The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  The dedication page of Dyson’s 2005 book Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? consists of a long list of names, each followed by a cloying phrase plainly designed to shape a picture of the author as a virtuous, sensitive soul (“To . . . Who fed me and taught me the true meaning of ministry and manhood”; “To . . . Who fed me and first inspired a young pastor to pursue a Ph.D.”). All this narcissism is prelude to a stunning nasty personal attack in which Dyson lambastes Cosby for his “overemphasis on personal responsibility” and supposed indifference to the “structural features” that underlie black poverty. (To which one might reply that Cosby’s crusade is a reaction to a half century of preoccupation with “structural features” that has proved disastrous.) Dyson professes to be offended by Cosby’s insistence that young black people learn to speak and write proper English—or, as Dyson puts it, in his own surprisingly shaky English: “Cosby also spies the critical deficiency of the black poor in the linguistic habits, displaying his ignorance about ‘black English’ and ‘Ebonics.’” Dyson also accuses Cosby of “disregard for the hip-hop generation,” claiming that the comic’s “poisonous view of young folk who speak a language he can barely parse simmers with hostility and resentment”—even though Cosby’s entire campaign is plainly motivated by a deep concern for those young people. Dyson even has the nerve to contrast Cosby to his own wonderful self, writing about his visit to a youth detention center where he and his wife “were touched, even moved to tears” by the young thieves and murderers there and quoting several pages of comments by the inmates about how much his visit meant to them.

  Countering Cosby, Dyson maintains that “body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth.” Yes, but what kind of identity—an individual identity marked by self-respect or a group identity marked by mindless copycatting? As for hip-hop, Dyson considers Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Russell Simmons good role models because they’ve “made millions from their clothing lines.” And he claims that “[n]ames like Shaniqua and Taliqua,” ridiculed by Cosby, “are meaningful cultural expressions of self-determination and allow relatively powerless blacks to fashion their identities outside the glare of white society.” Yes, and keep them from finding jobs. “Cosby’s comments,” gripes Dyson, “bolster the belief that less money, political action and societal intervention—and more hard work and personal responsibility—are the key to black success.” Cosby doesn’t exactly argue this, but the dismal failure of Great Society programs only proves how right Cosby is when he argues that simply throwing government money at social problems won’t solve them. After two or three generations of self-serving antics by increasingly appalling con artists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the positive response by black Americans to Cosby’s campaign reflects a widespread recognition that it is time for a leading black voice to emphasize personal responsibility. (Even Barack Obama, after all, has said many of the things that Cosby has said.)

  Repeatedly, Dyson chastises Cosby for not having been more preoccupied during the course of his career with his “black identity.” He repeats this term over and over for pages (noting, of course, in dutiful postmodern fashion, that “the focus on race . . . surely doesn’t block the consideration of other equally compelling features of identity rooted in gender or sexual orientation or religion or class”). “For most of his career,” Dyson complains, “Bill Cosby has avoided race with religious zeal.” Or as he puts it elsewhere in his book, a bit less coherently: “Cosby has for the most part banished the galvanizing virtues of blackness to the realm of inference.” Meaning what? Is every writer, artist, or performer who belongs to a minority group obliged, in his work, to constantly make a point of his membership in that group—especially when his membership in that group is written on his face? “Despite Cosby’s brilliant work, race hasn’t disappeared; it seems he might have as usefully led us through the battlefields of race instead of around them,” Dyson complains. This is the most unfair kind of criticism: Dyson is, in effect, going after Cosby for not being Richard Pryor. In any case, it’s untrue that Cosby has “avoided race”: it was impossible, for example, to watch The Cosby Show without noting that the walls of the Huxtable family home were covered with African and African-influenced works of art and even featured an anti-apartheid poster (which, as it happens, Cosby kept in place over NBC’s fierce objections). In reply to those who defend Cosby’s criticisms of inner-city social pathologies by noting “his majestic philanthropy over the years,” Dyson argues that defending Cosby on such grounds is “like saying that it’s all right to rape a young lady because you’ve given a million dollars to a women’s college.” (The allusion here is to Cosby’s munificence: his donation of $20 million to Spelman College was the single largest contribution ever made to any historically black college or university.)

  For blacks, Cosby has been a trailblazer. Yet he’s condemned by Dyson for not having been a grandstander. Dyson repeatedly accuses Cosby of lacking courage. “Cosby,” Dyson claims, “is so obviously embarrassed by the masses of black folk that he has taken to insulting and, truly, intimidating them.” But if Cosby were embarrassed by his fellow blacks, the last thing he’d want to do would be to run around the country talking to them about themselves. Dyson likens Cosby to the black “elites” of previous generations who criticized the black poor because they damaged the race’s image, and depicts him as a member of a snooty black elite that looks down on working-class blacks; yet it’s Dyson who belongs to a black elite, namely the black power establishment based in the academy and in various “activist” rackets. Far from lacking courage, Cosby has shown considerable bravery in taking on that establishment, which (as Dyson exemplifies) is not above answering cogent critiques with personal attacks.

