Michael Eric Dyson

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

  We should draw a distinction, however, between a comic’s professional persona and his public position as a private citizen. A comic’s privacies—of emotion, of experience, of evolution—fuel artistic expression. But his public actions as a private citizen, as one not elected or appointed to office, appeal to a different dimension of his identity. The comic-citizen is a species of all articulations of role switching and the frequent genre blurring that occur when celebrity enters the equation. To be of use to his group, the well-known comic of color has to occasionally breach the pact he makes with himself—that he will act out on stage his encounter with personal and social issues that can be turned to creative advantage, but otherwise, for the sake of his sanity and dignity, he will try to keep everything to himself. (Of course, comics like Richard Pryor shredded this agreement in ways that were both spectacular and utterly horrifying.) The comic-citizen affirms members of his race who identify with him even as his celebrity amplifies their influence through his identification with them. Fair or not, the comic of color, just like most black professionals, is presumed to have a contribution to make—a presumption fed by the desperation to be validated by the fortunate of the race—and it is the public character of that contribution that is critical to his constituents.

  If the comic of color can’t help being representative, it is because she embodies in her art the turmoil and suffering that anonymous blacks regularly endure without the platform or public sympathy the celebrity comic may enjoy. The black comic need not surrender a complex or antitypical or independent vision of black identity to uphold her critical function; part of the appeal of black comics is their irreverent perspectives that encourage pitiless cultural inventory and relentless self-critique.67 The black comic’s artful engagement with the stages and styles of black identity only bolster her position of authority and representation, especially if she has chosen the strategy of intentional blackness and opted to publicly identify as a black figure with her black people. If, however, the comic has declined those representational duties and has instead chosen the strategy of accidental blackness, then her words may be interpreted as hostile, unloving and harsh. This is Cosby’s dilemma: Having been accidentally black for forty years, he has suddenly and violently switched strategies of self-presentation to an intentional blackness that can be supported by neither his politics nor his past. Cosby’s choice to go public as a crusader against poor blacks—those who may have looked up to him over the years with memories of Uptown Saturday Night, where he appeared more intentionally “black” than in most other roles, or who may have fondly reminisced about Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids’s marvelously vernacular intonations, contrary to Cosby’s present mission to stamp out Ebonics—is remarkably troubling, for reasons I explore throughout this book. For now, two problems are most pressing.

  First, by attacking the poor, Cosby has made tragic use of his public capital. Despite black folk criticizing and begging him for forty years, Cosby has refused to explore race in his comedy, rejected the role of crusader or leader on issues of race and resisted bearing the burdens of racial representation in public with grace. Not only has Cosby refused to speak for black folk, but he has refused, with rare exception, to speak against a host of ills during his day, including white supremacy, unfair housing practices, segregated public accommodations, Jim Crow laws, unequal health insurance, racial disparities in wealth, disproportionately high infant mortality rates, unjust criminal justice sentencing practices, unequal higher education access, environmental racism, crumbling ghetto infrastructures, lead poisoning and asbestos consumption among poor children, and, on the evening he made his infamous remarks about the ghetto poor at a ceremony commemorating Brown v. Board, the persistent and harmful resegregation of black children in schools across the country.

  Cosby has chosen instead to direct one of the most powerful and influential voices in the culture, and one of the brightest media spotlights in the land, against some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, who are in need of support and love, not humiliation and belittlement. It is tempting to dismiss Cosby as a crotchety, self-loathing hypocrite—after all, he has suffered, sometimes publicly, from some of the very ills he deplores (including admission of an affair and charges of a child out of wedlock, though the latter claim has not been proved). But that would be too easy and in some ways unfair, since Cosby’s claims are either true or false regardless of his moral status. However, Cosby’s standing does have relevance in discussing whether or not he has been able to as strictly adhere to his lessons as he counsels. As we shall see later, he hasn’t.

  Cosby’s media assault has been defended by those who say he’s built up sufficient capital to diss poor blacks through his majestic philanthropy over the years. (The word literally means “love of humanity,” but writers have also warned of the concentration of power in the hands of the few in a “philanthocracy” that is peculiarly American, and distinctly plutocratic.) 68 But that’s like saying that it’s all right to rape a young lady because you’ve given a million dollars to a women’s college. One is never granted permission to do wrong as the reward for doing right. One can’t accumulate enough goodwill to undermine the common good of the neediest members of our culture.

  Second, Cosby has lurched far beyond the circumference of his talent in making sweeping social pronouncements on race. It is not merely a matter of whether one agrees or not with Cosby; it is the fact that Cosby has not been practiced or articulate in matters of public negotiation with the subtleties, nuances and complexities of racial rhetoric. He has been ingenious, if misled, in creating comedy that has insisted on the nonexistence of race as the condition of our agreement on universally recognized values. In his nonracial comedy, Cosby has been sharp, luminous, humorous and sometimes sophisticated. Even when he was feigning anger or enacting bluster, he was usually analytically generous—that is, in his search for the roots of the behavior he lampooned, he was willing to cede the humanity of the people he surveyed. Cosby was often lucid and elegantly improvisational, even multivocal, playing to his strengths in routines honed over a brilliant stand-up career where, like a jazz artist, he constructed narratives of sometimes haunting ethical beauty that offered insight into the human condition.

