by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
Even earlier when Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids—not in the cleaned-up, linguistically correct language of the 2004 film but in the original cartoon series—appeared on the scene, they brought verbal resonances to Saturday morning television that were rooted in black community. A cartoon series set in the projects, with the intonations of black children ruling their roost through stories with moral meaning, it was visual vernacular; the aesthetic communicated a dialect of style. And when Mushmouth created a distinct pattern of speech, he created a linguistic rule of his own—by inserting the “B” sound into his speech, he asserted the rule of the ubiquitous “B” in syllabic construction. “Hey man” became “hey-ba man-ba,” and his own name became “Mush-ba Mouth-ba.” Cosby has reaped huge financial dividends, and cultural capital, off of that cartoon and its film; it seems disingenuous for him now to deprive real-life children of the very legitimacy of perspective and verbal creativity he allotted to cartoon and cinematic characters.
Cosby seemed not to notice his own Black English in 1997 when he penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “Elements of Igno-Ebonics Style.”36 Cosby was responding to the Oakland School Board’s controversial, and widely misinterpreted, decision to use Ebonics in the classroom to help black children bridge the gulf between their native dialects and speech habits and “standard” English. Cosby lampooned Ebonics speakers in feigned dialects and then scolded the Oakland School Board: “Granted, if you don’t teach Ebonics, the children will find it anyway. But legitimizing the street in the classroom is backwards. We should be working hard to legitimize the classroom—and English—in the street. On the other hand, we could jes letem do wha ever they wanna. Either way, Ima go over heanh an learn some maffa matics an then ge-sum ‘n tee na’ then I’ll be witchya.”37 But Cosby, and many more besides, missed the point. The Oakland School Board made the decision to boost black children’s literacy in “standard” English by meeting the students where they were rhetorically; like all good teachers, they began with the given and then used it to arrive at the goal. Between the given and the goal lay expanses of black linguistic practice that the Oakland teachers sought to use in their efforts to respect the speech of their students while bringing them up to snuff on “standard English.”
The Oakland teachers realized, as do most black folk, that we must code-switch, or, as Cosby phrased it, speak one variety of English on the streets and another in the home, on the job and the like. The recognition of Black English’s legitimacy is not an argument against learning “standard” English; it is to recognize that discussions of language, especially involving poor and minority peoples, are discussions about the issues Cosby addressed in his dissertation: power, domination, black inferiority, white superiority and white supremacy. Who can, or should, determine what language is legitimate and useful, and when it can or cannot be spoken? Of course Cosby is right to stress the need for black youth, and their parents, to understand the contexts where some languages are more useful than others. But the sense of propriety is driven as much by power and the cultural normalizing of the taken-for-granted (and hence taken for standard and taken for true and right) linguistic styles of the white mainstream as by an innate sense of what is good or bad language. The more languages folk have at their disposal, the more easily they are able to negotiate with the hidden premises of power that underlie discussions about linguistic appropriateness. To ignore the cultural and racial contexts that deny access to such multilinguisticality, and to overlook the rigid racial and educational hierarchy that reinforces privilege and stigma, are intellectually dishonest.
Perhaps there is a deep element of shame that Cosby has not yet overcome in the use of black style and Black English. In a 1969 interview, Cosby movingly spoke of how he confronted the black embarrassment associated with black style. In his junior high school, at Christmastime, Cosby and his schoolmates had been allowed to bring in sound recordings to share with the class and celebrate the holiday season. Cosby didn’t own any records, but a couple of black girls brought in Mahalia Jackson’s version of Silent Night, while white kids brought in recordings like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s version of the Hallelujah Chorus and Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. When the white kids listened to Mahalia Jackson, they snickered, “because of their own ignorance and, at the same time, we were embarrassed because it wasn’t white. Mahalia just didn’t sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Clara Ward didn’t sound like Bing Crosby.” Cosby said at the time that “this no longer happens, because of the black-is-beautiful re-education, because of the fact that our culture, our music is something to be proud of.”38 Cosby admitted that it hadn’t been easy to “throw out all the brainwashing,” but black folk were making the effort. As an example, he told another, perhaps even more poignant, story from his life.
Black people from the South have a common accent; it’s almost a foreign language. I can’t speak it, but I understand it, because my 85-year-old grandfather speaks it. I remember hearing him use the word “jimmin” and I had to go up to my grandmother to find out what he was saying. She told me he was saying “gentlemen.” That was black; it’s the way my grandfather talks, the way my Aunt Min talks, because she was down South picking cotton while I was in Philadelphia picking up white middle-class values and feeling embarrassed about hearing people talk like that and wanting to send them to school to straighten them out. I now accept this as black, the same way I accept an Italian whose father from the old country has a heavy accent. I accept it as black the same way chitlins and crab fingers and corn bread and collard greens and hush puppies and hog jaws and black-eyed peas and grits are black. This is what we were given to eat; this was our diet in the South, and we’ve done some groovy things with it. Now even white people are talking about Uncle So-and-So’s sparerib place.39
If Cosby could only see Black English in this light, with this compassion and this discerning of the social and racial networks that sustain cultural expression, he might appreciate its power and beauty.
