Michael Eric Dyson

by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?

  For most of his career Bill Cosby has avoided race with religious zeal. His role as racial prophet to lower-class blacks, therefore, screams of irony and suggests Cosby’s profound confusion and the tragic misuse of his fame to assault the poor. By tracing his career against the backdrop of race, we gain a clearer understanding of how Cosby’s present position departs dangerously from his storied path—and how that departure signals the sacrifice of his principles and points to his being way out of his depth. I think Cosby’s faults are both poor comprehension and thin description of the problems he sees.

  Cosby came of age during a shift in cultural sensibilities that shaped comedy’s landscape. Stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory cast off the social conformity of the 1950s and sank their comic fangs into the repressed psyches and repressive politics of Cold War America. Gregory built on the work of black comics who were among the first to perform before mainstream crowds, including Timmie Rogers, Nipsey Russell, George Kirby and Slappy White.1 But his penetrating racial observations catapulted Gregory to greater acclaim and a bigger white audience than any black comic before him. By the time Cosby burst onto the national scene (joined later by Godfrey Cambridge, Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor), Gregory’s influence was at once mythic and smothering. Any young black comic hoping to share even a fraction of Gregory’s spotlight would have to shine with the gifts Gregory bequeathed: acerbic attacks on the color line, witty self-mockery and telling the truth about black life in white America.

  At first, Cosby was content in Gregory’s shadow. He did his best to harness the master’s rhetorical fire. He conjured just enough anger to be authentically black in the comic mold Gregory had forged. The New York Times took notice of young Cosby and lauded him for “hurling verbal spears at the relations between whites and Negroes.”2 Soon Cosby gave up hope of matching Gregory’s wily racial shtick. “I was telling racial jokes then,” Cosby recalled in 1964. “You know, the biting, witty kind about the Negro’s role in America. But pretty soon critics began to regard me as a sort of hip Nipsey Russell and a Philadelphia Dick Gregory. Well, I decided then and there that I had to be original if I wanted to fulfill my aspirations of becoming a big man in show business.”3 Cosby’s originality lay in reclaiming the comedic and literary past to fashion a distinctive comic style. He told stories about his childhood, football and public transportation, sprawling, jazz-like tales that unfolded over as much as half an hour, just like the stories he had heard his mother read to him from the writings of Mark Twain, the brothers Grimm, Swift and the Bible.4

  But Cosby’s revamped comic vision was even more radical: He would discard the use of color in his comedy since it was little more than a “crutch.”5 Cosby was challenged by a fellow comic’s argument that if he changed color tomorrow he’d have no material, sending him in search of jokes that bypassed pigment. He took comfort in neither the spoiled clichés of color nor the comic relief they offered. Cosby was even convinced of the divisive consequences of racial humor. “Color humor, like off-color humor, makes audiences uncomfortable,” Cosby said in 1965. “When I began telling racial jokes, the Negroes looked at the whites, the whites at the Negroes, and no one laughed—and then I had to tell the jokes all over again. So I tried reaching all the public, so folks would say, ‘Hey, man, here’s a Negro who doesn’t use racial material.’”6 Cosby’s resort to color-blind rhetoric wasn’t simply a means to bridge the racial gap in his audiences; it also suggested his philosophy of race beyond the comedy club. “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.”7

  Cosby’s determined effort to keep race from coloring his life and career gained more visibility when he won a role in 1965 alongside Robert Culp on NBC’s I Spy. As one half of an interracial duo who trotted the globe entangled in espionage, Cosby shattered television’s race barrier as the first Negro to star in a network series, leading Variety magazine to tag him “TV’s Jackie Robinson.”8 Cosby’s meteoric rise made news, but just as much ink was devoted to his racial politics as to his acting, which, as a twenty-seven-year-old novice, he had surely not refined. The press noted Cosby’s adroit stereotype-shattering—his character on I Spy had been a Rhodes Scholar, was fluent in seven languages and didn’t sing, dance or widen his eyes in paroxysms of fear like so many black actors before him were forced to do. But they couldn’t resist noting that Cosby’s race on the series was no big deal at all, a point that made him the darling of many white critics.

