Michael Eric Dyson

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

  Even after Cosby rewrote the rules of the TV sitcom with the unprecedented success of The Cosby Show in 1984, he wasn’t spared the critic’s lash.36 Tired of the endless cycle of “car chases and breasts and characters yelling at each other and saying Yowie!” Cosby turned his attention to crafting a half-hour series that would showcase the strengths of the American family.37 As early as 1966, Cosby said that “[s]omeday I want to do a family situation comedy on television and it will be a hit because people want to see what goes on in a Negro home today.”38 A few years later, Cosby was more forthright than ever about the prospects of a series with a black, non-stereotypical cast. When asked if such a show could be successful on TV in 1969, Cosby was blunt.

  Probably not. The kind of show you mean would have to be about the life of a black family, with all its struggles. But if you’re really going to do a series about a black family, you’re going to have to bring out the heavy; and who is the heavy but the white bigot? This would be very painful for most whites to see, a show that talks about the white man and puts him down. It would strike indifferent whites as dangerous; it would be called controversial and they probably wouldn’t tune in. But when there’s a right and a wrong, where’s the controversy? The white bigot is wrong. The indifferent person sitting on the fence is wrong. Instead of having occasional shows that present the black viewpoint on educational channels, the networks should be in there pitching now.39

  By the time Cosby got his wish more than fifteen years later, his views had drastically changed. He no longer believed that a show about the family should explore the struggles of the average black family. Neither did he feel in any way compelled to address racism or the plight of black folk in a world still populated by white bigots. The Huxtable family that Cosby created was solidly upper middle class—Cosby played an obstetrician, his TV wife a lawyer—and hardly ever uttered a sentence about racial or class struggle. In fact, no sign of poor black folk was spotted until near the end of the series’ run when a visiting relative of modest means was embraced by her wealthier kinfolk. Cosby’s statement about the black family sitcom in 1969 proved to be an aberration in his solidly color-blind philosophy. By 1984, with the arrival of the Huxtables in American homes and at the top of the Nielsen ratings, Cosby’s dream television family just happened to be black. One critic gushed, “Yes, the family is black, but that fact is totally ignored. No racial jokes are made, no problems of prejudice discussed. The Huxtables are comfortable middle-class Americans … and their stories could take place almost anywhere. Nobody actually says this family represents the whole human family, but the delicious ordinariness of its pleasures and tribulations has given millions a fresh, laughter-splashed perspective on their own domestic lives.”40

  In The Cosby Show the comedian found the most influential vehicle yet to promulgate his color-blind politics and to swipe at critics who believed that he comforted whites and copped out of addressing the problems of black America. Cosby, and his show’s consultant, noted Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, bristled at the charge that the Huxtables weren’t black enough, or that they were minstrel makeovers of fifties sitcom characters. Poussaint contended that “it is racist to suggest that the series is merely Father Knows Best in blackface.”41 Relying on the inferential racial politics Cosby has mastered, Poussaint argued that the “Black style of the characters is evident in their speech, intonations and nuances.”42 As for Cosby, he, too, blanched at the suggestion that his television family hadn’t dealt with controversial issues like racism, poverty and interracial dating, and that they ignored the masses of blacks who were far less wealthy than the Huxtables.

  Why do they want to deny me the pleasure of being just an American and just enjoying life? Why must I make all the Black social statements? My family here is not going to sit around for half an hour and do Black versus White versus Brown versus Asian jokes so people can say “This is a Black show.” What they [the critics] are doing is saying, “Well, if you’re not going to talk about these [Black] issues, then why are you there?” And then comes the arrogance on my part. “I’m here because I’m a human being and I want to have fun. I want to show the happiness within our people. I want to show that we have the same kind of wants and needs as other American families.” I’m going to take this show and make it last as long as I can to show Black people that they have something to be proud of.43

  Cosby’s racial politics—made up of his belief that color is a crutch that has no place in his art; his desire to bring the races together by focusing on their similarities, not their differences; his yearning to be seen as a human being and an American without reference to race; and his resistance to racial representation and crusading—spin out from, and wash back against, broader currents of debate in black culture. Failing to identify these currents dooms us to believe that Cosby’s racial politics are exceptional or original, when they are neither. Along the way it will become clear how Cosby’s recent views ratify certain beliefs while rejecting others in black culture. In light of Cosby’s beliefs over the last forty years—about race, universalism and human identity—it is hard not to conclude that his public denunciation of the black poor sullies his principles.

  Cosby’s words about lower-class blacks have not spiraled into a vacuum. His comments have been received in a specific cultural and political context. Cosby’s remarks also have reinforced and discarded views about how poor black folk behave and how they ought to be treated. I will address these views, and the contexts that frame them, later in the book, especially in Chapter 5. For now, Cosby’s views should be placed within black cultural debates that have to do with the stages, status, styles and strategies of black identity. As with any outline of thought and reaction, these categories are meant to provide a convenient handle on broad trends within black culture. They are neither exhaustive nor pure, since they bleed between lines of strict definition. Yet, they can help to identify and organize ideas of cultural identity that unmistakably imprint Cosby’s beliefs.

