Michael Eric Dyson

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

  But Cosby would have none of it; his actions recall his “tough-love” approach to his troubles with Erinn. After Autumn dropped out of college, and sought more money from him, Cosby went off. “I was upset,” Cosby confessed in court. “And I said to her, ‘I’m tired of you. I’m tired of your mother. You and your mother have never given me a happy moment for what I’ve given.’”58 Cosby offered to pay for college and living expenses if Autumn found a part-time job to help herself, an offer he framed tersely: “take it or leave it.”59 It was then that Jackson came up with her scheme, in cahoots with Medina, to extort Cosby for millions, and placed several calls to Cosby and his representatives. They also wrote letters to several of the companies for whom Cosby endorsed products, calling attention to his alleged fathering of an illegitimate daughter in an effort to embarrass him with the corporations who paid him as much for his wholesome image as for his enormous talent. The letters, to CBS, Kodak, Phillip Morris, the owner of Jell-O, two publishers of Cosby’s books, and even President Clinton, misspelled Autumn’s first name and charged that Cosby was a “Deadbeat Father… . Autum is left in the Cold, Penniless and Homeless.”60

  Cosby spoke in court about his embrace of “the moral values” and “the family values” in his vast body of work, including his commercials, signaling how potentially damaging Jackson and Medina’s actions were. “They come to me,” Cosby said, in reference to the companies that had signed him to endorse their products. “Kodak is family, family pictures, family children. The pudding is family. Ford, car, family.” 61 That’s when Cosby instructed his lawyers to contact the FBI and to snag Jackson and Medina, who were eventually convicted of extortion, conspiracy and crossing state lines to commit a crime. A third man, Antonay Williams, with whom Autumn eventually had twin boys (delivered in prison), cooperated with the authorities and was given probation.62 When her daughter was sentenced to serve twenty-six months in prison, Autumn’s mother Shawn protested, “This child is facing long years for phone calls and letters, when all they really were were a cry for help.” She said that Cosby should “run as fast as he can to the judge and ask for leniency for her.”63

  Although no one excused Jackson’s behavior, some critics offered sympathetic portraits of Jackson while criticizing Cosby for failing in his parental obligations.64 One of the most thoughtful and balanced takes on the entire affair was provided by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Readily conceding that Jackson’s behavior was “stupid, preposterous, pathetic, and no doubt illegal … [and] also—intentionally or unintentionally—profoundly cruel” (since it coincided with Ennis’s death), Herbert let on that “you cannot escape the queasy feeling that this [trial] is something that should not be happening. This is unnecessary.”65 Herbert argued that Cosby’s claim that he “unequivocally and absolutely” was not Autumn’s father was too strong in light of his admitted affair with Shawn Thompson. Herbert argued that while the court ruled that the legal proceedings wouldn’t worry with the question of Cosby’s paternity, “you would have to be a cold fish indeed to believe it is not relevant to Autumn Jackson. There seems to be no doubt that Ms. Jackson has long believed that she was Bill Cosby’s daughter, and that must have been a torment.”66 Herbert said that Jackson must have been “hurt and confused” when at age nine, she saw The Cosby Show become a cultural phenomenon and Cosby, her father, at least in her mind, become America’s dad. As Herbert poignantly wrote:

  It must have been alternately exciting and unbearably depressing. Autumn Jackson would sit in front of the tube on Thursday nights and laugh with the rest of the country at the idealized antics of the Huxtable family. And then she would go to bed with the inescapable thought that her father, the greatest of them all, cared more for his TV children than for her. Bill Cosby may not be Autumn Jackson’s father. But it was Autumn’s desperate fantasies about the perennially absent Mr. Cosby that drove her to make the ludicrous demands that landed her in such deep trouble… . [Y]ou wonder if there isn’t room somewhere in this entertainment for some measure of mercy. What she did was wrong. But is it necessary to send her off to a stretch in a Federal penitentiary? You wonder what purpose that would serve. And you toy incessantly and uneasily with the most disturbing of thoughts: What if Bill Cosby really is her father?67

  As with Erinn, Cosby’s lack of empathy proved strong—an empathy, by the way, that need not have meant that he was willing to cavalierly dismiss Jackson’s responsibility, only that he might have, as Herbert argued, placed himself in her spot, one that, for all we know, he was responsible in part for creating as her potential biological father. Cosby’s claim over the last several years is that he, and not Autumn or her mother, took a blood test to settle the matter once and for all, but that ignores the context in which he was finally willing to offer proof: after Autumn was ordered to prison; after she had suffered for most of her life believing that he was her father; after her repeated efforts to forge a permanent bond with him were frustrated; after Cosby twice reneged on taking a paternity test; and after the portrayal of her as merely a horrible opportunist and extortionist was set in the minds of those who had no sympathy for her. What she did was surely atrocious, harmful and, in many ways, self-destructive. But the question hangs over Cosby’s head, put there by a thinking public and stated by Herbert: What if Cosby really is Autumn’s father?