  In striking contrast, as a social critic of late, Cosby, in his observations about the black poor, is flat, univocal, literal, his monologue marred by dreadful analysis and wailing monotones, his speech bruised by disgust and nearly uncontrollable contempt. In the past, he has been mostly unwilling to speak up in traditional, representational fashion when it might count for the poor black people he now attacks. One of his defenders even admitted that “Cosby would not be at his best as a professional civil rights leader, a Black Panther, or the head of a poverty program.”69 Or, he might add, as a social critic. Although Cosby has chided the black poor for failing those brave blacks who “marched and were hit in the face with rocks,” he fails to mention that when he had the chance to join the pioneers he now pits against the poor, he reneged. “I don’t want to go someplace where they’re throwing rocks unless I have some rocks to throw back,” Cosby said.70 And when he went on the Phil Donahue Show in 1985, he resented being asked about the black culture whose poor members he now unhesitatingly discusses. “I am not an authority on blackness,” Cosby angrily insisted. “I didn’t come on this program to discuss blackness. I came on this show to discuss human beings and let’s get into that… . I don’t want to spend the time when a black person shows up on a show talking about blackness and what you all have to do in order to make America better… . Right now, why don’t you see if I can be a h-u-m-a-n b-e-i-n-g.”71

  Cosby’s recent crusade underscores how much he has contradicted his color-blind, leader-reluctant principles, and suggests the manner in which he has scarily ranged far from his arena of competence. On the Donahue Show, when audience members wanted to learn Cosby’s views on racial matters and to know what they could do to improve race relations, he rebuffed them with surprising
gruffness. Apparently Cosby was neither ready nor willing to impart his wisdom. Only now he can’t keep quiet; the unguarded words tumble from his mouth in unforgiving fury. And they hurt poor black people much more than anything Cosby has done to help them in the past. His relentless attack is symptomatic of the huge generational and class divide in black America. Our response is a measure of our willingness to meet him on the intellectual and cultural battlefield and provide good reasons why he is wrong. The reputation of millions of young people and poor folk hangs in the balance.

  Chapter Two

  Classrooms and Cell Blocks

  [I]n our cities and public schools we have fifty percent drop out … Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents (clapping and laughter). And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers. For what? And won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics. (clapping) … All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.” And these people wanna buy the friendship of a child… . and the child couldn’t care less … Just forget telling your child to go to Peace Corps. It’s right around da corner. (laughter) It’s standing on da corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. “Why you ain’t, where you is go, ra.” I don’t know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk (laughter). And then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on da corner and you got in the house and you switched to English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with “why you ain’t…” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this? Well, they know they’re not, they’re just hanging out in the same place, five, six generations, sitting in the projects. Well you’re just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out … Now look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop out. Look, we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry. Oh God, they’re angry … It’s time for you to not accept this language that these people are speaking, which will take them nowhere. What the hell good is Brown Vs. the Board of Education if nobody wants it? And if they’re getting in the way? … These are children. They don’t know anything. They don’t have anything. They’re homeless people. All they know how to do is beg. And you give it to ’em, trying to win their friendship. And what are they good for? … When you walk around the neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff’s not funny. These people are not funny anymore. And that’s not my brother. And that’s not my sister. They’re faking and they’re dragging me way down. Because the state, the city and all these people have to pick up the tab on them, because they don’t want to accept that they have to study to get an education. And so, ladies and gentlemen, please, Dorothy Height, where ever she’s sitting, she didn’t do all that stuff so that she could hear somebody say, “I can’t stand algebra, I can’t stand…and what you, why you wanna,” with holes in them … It’s horrible. Basketball players, multimillionaires, can’t write a paragraph. Football players, multimillionaires, can’t read. Yes. Multimillionaires. Well, Brown V. the Board of Education. But where are we today? It’s there; they paved the way. What did we do with it? The white man, he’s laughing, got to be laughing. 50 percent drop out, rest of ’em in prison.

  In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison … I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? (clapping) Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? (clapping) And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why don’t the father show up to talk to this boy? … Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and we’re outraged, “Ah, the cops shouldn’ta shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? (laughter and clapping). I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else (laughter) … And they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza. And then run to the poor cousin’s house. They sit there and the cousin says “what are you doing here?” “I just killed somebody, man.” “What?” “I just killed somebody, I’ve got to stay here.” “No, you don’t.” “Well, give me some money, I’m going…” “Where are you going?” “North Carolina.” Everybody wanted to go to North Carolina. And the police know where you’re going, because your cousin has a record… And then they stand there in an orange suit and you drop to your knees, and say, (crying sound), “Please, he didn’t do anything, he didn’t do anything.” Yes, he did do it. And you need to have an orange suit on too (laughter, clapping) … You got to tell me that if there was parenting, help me, that if there was parenting, he wouldn’ta picked up the Coca Cola bottle and walked out with it to get shot in the back of da head. He wouldn’t have. Not if he loved his parents. And not if they were parenting! Not if the father would come home. Not if the boy that dropped the sperm cell inside of da girl and the girl said, “No, you have to come back here and be the father of this child.” They don’t have to.