When Cosby claimed that black parents bought their kids $500 sneakers instead of spending $250 on Hooked on Phonics, I immediately had two thoughts. First, I recalled that in 1994 Hooked on Phonics had agreed to settle charges brought by the FTC that it lacked sufficient evidence to support its widely advertised claim that its products could rapidly teach children with learning disabilities to read, regardless of the problems they had. Educational experts countered the Hooked on Phonics advertising juggernaut by suggesting it only worked as an “after-school adjunct to comprehensive reading instruction that teaches children more than sounding out letters and words.”40 Hooked on Phonics has been the subject of very little academic research and, as a result, is not looked upon by many knowledgeable education specialists as an important means to help children to read. At best, it plays a supplementary role that helps with some of the skills necessary for children to read. Perhaps the black parents that Cosby blasted were more aware of the overstated claims of Hooked on Phonics than he appears to have been. If one has limited resources, spending $250 on a product that has not been proved to deliver what it promises is sound educational and consumer practice.
But I also thought of Elizabeth Chin’s marvelous ethnographic study of the consumer behavior of poor black children, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.41 Although Cosby targeted poor black parents, a great deal of the consumption for youth in poor communities is done by youth themselves. The point of Chin’s book is to dispel the sort of myths perpetuated by Cosby and many others, black and white, whose perceptions of black youth are strangled by stereotype. She thus chides those who make judgments about black youth based more on “guesswork” than “fieldwork.”42 Chin contends that black youth are not the “combat consumers” they are portrayed as being: either captives of a powerful fetish for brand names or predatory consumers willing to steal for Air Jordans or kill for a bike. Chin argues that “consumption is at its base a social process, and one that children use in powerful ways to m
ake connections between themselves and the people around them.”43 Chin also notices that, unlike their middle-class and upper-class peers, the children she studied were made profoundly conscious of what it costs to clothe, feed and take care of them; hence, they usually spent part of the money they had on necessary, not pleasurable, items. Chin explains her work in a powerful anecdote about the prejudice she confronted and, by extension, the black youth she studied, in examining the consumer behavior of black youth. She says she had developed, as do most researchers, a one-line response to questions at cocktail parties about the nature of her research in New Haven.
“I’m studying the role of consumption in the lives of poor and working-class black children.” Here I would more often than not get a knowing look. “Ah,” the response would be, “you must have seen a lot of Air Jordans.”… “Actually, no,” I’d answer. “I only saw two pairs of Air Jordans on the kids I worked with.” [T]his statement was nearly always met with incredulity. More than once people responded with something to the effect of “There must have been something wrong with your sample.” … [T]hese comments also disturb me because so many people seemed to prefer hanging on to ideas about poor black kids that had been gleaned from the pseudo experience provided by the kinds of news stories I have so extensively critiqued in the preceding pages. Like the terms inner city and ghetto, the “Air Jordans” response to thinking about poor and working-class black children and consumption obscures more about those children than it reveals.44
Cosby’s gross generalizations about poor black parents and their consumptive behavior—based on his commonsense observations and likely not on a systematic examination of the buying habits of poor black parents or their children—reinforce the biases that Chin sought to challenge in her study. Cosby belongs to a group of critics who have, according to Chin, made black consumer behavior appear pathological. 45 And I couldn’t help thinking when I read Cosby’s “Igno-Ebonics” op-ed (which begins, “I remember one day 15 years ago, a friend of mine told me a racist joke. Question: Do you know what Toys ‘R’ Us is called in Harlem? Answer: We Be Toys,”) of the touching story Chin tells of a shopping trip to Toys “R” Us with a black youth who had never heard of the store before, much less visited it, but who agonized greatly over the choice between two inexpensive toys that would enhance different social relationships.
Cosby’s remark hints at the priorities of poor black parents and youth: are they educationally oriented or materially focused? It is interesting that Cosby expects poor parents, and youth, to be more fiscally responsible than those with far greater resources prove to be. Immediately, the defense of their consumer habits, however, rests on the assertion that wealthier parents and children have more latitude, while poor parents must be ever so careful about how they spend their money. There is a cruelty to such an observation, however; not only is the poor parent, or child, at a great disadvantage economically, but they are expected to be more judicious and responsible than their well-to-do counterparts, with far fewer resources. Moreover, the materialism that obviously can strike poor folk as well is, nevertheless, far less likely to do them or society as much harm as it does those with far greater wealth in our country. The perception that the meager resources of the poor are somehow atrociously misspent on expensive consumer items is far out of proportion to the facts of the case. And to begrudge poor parents the desire to provide their children some of the trinkets of capital in a profoundly rapacious consumer culture that endlessly promotes acquiring things as a mark of status and citizenship (didn’t George Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, direct Americans to prove they were uncowed by terrorists by returning to the stores?) is plain dishonest.
