night, and as a rule, my Fourth of Julys tend to be my quietest holiday of the year. We're not much for picnics or cookouts, and frankly, any weekend can be a holiday weekend in the summer. Oh yeah, I hate fireworks.Cannnot stand them.

So I have a lot of time to think, relax and wait to see the game comes on and the Mets sweep the Yankees at Shea.

The reason I bring this up is that while laying in bed, I realized why I didn't take Cosby's rant seriously. It's because it places ALL the onus on poor black families and none on his fellow members of the elite.

The thing is that Cosby wants to blame the least able, and most affected for their plight says more about him than what it says about them. The fact is that the black elite has long made a sport of condemning the black underclass. It was true in 1900 and it is true today. The difference was that segregation made seperation impossible. While some are nostalgic for the old days, they were just as fucked up as things are today. My mother often recounts suicides, spousal abuse, gangsters and teenage pregnancy. When my mother was in high school, the racist teacher found out one of her classmates was pregnant and got her kicked out of school. This wasn't in South Carolina, but New York City, where my mother was born and raised. And this was in 1948.

So what Cosby is talking about is a highly edited version of history. Black people have always given their kids weird names. Oprah is not a name you'll find in a baby name book. The difference is that the kind of names changed in the 1960's. Now, it's the game all Americans can play. For some reason, people thought that Islamic names were more "African" than Christian names. It was, of course, a misreading of history, since Islam and Christianity were imported into Africa at the same time. Nigeria, where my ex-brother in law is from, is evenly split between the two religions. Both are equally valid in terms of their origins in Africa.

What Cosby has been allowed to get away with is this: not excoriating the black middle class for abandoning their relatives in urban America. Black families often have a wide economic spread. Look at Atlanta and LA, they have their exclusive black suburbs, their fraternal organizations and their Jack and Jill Clubs. Hell, the black colleges are really buppie factories, teaching a new generation of the elite. Because if you're poor, don't expect to stay there.

My nephew went to Hampton Institute for a year, ran out of money and then wound up going to UMass Boston. Call me cynical, but if he had started at oh, UMass Amherst, he might not have run out of money. The black elite have always been big on pimping their little schools, but the reality is that for the black working and lower middle class, it's the big state universities which educate them. The school with the largest black population in the US is the University of Maryland. The second largest is City University of New York.

Historically black colleges are far less about helping the poor join the middle class than about maintianing an elite. If you're poor and black, Howard or Moorehouse isn't going to help you. You're going to City College or the University of California at San Francisco. But it's that ethos which Cosby embraces and ignores its effects.

He also lets overtly racist policies like redlining, which prevents black businesses from getting insurance at fair rates and the way we fund schools through property taxes a free pass.

This argument reminds me of something Paul Krugman said during an economic conference at the Center for American Progress this week. He was asked about personal finances and he said he agreed with Elizabeth Warren, that it wasn't just a matter of personal responsibility, but the burden of trying to live in good school districts and pay the taxes. Her book, The Two Income Trap, makes this argument clearly. So clearly that she was on both Oprah and Dr. Phil.

Well, poor black people aren't just poor. They aren't just ignorant rap listening morons who can't name their kids right (I have had people fuck up both my first and last names since kindergarten and I'm not named Raheem). There are wider socioeconomic factors here and they don't just affect black people. Cosby's saying "don't blame white people". Well, who do we blame for redlining and discrimination and flawed school funding? It's mostly white people in state legislatures.

Then, he makes a pointless argument about rap music. This is one of the oldest canards in Black social life. The only accepted music was gospel. Any other music was devil music, from WC Handy to Scott Joplin to Robert Johnson to James Brown, all the popular black music was ungodly and thus bad. It always offended someone at some time.

Why didn't Cosby mention the pernicious effects of Slayer and Metallica. Every angry white kid has Metallica in their MP3 colelction. Why, I even own some.

Stanley Crouch makes this same, now discreted argument, all the time. Well, I have news for them: Jazz dominiated popular music until 1950, then the blues and its bastard child rock, won the day. Simple as that. No one is going to listen to jazz to make these people happy. The hip-hop nation allows for self-expression in the same way that the internet does. There is no going back.

And Cosby misses a point, of course 50 Cents would be lionized, Americans love outlaws. You know, Al Capone, Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde. What would tell him that a man shot nine times and lives wouldn't be a hero in America. We still debate if Billy the Kid, a teen killer, died in 1881 or much later. We still track down how Butch Cassidy died. These folks are criminals and American folk heroes. Hell, I was stunned (and not a little surprised) to find out that Clyde Barrow was a bisexual and regularly had threesomes with Bonnie Parker and his prison boyfriend. You didn't see Warren Beatty blowing some guy in that movie with Faye Dunnaway, did you? Of course, it was a British documentary which mentioned this.

Cosby's whole rant is this internalized feeling that black people should somehow achieve perfection. That we all need to "stick together" like the Jews. Which is insane. Jewish social life is riven with debate. There is nothing like the ideological conformity common in black political life. What's the old joke, if you have two Jews, you have three arguments? So this demand for perfection seems to arise from time to time, driven by myth and unrealistic expectations.

The statement about beating women is grossly ignorant. According a new book, 40 percent of the NBA have criminal records, mostly violence against women. Funny, these men are, uniformly, rich and they beat the hell out of women, cheat on them, and Cosby neglected to mention them in his little rant.

What most disturbs me is the way Cosby is SO eager to cut the black middle class slack for abandoning it's brothers and sisters, building gated communities, and still lagging behind in test scores. There is still a gap in achievement even when economics is not a factor. And it isn't because blacks are stupid, we know they aren't. Racism might play a role. The black middle class got their money and they ran to suburbia, even when racism limited their options. Look at Long Island. The most racially segregated place in America. You can tell if someone is black by the town they live in, Hempstead, Wyandanch, Freeport, Roosevelt. The same crappy school districts, same poverty you get in the Bronx, except people are far more hostile to change. Before he lectures the poor on their shortcomings, he might want to lecture his peers and the middle class on theirs.

This ranting about the use of nigger is silly. People use it, they use it privately and publically. It's a word, not some kind of moral litmus test. I don't use it often, but I do use it. Would I use it in a room full of whites? Probably not. But then, I wouldn't use it in a room full of blacks, either.

There are real problems within black America. But what needs to be understood is that many of these problems are American. The problems of the poor are not specially related to blacks. But by internalizing this and ranting, inappropriately, about this, whatever good points Cosby made are lost in the ensuing uproar. And it's inappropriate because he's victimizing the least able to defend themselves, usinghis celebrity and fame to add one more burden on an already burdened life.

posted by Steve @ 9:33:00 AM