  Newsweek observed that on I Spy, “his lines provide the color, not his skin,” while National Review chimed in that “watching along, one does not notice him as a Negro but as a rough, tough, generous, loyal, fine, funny fellow.”9 One review of his I Spy role noted that race “will be of no importance, just as in Cosby’s comedy act. He is a stand-up satirist who happens to be colored.”10 Another critic agreed. “Cosby is anything but self-conscious as an entertainer about the fact that he is a Negro. Indeed, he vaulted onto TV by way of his enormous success as about the only Negro nightclub comedian who avoided rather than leaned on racial themes.”11 Another writer trumpeted Cosby’s raceless persona by saying, “he is concerned more with dropouts than discrimination, bothered more by air pollution than prejudice.”12 For still another critic, Cosby had a distinct advantage over Sammy Davis, Jr., Sidney Poitier and Nat King Cole: “Cosby’s great achievement is that he … is not primarily a Negro, he is primarily a guy.”13 A journalist saw parallels between Cosby’s professional identity and racial reticence. “As Cosby’s humor is devoid of race, so too is his public image. He doesn’t speak out on racial matters.”14 Finally, one reporter sketched Cosby’s broad appeal on the canvas of racial struggle. “He was a Negro standing against a background of black rage and revolution who told stories without regard to race or color. Time was when another generation of Negro comics like the late Bert Williams was afraid to joke about race before white or black audiences… . Bill Cosby came along cool and color-blind, choosing to ignore the hang-ups of blacks and whites, and making jokes about everyday life as though all men were created equal.”15

  During I Spy’s three-year run and after, Cosby enhanced his image as a colorless comic, as one who told “colorful jokes which in my opinion have no relation to a person’s color at all.”16 Cosby was delighted that he was called “to play a spy instead of a problem.”17 Cosby’s costar Bob Culp also exulted in their color-blind bond on the show. “We’re two guys who don’t know the difference between a colored and a white man. That’s doing more than 100 marches. We’re showing what it could be like if there had been no hate.”18 Downplaying Cosby’s race can be seen as a noble effort to stem racism’s hurtful ubiquity and to stamp out all cultural presumptions keyed to color. Still, one can’t help but notice the irony of Cosby’s situation: His ability to be color-blind was tied directly to the fierce struggles for racial justice being waged by blacks in the streets and courts of the nation.19 Cosby admitted as much when he noted their roles while defining his own. “Negroes like Martin Luther King and Dick Gregory; Negro groups like the Deacons and the Muslims—all are dedicated to the cause of civil rights, but they do their jobs in their own way. My way is to show white people that Negroes are human beings with the same aspirations and abilities that whites have.”20

  The burden of race that Cosby bore clashed with some of the beliefs the movement encouraged—that blacks be treated as individuals and that color cease to matter as much as character in establishing personal relations. But until society fundamentally changed, these ideals could be cruelly twisted to intimidate blacks who—unlike those who naïvely believed they had already become reality—knew their realization was still far off. These blacks knew that color, whether we liked it or not, still intruded where it shouldn’t. Cosby’s choice to go color-blind in this context obligated him to ignore race—at worst, to pretend that it didn’t exist and at best, to a
ct as if it were incidental to national life. In either case, Cosby’s lofty goal of proving that blacks are human struck a nerve in white communities eager to be rid of guilt because racism still existed. In the bargain of Cosby’s racial politics, both sides were shortchanged. Black folk failed to find as clear a voice for our humanity as we might have had if Cosby had been willing in his comedy to flesh out the nuances of black identity. Cosby would have had to acknowledge the differences, not just the similarities, of white and black life—differences in infant mortality rates, living standards, education, life expectancy, economic status and the like, all of which could be empirically confirmed and not left to subjective perception. And whites were freed from the responsibility to mend the social relations they had fractured, or in any case had benefited from, in the first place.