  If he is, it wouldn’t make what Jackson did any less unsavory, but it would mean that Cosby failed to honor his obligation to be a good parent. It would mean that he put his child through untold suffering and, against the Bible’s regulations, tempted his child to do wrong by withholding from her not his money but his abiding presence and the ministry of time. It would mean that he caused her psychic anguish, helped to spark in her brutal self-doubt and confusion, and, perhaps, contributed to her moral instability. Jackson should have been held responsible for her actions, which means she should have been placed in a structured environment with institutional support to confront the error of her ways. Some deem a prison sufficient; I think a halfway house, with reduced time for seeking to complete her education, plus psychological counseling, would have been better. But Cosby should not so easily get off the hook if he is indeed Jackson’s father. Given his eagerly down-putting speeches delivered to the poor for their terrible parenting, he would deserve to be held in lower esteem for his potential parental offenses. Since we may never know whether or not he is her father, it may be that he will have to endure a lifetime of skepticism about this most primal of parental responsibilities: acknowledging the child you make and acting in a healthy, productive fashion toward your seed. That is, after all, what Cosby in much meaner terms has demanded of the poor. Why not expect him to at least do the same?

  The danger in making class-based assessments of character is that we associate wealth and resources, or at least style and status, with superior moral achievement. If wonderful families like Cosby’s can struggle, and if a man of Cosby’s stature can stumble, then all of us can. (We shouldn’t make the mistake of characterizing the life of a family unit by measuring its worth with too short a moral yardstick, a point that Cosby should remember, even as we shouldn’t forget that Cosby and his wife and children stand as a testament to the beauty and power and unimaginable generosity of the black family, despite the troubles they have encountered.) All families, whether rich or poor, can, and often do, suffer from poor moral choices, or from the inevitable strife of the clashing personalities of its members, or from generational tension. To be sure, poor families are more vulnerable in particular ways to troubles from which well-to-do families are exempt: the lack of healthcare, childcare, nutrition, cash reserves, credit and money for education. But the ethical plagues that Cosby sees emanating from poor homes and parents are widely shared in all communities. In holding this view, one need not believe that poor families should be spared critique or rigorous examination, but such assessments must be fair minded and balanced, and rooted in the desire for uplifting change to occur. I have no doubt that in his
heart of hearts Cosby has the desire to see the poor thrive; but there can be little doubt that the method of verbal assaults he has adopted is counterproductive to his stated goal. Criticism is one thing; condescension and condemnation are another.

  Moreover, the bitter attacks Cosby has launched dishonor the incredible strength of character of millions of poor blacks who have never cheated on their wives and never had babies and not taken care of them (and, in fact, have often reared children not from their own flesh). Indeed, if the black folk who support Cosby’s contentions about the poor were honest, especially those who say we should finally air our dirty laundry and be done with the protective secrecy that only seals our moral doom, they would have to admit that much of the moral miasma plaguing black America comes from the top, not the bottom.

  The truth is that the black elite, and in some cases the black masses, have always taken the poor to task for their poor parenting. But in some instances, the elite and the middle classes, and the working classes, have defended the poor and noted the obstacles they had to surmount to be successful parents. We can get a flavor of such sentiment in the 1914 publication Morals and Manners Among Negro Americans: A Social Study Made by Atlanta University, Under the Patronage of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, a report growing out of an annual conference studying Negro problems held at Atlanta University.68 Edited by W.E.B. Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill, Morals and Manners captures turn-of-the-century beliefs about the moral and religious condition of black America by recording the responses to a questionnaire distributed nationally to preachers, teachers, social workers, skilled trade workers (contractors and builders, bricklayers, tailors, painters, blacksmiths, dressmakers, cigar manufacturers, harness makers, stationary engineers) and professionals, including physicians, dentists, lawyers and others. The answers to questions about good manners, sound morals, cleanliness, personal honesty and the rearing of children, among other subjects, are categorized by the thirty states of the respondents. The responses to the condition of parenting in the early 1900s may as well have been snatched from the mouths of contemporary observers, parents and critics on every site of the ideological spectrum.

  In Alabama, it is noted that the “better families look after children well,” while others, the less well to do obviously, “are somewhat neglectful.” Another says that generally speaking, “the rearing of children is well done, tho many fail thru ignorance and lack of character.” A respondent from the District of Columbia agreed, sounding like a modified version of Cosby, saying that “[b]etter classes of colored people rear their children properly. Among the lower elements the children are not reared properly.”69 And, in a clear example of how things hardly ever change for the poor, one observer says that the “children are neglected in many cases from the lack of facilities to rear them properly, inadequate schools, necessity of the parents to work and spend little time in the home.”70