  The stages of black identity refer to how blacks dynamically negotiate offensive, misleading or troubling information about black life. The first stage is stereotype, where white prejudiced beliefs and bigoted intuitions are dressed as objective observation and common sense—from D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, portraying black males as rapist thugs, to Smith and Murray’s book The Bell Curve, offering “scientific” proof of black intellectual inferiority. Racial stereotypes may contain strands of truth wrapped around knots of willful ignorance and deadly distortion. At its heart, a stereotype is a lazy assessment of the other, a sloppy projection of bias onto a vulnerable target: Blacks are dumb, lazy, criminal, sex-crazed and so on. In early film and television, blacks were only seen as coons, maids, cooks, butlers and the like. Blacks spend a great deal of time fighting these labels and proving they’re not true.44 Cosby has attempted to resist stereotypes from the start of his career.45

  The second stage is archetype, or the projection by blacks of the defining characteristics of black identity. Since most stereotypes are negative—and even when they involve ostensibly flattering traits like sexual prowess or the ability to dance and sing, they are tinged with paternalism and condescension—black archetypes are usually positive and spotlight the virtues of black identity. Thus, blacks reject Stepin Fetchit’s shuffling, bowing, dim-witted, demeaning portrayals of black masculinity in film and offer in its place the dignity and poise of Sidney Poitier’s legendary film roles, or Bill Cosby’s vast body of work on television. (But millionaire Fetchit, born Lincoln Theodore Perry, said before his death at age eighty-three in 1985 that all “the things that [Bill] Cosby and [Sidney] Poitier have done wouldn’t be possible if I hadn’t broken that law.”)46 Blacks argue that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not as accurate a reflection of black life and identity, and not nearly as heroic, as the one presented in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Archetypes embody the efforts of black folk to wrest the authority of self-definition from whites
who fail to see the beauty and power of black life, and to redefine our identities in more edifying terms.

  The third stage is antitype, or the expression by blacks of the irreverent meanings of blackness that transgress against received beliefs or accepted norms. The creation of antitypes—from blaxploitation films to hip-hop music, from the comic routines of Richard Pryor to the silhouette art of Kara Walker, from Audre Lorde’s lesbian scholarship and activism to “homothug” gay drug dealer Omar portrayed on television’s The Wire by Michael K. Williams—permits blacks to challenge visions of blackness that exclude the unsavory and the politically incorrect. Antitypes embody efforts to explore the experiences and identities of blacks who are usually kept—because of class status, lack of power, gender and sexual orientation—from being visible in archetypal black representations. Black archetypes provide the backdrop for influential blacks to elevate or sink antitypical visions of blackness—for instance, Cosby’s embrace of antitype through his support of nontraditional gender roles on The Cosby Show and his resistance to antitype through his criticisms of the new black comics and hip-hop culture. The appeal to archetypes also permits powerful blacks to heap scorn and stigma on blacks who fall within antitypes’ borders, whether they are poor or gay or single mothers. Cosby’s blasting of poor blacks for their failure to hold “up their end in this deal” is a perfect example.

  It should be noted that the work of some blacks crosses between the stages of black identity. Toni Morrison’s novels, and her literary and cultural criticism, may be viewed as both archetypal and antitypical, since they support and subvert beliefs about black identity. And Kara Walker’s visual art experiments with the images of blacks produced by racist whites, appropriating and signifying on stereotypes of black identity while veering into antitypical territory. At times, as with the comedy of Keenan Ivory Wayans on his 1990s sketch variety series, In Living Color, or the gangsta raps of Snoop Dogg, the line between stereotype and antitype is barely discernible, a point not always lost on creators of black art who seek to play with negative portrayals of black life in order to explore, and, sometimes, unmask them.47 In the main, Cosby has been hugely unsympathetic to such efforts.

  The stages of black identity are closely related to the styles of black identity, which have to do with seeing black culture and identity in either complex or simple terms. By extension, the styles of black identity concern whether we will be absolute or comparative, fundamental or flexible, in our views of blackness. Is black identity a once-and-for-all proposition that is settled in advance of social and psychological factors, or is it continually transformed by these and other forces? For instance, in the stages of black identity, stereotypes are seen by many blacks as negative, archetypes are seen as positive, and antitypes are viewed with great suspicion, depending on the kinds of political and racial struggles one seeks to wage. Often, black identity is reduced to the mantra of “positive” versus “negative”: An image or identity either uplifts or degrades black folk. Cosby is squarely in this tradition of interpretation. He decries “what many of today’s black comics are doing with the legacy he left them. Where Cosby’s routines were mostly good-natured and colorblind, he thinks comics are now foulmouthed, misogynistic and too eager to reinforce negative stereotypes of black people.”48 While positive-versus-negative conversations are often productive when directed at obvious examples—few blacks would disagree with the contention that Rush Limbaugh’s 2003 attack on the talent of black quarterback Donovan McNabb was laden with vicious stereotype—they are just as likely to stall in more difficult cases, especially when competing visions of black identity are evoked within the culture.