  Both sides were also called on to pretend a bit, in fact, quite a bit. There is little doubt that Cosby’s efforts to prove our humanity flowed from the impossible position he occupied—of being forced to represent his race when all he wanted was to be a human being allowed to go his own way without the encumbrances of color or caste. Yet, it must be remembered that it was the same impossible position that all black folk in one way or another, depending on our gifts and fate, wrestle with as a condition of our existence. If Cosby had shown he understood that in some noticeable fashion, it may have been as helpful to us as his insistence that race would not ruin his art. Even as he fled its tyranny, race marked Cosby’s route of resistance. As those who have sought a similar path can testify, the decision to ditch race is not simply a matter of will. Cultures and classes and societies with all their folkways and mores and politics matter as well. Color has shaped Cosby’s life and career, and not only in brutal, negative fashion. Unfortunately, Cosby has for the most part banished the galvanizing virtues of blackness to the realm of inference. It is not that he has refused to acknowledge them, or to take pleasure in the cultural modes they provide; he has simply disavowed the need to explain or justify them. He has taken them for granted, which is heartening in some contexts and less than courageous in others. Though he has repeatedly said that he wants to help whites to understand our humanity, Cosby has been shy, and sometimes downright resentful, about the duties of racial exposition such a role entails. That is, until quite recently, when his mean-spirited explanations of the black poor began to metastasize across the globe.

  Cosby’s critics grew along with his fame and fortune. He knew from the start that his racial politics left him “open to skeptics who would like to brand him as a deserter of the cause.”21 Some of those critics noted that while Cosby dodged stereotypes on I Spy, he still played Culp’s valet and tennis trainer as part of their undercover act. Cosby’s character Alexander Scott wasn’t allowed to smoke or drink. Others suggested that Scott’s sexless existence proved that Cosby would never be equal to Culp until he also got the girl.22 Then, when he occasionally got the girl, other critics like the London Times openly questioned, as their headline blared, “Why Cosby Never Gets a White Girl.”23 But there were more substantive critiques, and one critic, Faith Berry, stands out for the sharpness of her views. Berry argued that, unlike Dick Gregory, Cosby “didn’t have a reputation for putting his career on the line to tell it like it is.”24 Despite the pride some blacks took in Cosby’s pioneering role on I Spy, Berry lamented his role as a spy “fist-fighting and gunning down darker people in the service of American espionage around the globe.” Berry argued that none of the Emmy awards Cosby received for I Spy “counted so much as the image he projected: that of a kind of half-man who, had he lived during the days of Nat Turner, might have sold Turner down the river and been applauded for it by too many people.” Perhaps Berry’s most telling critique of Cosby is that his role, and those of other black actors on television shows in his wake, “created a new black stereotype of overwhelming dishonesty: the black man with no real personal life or vision of his own, the black man who is in the plot as a useful tool, the cooperative, all-too-often flunky accomplice made to look heroic in a scenario reminiscent of the old Lone Ranger-Tonto put-on.”25

  Berry was mixed in her review of The Bill Cosby Show, Cosby’s half-hour television comedy series that debuted as the number one new show in 1969 but was canceled after two seasons, lasting a year less than I Spy. Cosby played likable, fun-loving high school gym teacher Chet Kincaid, again without explicit reference to his color. Berry admits that “what does come through much of the time, thanks to Cosby and a raft of black performers, is that black people are human—even if, as the show would have us believe, they don’t have a problem in the world.”26 Berry understands the importance of Cosby’s approach since “the blacks-as-humans factor has rarely been stressed in the theatrical business, including television.” She praises the show for featuring a black mathematics student as the brightest pupil in an algebra class, which is “nothing extraordinary, except that it’s surely the first time on television.” In the end, however, The Bill Cosby Show fails to deliver to black viewers what they hoped for: “black actors [that] project the black image honestly; and, in this day and time, the new black image and not a new stereotype .” For Berry, Cosby had a new image, “but to call it honest, to refer to it as a show with a black man in situations that actually portray the black experience, would be to state an untruth.”27