Perhaps Cosby has forgotten what it was like to be young, black and poor, or to be hungry for even more capital in the wake of a real first taste of money and the comforts it can bring. Ebony magazine reports that when Cosby was asked in 1965 why he entered the acting field, he had a one-word reply: “Money!”46 He told the Saturday Evening Post that “I’ve got no great artistic ambitions. What show business mainly means to me is cash.”47 Neither should we forget that Cosby was once, and for a long while, one of the most recognized and successful pitchmen in American history, promoting products to the American public—from Jell-O to Ford automobiles, from Coca-Cola to E. F. Hutton—for our eager consumption. (It is not hard to imagine that Cosby, had he come along at the right time, might have pushed $250 sneakers [they don’t cost $500, but we got his point], engaging in what cultural theorists term “the social construction of desire.”) It even led to a brief, pungent, satirical editorial by Edward Sorel, “The Noble Cos,” in The Nation in 1986 that assumes Cosby’s voice: “So this buddy says, ‘I didn’t mind your commercials for Jello, Del Monte, Ford cars … Ideal Toys, or Cola-Cola, although Coke does do business in South Africa… . But, Bill, why do commercials for those crooks at E. F. Hutton?’ My buddy didn’t understand my commercials improve race relations. Y’see, by showing that a black man can be just as money-hungry as a white man … I’m proving that all men are brothers.”48
Cosby’s insistence, in his infamous May 2004 speech and on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation in July 2004, that black youth are anti-intellectual because they chide high achievement as “acting white,” repeats what is the academic equivalent of an urban legend.49 Claiming that black youth are anti-intellectual is pretending somehow that America is not consumed with anti-intellectualism. Cosby’s claim has the dubious virtue of being both true and uninformative. It is not that black anti-intellectualism doesn’t exist, shouldn’t be admitted, or doesn’t reveal itself in ways that need to be vigorously opposed. But it is highly misleading to tag black communities as any more anti-intellectual than the mainstream. Richard Hofstadter wrote a book in 1963 entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. 50 He blamed McCarthyism’s withering assault in the 1950s on “the critical mind” and the choice of Dwight D. Eisenhower—who, as Hofstadter says, was “conventional in mind [and] relatively inarticulate”—over Adlai Stevenson—whom Hofstadter termed “a politician of uncommon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed anything in recent history”—as the defining moments of modern anti-intellectualism. 51 (One wonders if Hofstadter might today see parallels in the choice of George W. Bush over Al Gore, or even John Kerry, though Bush isn’t Eisenhower and Gore and Kerry aren’t Stevenson.)
But, according to Hofstadter, the plague of anti-intellectualism is even more ancient than the 1950s. Hofstadter says that “[o]ur anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity.”52 And a recent National Endowment for the Arts report says that book reading has dramatically declined in the United States over the last ten years.53 Neither is the anxiety especially American: There is hand-wringing over anti-intellectualism around the globe. There is the study that decries the effect of modernization on Russian youth, saying that anti-intellectualism might result if Russian intellectual life is ignored while Western education is celebrated. 54 And then there is the study, first done in the ’60s and replicated in the ’80s, of anti-intellectualism among Korean teachers because they favored athletic and nonstudious pupils over academically brilliant, studious and nonathletic pupils.55 That certainly shreds the myth of the Asian model minority. And then there is the study of “Victorian Anti-Intellectualism.”56 The twist here is that it was the middle and upper classes who scorned intellectual engagement. Cosby should take note: They weren’t worried about Puffy; they were putting down Puffendorf!
The notion that black youth who are smart and who study hard are accused by their black peers of “acting white” is rooted in a single 1986 study of a Washington, D.C., high school conducted by Signithia Fordham, a black anthropologist at Rutgers University, and John Ogbu, the late Nigerian professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.57 According to Fordham and Ogbu, many black students at the school didn’t study and deliberately got bad grades because their classmates thought they were “selling out” an
d “acting white.” Fordham and Ogbu’s study has gained iconic status in the anecdotage not only of Cosby but of figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the pages of the New York Times and Barack Obama in his thrilling keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.58
The trouble with such citations is that they help to circulate and give legitimacy to a theory that is in large part untrue. First, in 1997, Duke professor Philip J. Cook and Georgetown professor Jens Ludwig set out to determine, through field research, if the alleged grief visited upon those black students who study actually existed.59 While Fordham and Ogbu studied one school, Cook and Ludwig studied 25,000 public and private school students, following them from eighth grade through high school. Cook and Ludwig concluded that black students were just as eager to excel in school as whites and that black students dropped out of school only slightly more than white students, largely due to low family incomes or absent fathers.60 Cook and Ludwig discovered that blacks and whites with similar family characteristics cut class, missed school and completed homework at nearly the same rate.61