  Cosby can’t win with Dyson: though on I Spy in 1965 Cosby “shattered television’s race barrier as the first Negro to star in a network series” (unless you count CBS’s Amos ’n Andy in 1951–53 and Nat King Cole’s 1956–57 variety show on NBC), his “race on the series was no big deal at all, a point that made him the darling of many white critics.” Perhaps Dyson is too young to easily grasp that in 1965, the fact that the program didn’t make a “big deal” out of Cosby’s race was a “big deal.” As for The Cosby Show, Dyson approvingly quotes a passage from Gates indicting that series for “reflecting the miniscule [sic] integration of blacks into the upper middle class” and thus “throw[ing] the blame for poverty back onto the impoverished.” It is striking to see Cosby criticized by Gates and Dyson, professors at major universities who earn huge salaries, for portraying a black family at or near their and his own socioeconomic levels—thereby providing blacks at lower socioeconomic levels with an image of a life to strive for, as well as of responsible parenting and professionalism.

  Dyson does acknowledge that in his comic routines, Cosby, “like a jazz artist,” has “constructed narratives of sometimes haunting ethical beauty that offered insight into the human condition.” But he also accuses Cosby of not being “practiced or articulate in matters of public negotiation with the subtleties, nuances and complexities of racial rhetoric.” I would counter that there is absolutely no sign in Dyson’s book of subtlety, nuance, or complexity—and I would also point out that one of the people whom he does celebrate for these virtues is Al Sharpton. Dyson has no respect for Cosby’s comedy philosophy, which he quotes: “I don’t think you can bring the races together by joking about the differences between them. I’d rather talk about the similarities, about what’s universal in their experiences.” This philosophy underlies the work of all great authors and artists, but it’s not a philosophy that’ll win you a tenure-track job in Black Studies.

  Dyson sneers at Cosby’s complaints about “[t]he poverty pimps and the victim pimps”—but Dyson refuses to acknowledge that there are such pimps, and that Jesse Jackson stands at the head of that pack. As it happens, Dyson contrasts Cosby unfavorably with Jackson, whom he praises for understanding “the dynami
c relationship between personal and social responsibility” and calls “the most gifted social activist and public moralist of our times.” (This is the same “public moralist” who called New York City “Hymietown.”) Jackson, Dyson adds, “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.” Absent from this tribute is any mention of the damning revelations contained in the book Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, in which Kenneth R. Timmerman demonstrates conclusively that Jackson is a world-class shakedown artist whose specialité de la maison is threatening to publicly attack companies as racist unless they grease his (or a crony’s) palm. (In 2001, University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos recounted in the Rocky Mountain News Jackson’s boycott of Anheuser-Busch, a company whose “warm feelings for the Jackson family overflowed to the point where the corporation gave Jackson’s sons a beer distributorship.” Asked Campos: “How can a man who at this point retains all the moral authority of a professional extortionist continue to hold himself out as one of America’s political and spiritual leaders?”)

  Dyson would seem to be a perfect example of Steele’s top-drawer hustler—the kind who’s managed to hustle his way to the summit of the Black Studies pile. Certainly excellence has nothing to do with it: Dyson is neither a clear nor an original thinker, and is an absolutely terrible writer. “To a degree,” he writes in a typical sentence, “the black elite acted out of necessity, but perhaps to a larger degree, their actions proved how they had unconsciously drank [sic] in the poisonous view of the black poor that whites forced on them.” He is especially fond of painfully awkward metaphors: “Every time the black aristocratic finger pointed at poor black folk’s pathology, four more fingers of white moral unease folded into its palm.” And: “The aesthetic ecology in which they [black youth] are nurtured surely contains poisonous weeds and quicksand, glimpsed in sexist tirades on wax [?] and the hunger to make violence erotic.” His illiteracy, moreover, is matched by his innumeracy: “In 1954,” he writes, “the neonatal mortality rate for blacks per one thousand live births registered at 27 percent.” This statement is followed by several others in which he similarly misuses the word “percent.” (Plainly he means to say that the mortality rate was 2.7 percent.)

  Ta-Nehisi Coates admits to having considered Cosby an elitist—but he notes that his own father, a member of the older black generation, respects the comedian as a voice for “black empowerment.” It is for that reason, says Coates, that “Cosby’s argument has resonated with the black mainstream.” Yet although Coates—who suggests that Cosby is the ideological heir not only of Booker T. Washington, the “conservative” preacher of black self-reliance, but also of the radicals Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, both of whom “fault[ed] blacks for failing to take charge of their destiny”—remains critical of much of Cosby’s message, he treats Cosby with respect and implicitly rejects the effort by Black Studies figures like Karenga to sell young people on the myth of a noble and glorious Egyptian heritage. “Black people are not the descendants of kings,” Coates asserts. “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.”