  Berry’s critique, and those of other writers, underscore the difficulty Cosby faced in carving out a career that flew beyond race—the talk of it, the disputes about it, the contradictions and paradoxes of it that dogged his path. And neither would Berry be the last critic to charge Cosby with playing a stereotype, the very thing he has warred against in a career that also includes over twenty comedy albums, nearly as many movies, more than a half-dozen books, nearly ten music albums, and just as many television series, including a groundbreaking cartoon series, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. After he tried his hand at a comedy-variety series in 1972, The New Bill Cosby Show, which lasted only one season (another series, Cos, didn’t last two months in 1976), Cosby turned to film, including a well-received comedy trilogy in the mid-’70s directed by and costarring Sidney Poitier.

  In California Suite, a four-segment ensemble comedy based on Neil Simon’s play that also featured Walter Matthau, Jane Fonda, Maggie Smith and Michael Caine, Cosby appeared in an all-black segment costarring Richard Pryor. Cosby and Pryor’s slapstick performances as two black physicians who face one mishap after another while on vacation were skewered by noted critic Pauline Kael. Kael admitted that the Cosby and Pryor roles were originally played by white actors when the comedy was staged on Broadway. “When the roles are played by black actors,” Kael wrote, “the skit seems to be saying that the men may be doctors but they’re still uncontrollable, dumb blacks.”28 Kael argued that the film’s art direction and choice of “recessive whitened décor turns them into tar babies.” Kael contended that the slapstick setting transformed Cosby and Pryor into vicious stereotypes. “When they stumble around a flooded room, crash into each other, step on broken glass, or even worse, when Cosby bites Pryor’s nose, it all has horrifying racist overtones.” Kael concluded that the film showed “blacks who act like clowning savages.”29

  Cosby was so incensed at Kael that he took out a full-page ad in Variety and fired back. “Are we to be denied a right to romp through hotels, bite noses, and, in general, beat up one another in the way Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Martin & Lewis, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin did—and more recently as those actors in the movie Animal House? I heard no cries of racism in those reviews. If my work is not funny—it’s not funny. But this industry does not need projected racism from critics.”30 Cosby’s querulous exchange with Kael and, before that, Berry’s critique, were deeply ironic: Despite his efforts to explore black humanity while purging his art of overt racial reference, and especially racial stereotypes, Cosby was ensnared in controversy over his alleged stereotypical portrayals of blacks on the small and silver screens.31

  While the letter
to Kael was one of his most visible retorts, Cosby, and a few of his friends, constantly responded to critics of his image and his color-blind, race-avoiding politics. In 1965, Cosby suggested to skeptics that his approach benefited race relations. “If my material is without race consciousness, maybe I can promote equality better. After all, if something applies equally to black and white, the underlying assumption is the sameness of both.”32 He was pricklier in 1969 when he defended his philosophy.

  Well, I think there are some people who are disappointed when I don’t tell my audiences that white people are mistreating black people. White critics will write about Cosby not doing any racial material, because they think that now is the time for me to stand up and tell my audiences what color I am and what’s going on in America. But I don’t see people knocking the black elevator man in their building just because he isn’t doing anything for civil rights by running that elevator… . The fact that I’m not trying to win converts on stage bugs some people, but I don’t think an entertainer can win converts. So I don’t spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act.33

  Sammy Davis, Jr., an equally controversial figure in black circles for his race-transcending, race-denying politics, defended his friend Cosby, saying that he “carries as much weight on his shoulders as any Negro I know,” and that while Cosby wasn’t “a front-runner in the cause—that’s not his nature,” he was nevertheless “totally committed.”34 Cosby was even more transparent in resenting the racial representation thrust on his shoulders. “I don’t have time to sit around and worry whether all the black people of the world make it because of me. I have my own gig to worry about. If a white man falls off a chair, it’s just a guy. If a Negro does it, it’s the whole damn Negro race. I don’t want to be a crusader or a leader.”35