  Bill Cosby, by his own admission, was a bad student, and “compiled a lackluster academic record from the moment he set foot in school.”1 His sixth-grade teacher noted on his report card that “William would rather clown than study.”2 He dropped out of high school after he flunked the tenth grade three times. He enlisted in the navy, where he got his GED, and then enrolled at Temple University, where he dropped out to pursue a show business career. His unfinished bachelor’s degree from Temple was eventually bestowed on him because of “life experience.”3 Cosby enrolled as a part-time doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which awarded him the Ed.D. degree in 1977 for a dissertation on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. But not even that degree was unsullied by controversy: A professor who served on Cosby’s dissertation committee, Reginald Damerell, said that Cosby hardly took a class—and that he got course credit for appearing on Sesame Street and The Electric Company, “and wrote a dissertation that analyzed the impact of his show.”4 Damerell concluded that degrees like Cosby’s “do not attest to genuine academic achievement. They are empty credentials.”5 (While I think Damerell’s conclusion is harsh and unfair, it does underscore the ironic route Cosby has traveled to become nearly as acclaimed for his educational pedigree as for his comedic genius.) Given his difficult educational background, it’s a good thing Cosby didn’t have Bill Cosby around to discourage him from achieving his goals by citing statistics about black high school dropouts that don’t square with the facts. It’s a shame that Cosby skewered the victims of educational neoapartheid, the very folk that Brown v. Board sought to help, instead of pointing to the social inequities and disparities in resources that continue to make American schools “separate and unequal.” And for Cosby to overlook how the criminal justice system mercilessly feeds on social inequality is just as tragic.

  It may be partially accurate to describe the contemporary social and educational landscape for blacks in Dickensian terms: It is the best and worst of times, but only if we admit that one’s perception of the times rests on rigid class divisions in black communities. For an expanded black middle class, which enjoys unprecedented success at work and in school, the times are much better than before Brown, though exorbitant optimism must be chastened by the racist barriers that remain. In 1954, the year of the Brown decision, the neonatal mortality rate for blacks per one thousand live births registered at
27 percent, compared to 17.8 percent for whites. The maternal mortality rates per one thousand live births were 14.4 percent for blacks and only 3.7 percent for whites. The average black household income was $2,890, 55 percent of the white average of $5,228. In 1952, black illiteracy for those age fourteen and above was 10.2 percent, five times the 1.8 percent level of white illiteracy. At the time, more than a quarter of black males had no more than four years of schooling, compared to less than 9 percent for white males.6

  Today, the picture is dramatically different for the most well-to-do blacks. For instance, black households in the upper income bracket, those making $75,000 to $99,000, increased fourfold between 1967 and 2003, composing 7 percent of the black population.7 And while the picture got far better for the bulk of the black middle class, they had a far less sure grasp of economic security. In 1960, for instance, there were only 385,586 blacks who were professionals, semi-professionals, business owners, managers or officials, a number that swelled to 1,317,080 by 1980. By 1995, there were nearly seven million black folk employed in middle-class occupations, boosted by blacks joining the ranks of social workers, receptionists, insurance salespeople and government bureaucrats. 8 But signs of trouble persist. Despite the fact that the black median household income rose by 47 percent from 1967 to $29,026 in 2003, it still lagged by $16,000 the white median household income of $46,900.9 Plus, the median household income for blacks fell by 3 percent in 2002 and fell by more than 6 percent between 2000 and 2003.10 And the unemployment rate among blacks, at 10.1 percent, is twice the national rate of 5.6 percent. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of blacks with manufacturing jobs declined by 18 percent, forcing blacks into the service sector—including professions like data processing, advertising and housekeeping—which employs 43 percent of the black workforce, a larger percentage than for whites in the economy. 11 The problem with these jobs is that they have shown weak growth and provide fewer benefits. As a result, blacks, at 52 percent, lag far behind whites, at 71 percent, in employer-sponsored health care, and less than 40 percent of blacks have private pension plans, while more than 46 percent of whites are covered.12 All in all, nearly two in five nonelderly black folk had no health insurance between 2002 and 2003. And since more than half of all black families live in major metropolitan areas, the steadily increasing cost of public transportation is a huge problem. More than 12 percent of the black population relies on public transportation to get to work—and many others must also get to school and other vital destinations—while only 3.1 percent of whites must do the same.13 Finally, the poverty rate of black households is more than 24 percent, compared to 6.1 percent for white households.14