  Bill Cosby isn’t the only high-profile black American to ruffle the feathers of Black Studies. Steele, of course, is another. He has been a major contrarian black voice since the publication of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (1990), in which he argued that centuries of brutal discrimination against blacks did not justify “positive” discrimination in the form of affirmative action, which he considers condescending and destructive. He underscored the role of white guilt in the establishment of such counterproductive policies and noted the skill with which some blacks exploited that guilt to personal advantage—a pattern that Steele considered an ugly, unhealthy model of race relations. Steele also divided black public figures into two groups: while the “challengers,” such as Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and Jesse Jackson, send whites the implicit message that “only by paying my race back for our suffering at your hands can you prove that you’re not racist,” the “bargainers,” such as Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, and Barack Obama, send the implicit message that “I’ll take it for granted that you’re not racist, and you’ll be so thankful that you’ll like me, watch me, elect me.”

  Another heretic is the linguist John McWhorter, whose book Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2001) asks a series of questions:

  Is school a “white” thing? If not, then why do African-American students from comfortable middle-class backgrounds perform so badly in the classroom? What is it that prevents so many black college students in the humanities and social sciences from studying anything other than black subjects? Why do young black people, born decades after the heyday of the Civil Rights movement, see victimhood as the defining element of their existence?

  Quoting passages from books published in the 1990s in which “successful black men” bemoan their alleged victimization—some of them comparing themselves to slaves or victims of lynching—McWhorter points out that “most of us would be hard pressed to match these portraits with the lives of most of the black people we know.” Rejecting the idea “that the Civil Rights revolution has had no notable effect upon black Americans’ lives,” he argues that cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism have sent Black America off “on a tragic detour,” pumping up support for affirmative action and Ebonics and keeping black Americans from “reach[ing] Martin Luther King’s mountaintop.” Setting things back on track, he argues, “will require some profound adjustments in black identity.”

  For one thing, blacks will need to face up publicly to things they have already faced up to in private: “In the black community today,” McWhorter observes in Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority (2004), “there is a tacit rule that black responsibility and self-empowerment are not to be discussed at any length where whites can hear.” While many black people “sound like Shelby Steele among ‘their own,’” in mixed-race groups they’ll “carefully dredge up episodes of possible racism” and complain about the lack of “positive images of blacks in the media.” He illustrates the self-destructive nature of the kind of thinking found among many blacks today by quoting a comment about Losing the Race posted on Amazon.‌com by a black women: “I insist on my right to be mediocre.” McWhorter’s reaction: “Du Bois would turn in his grave.” He insists that “[w]e will not earn whites’ admiration by blackmailing them into pretending to respect us,” that “[a] race does not make its mark by how successful it has been at exacting charity, but by how much it achieves without charity,” and that “the race that reaches the mountaintop is one that embraces with vigor its achievements, trumpets them to all who will listen, and teaches its children that doing so in the face of obstacles only makes the victory sweeter.” Instead of teaching Tupac Shakur as a great religious thinker, McWhorter invites readers to “[i]magine an America where blacks do not bop their heads in warm assent when they hear Tupac Shakur shouting, ‘Fuck the police! Fuck the police!’”

  At the 2011 annual convention of the National Association of African American Studies, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I attend a panel on “Race in America: The Myth of the Post-Racial Era.” The first speaker, Gregory L. Bosworth, who teaches history, government, and public policy at St. Augustine’s College in North Carolina, cites Cornel West’s book Race Matters and asks (in an almost impenetrable southern accent): “Does race still matter with the rise of President Obama?” Many observers, he says, claim that the “racial era” ended with Obama’s election, but he begs to differ. On the very night Obama was elected, he says, two white men assaulted a black man in New York. (How many black men assaulted whites that night across the United States? Bosworth doesn’t say.) He als
o notes an effort to make the Confederate flag the state flag of South Carolina. So much, in his view, for the “Post-Racial Era.”

  He passes the baton to Marcus P. Nevius, an attractive, earnest-seeming young man of about twenty-five, also from St. Augustine’s College. Citing John Hope Franklin’s The Color Line (1993), which argues that the rise of the conservative movement slowed the fading of the color line in American society, Nevius argues that “we [blacks] have to begin to look at ourselves as American first,” just as German Americans, Korean Americans, and other Americans do. He suggests that with the election of Barack Obama, African Americans have “transcend[ed]” their niche identity and joined the mainstream. “As I move forward with my career,” he says, “I try to position myself in the same way [as Obama]. I try to represent what Obama could bring to my classroom.” He wants to be “someone who is American first, with an African American heritage,” and seeks to help construct “a post-racial era that can be beneficial to young blacks.” He also mentions his use in the classroom of the works of John McWhorter.