  For example, is rap music positive or negative? In the archetypal vision of blackness, that question is almost always answered in the negative because it is believed that rap embraces stereotypes of black people as violent, oversexed and criminally inclined, an argument Cosby has made on numerous occasions.49 The question of negative-versus-positive is seen as valuable because it yields the greatest insight about the processes and contexts of black identity. The antitypical vision of blackness might answer that despite rap’s admitted vices, it possesses, at its best, redeeming virtues: It counters official visions of history with narratives drawn from despised young folk; it joins the word and the drum, elemental aspects of black expressive culture; and it permits poor black folk another exit from the ghetto, even as its formerly poor artists continue to tout its virtues with mixed results. The answer to the question of rap’s influence points to competing visions of black identity, represented on one side by positive-versus-negative and on the other by complex-versus-simple.

  In the positive-versus-negative framework, questions of black identity usually attract black-and-white answers because there is often a black-and-white view of the issues at hand. In complex-versus-simple views of black identity, there is a much more complicated and multilayered view of black culture at work. Simple views of black life—whether stereotypical, archetypal or antitypical, and to be sure, there is a big difference between them—chase nuance and contradiction to the sidelines. An identity or issue is either positive or negative, either right or wrong. The positive-versus-negative outlook obscures the way challenging concepts of identity can be dismissed as negative because they don’t accord with dominant black views. For many blacks, gays and lesbians are viewed negatively because their lifestyles challenge rigid, fundamental black theological beliefs. A book that uplifts the radical legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., is viewed by many blacks as negative because it also honestly treats his alleged promiscuity and plagiarism.50 A focus on the positive simply can’t guarantee a full and engaging view of black life. A preference for hip-hop artists who are positive (no cursing, no self-denigrating epithets, no violent references to the ghetto) often overlooks the question of whether they have intellectual depth and the ability to flow. By contrast, rappers viewed as negative—if for no other reason than they employ the word “nigga” in their repertoire, a charge, by the way, that can be made against many rappers otherwise considered to be positive—may possess these abilities in abundance. And the same rapper who revels in a woman’s finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation.51

  There is a larger question at stake for the advocates of complex black identity: Does this notion of blackness honor the variability and multiplicity of black identity, and does it account for the contradictions and conflicts, and the good and bad, that characterize black life? Black folk have often avoided such complexity because destructive white stereotypes of black identity have been so widely disseminated. We are loath to expose ugly dimensions of black life to a white public that is often hungry for confirmation of black pathology while failing to see the same problems in its own backyard. Black culture has, therefore, become fixed in defining black identity; only the positive, redeeming and virtuous will do. That’s understandable, but still shortsighted and, on occasion, needlessly defensive. Although most groups don’t have to pay the heavy identity tax that blacks do for negative information circulating in the culture, it is still a gesture of racial maturity to embrace our complexity, a move that pains those stuck on positive-versus-negative, as Cosby often has been. The only exception he has been willing to make is to “air the dirty laundry” of poor black folk, while the habits and behaviors of other black communities are spared public hashing.

  The styles of black identity offer help in addressing the status of black identity, or the thorny issue of black authenticity, of what is real in black culture. The nagging worry of authenticity is whether black folk have strayed too far from the old landmarks of cultural identity. The status of black identity has become urgent with the rise of hip-hop culture and its mantra of “keep it real,” which often means honoring the ghetto roots of black identity. But a prior question of black authenticity, raised by jazz musician Gene McDaniels thirty-five years ago, still resonates, namely, �
��make it real compared to what?”52 Black folk engage the question of authenticity to distinguish between identities that are intrinsic and organic to the culture and those that are imported, or even imposed. This is what Cosby has in mind when he chides black youth for wearing their “hat on backwards, pants down around the crack … and all kinds of needles and things” in their bodies, asking, “What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans.” He’s defining what is authentic to black American culture by implying that these traits don’t reflect African roots, and by arguing that black Americans are not Africans, offering a double dose of authenticity claims.

  Authenticity anxiety is only heightened as figures and forces outside the culture play a bigger role in helping those inside it find their voices. There is heated debate, for instance, about whether hip-hop culture reflects genuine aspects of black culture or whether it is manufactured by advocates of consumer culture out to exploit black identity for the marketplace. Of course, a complex vision of black identity holds that both of these things are true. It is those who resent the marketplace’s intrusions and its corruptions of black identity—and that certainly includes archetypal advocates like Cosby as well as many fans of the art form, those most likely lumped under the antitypical rubric—who question whether “real” black youth culture really draws from emotional and intellectual roots within the culture. Some go even further and question whether the identities proclaimed in hip-hop as cutting-edge and countercultural are largely the creations of shrewd marketers out to make a buck by merchandising black pathologies. While those who fall inside the antitypical camp might hold this to be true—and those who have a complex view of black culture might agree—this position is most forcefully argued by defenders of a simple view of black culture. Marketing and merchandising are not new, even if they bear closer scrutiny because they have rarely been as strong and seductive a force as they are now. Neither should we forget that some of the ideas and images presently circulating in hip-hop, from the black rebel and outlaw to the cultural griot, have been around for quite a while in the culture.