  Another Alabama observer says that “[f]our fifths of the children are improperly reared” because the “parents in equal numbers have never had the proper training themselves.” This is a kinder version of Cosby’s quip that he blamed the children for their bad habits of speaking until he heard their parents. In Arkansas, it was the granting of too much freedom and the shifting of responsibility onto the shoulders of children at an early age that hurt them. “There is a tendency to permit children to have too many liberties before they are really able to see for themselves or really know what are the consequences that result from too early taking upon themselves the responsibility which belongs to mature years and I believe the parent is wholly in error.”71 In Georgia, a respondent echoes what seems to be the perennial claim among each generation of black folk: “I do not think that parents are quite as strict with their children as they were when I was a child.” Another Georgia resident thinks that structural factors, such as the need for the mother to work outside the home, always a necessity in black families, prevent the poor from doing as good as job as they might. “Not much care is taken along this line. Many mothers work out and children are left a great deal to themselves.”72

  But in Illinois, an observer thinks that it isn’t just poor black families who have trouble with their children. “Some of our best citizens hardly know what their children are doing.”73 In Kentucky, it’s the lure of pop culture that is ruining neglected children, a trend that the PTA fearlessly combats by helping untutored mothers. “Altho many of our children are neglected and allowed to run to the moving picture shows and public dances at night unaccompanied, yet the ‘Parent-Teachers’ Association’ is making a winning fight to give assistance to incompetent mothers.”74 An Ohio resident agrees, suggesting that “our curfew can hardly keep them off the street at night,” and that their “entertainment is left too much for their selection,” while another Ohioan says that there “is too much laxity,” that children “are not taught to obey their parents and superiors,” and that “they are allowed to go and come too much at will without reporting to superiors; to visit pool rooms, saloons, dances and places of cheap notoriety.”75

  In Mississippi, the theme of my-generation-is-better-than-yours crops up again, as a respondent claims that parenting is not attended to as carefully “as in former years. Parents of the second generation after slavery do not seem to be so expert in that art as their ex-slave parents.”76 And to flip the class code and to give pride of place to the unlettered, but more experienced, black parent, a Missouri observer notes that some of “the best women we have in morals and education, are the poorest housekeepers… . They are not the equal of the older people in rearing children.”77 In citing the loss of respect for the older generation, a claim that is evergreen in black culture across time, a New Jersey observer says that even though most “of the parents are rearing their children well,” they fail to, “in many cases … teach them respect for elders and reverence for God.” In Texas, apocalypse and utter hopelessness appear to reign, as one respondent says that parenting is “a complete failure. Lost almost without remedy. Indeed, a sad state of affairs as the children are permitted to run the streets at will.” In the same state, an opposite viewpoint emerges from a respondent who sees the virtues of parents, community and teachers working together, claiming that parenting receives “great attention among the people of our race and every school is supported by strong mothers’ clubs who go side by side with teachers in the welfare of the children.”78 Another Texas observer lauds the work of male parents and the church, saying that the “Father’s Club is doing a grand work,” and that “[p]astor and people alike have united to see that the children are trained in the home and that good instruction is gently given to them.” Finally, a Mississippi observer notes the incredible moral strength and encouraging example of poor black parents who transmit values and a love of learning against the odds. “It is really pathetic to see the sacrifices the humble Negroes are making to educate their children. There is very little companionship; while the parents work and strive to improve their children’s condition, they very often take them in their confidence and talk with or advise them to live honestly and uprightly.”79

  It should be apparent from these few citations that black folk have always engaged, sometimes cantankerously, sometimes caustically, at other times compassionately, but always vigorously, in a dialogue about black parenting. (And if one were to take early twentieth-century criticisms of black youth on face value, it was the generation of blacks that Cosby praised in his speech, the generation that included Dorothy Height and Kenneth Clark, that appeared to be headed for hell in a handbasket wrapped in bows. That should provide a cautionary tale about too easily assuming that our youth are morally distinct from older generations, which, though now lauded, were once condemned.) Elitist diatribes were often mixed in with homegrown strategies aimed at uplifting poor black parents and their children from their difficult circumstances. There was no shortage of assault on the moral lapses of poor blacks, but there was, too, some recognition that the black elite have no superior
grasp of morality. The themes that occupy black life now—how well we’re attending to our children, how much of pop culture they should consume, the role of religion in their values education, the training that poor parents need to succeed, the economic and social barriers that prevent their flourishing—have been a consistent worry in black life for at least a couple of centuries. The styles that we now adopt to address the black poor—whether edifying and encouraging or demoralizing and demeaning—were just as visible in black communities a century ago. And the modes of discourse we evoke to enforce our moral views—religious address or spiritual reference, noble racial didacticism, commonsense cultural rationalism, folk wisdom and the like—were vibrantly used in the early 1900s.

  While Cosby has described the lethal moral seizures in black America in terms of class and age—he has lambasted the poor and the young for quite some time now, and I engaged his arguments in Chapter Three—it is also clear that on some issues, including the themes of his speech and this book, there may be as much a genre divide as a generational one. There were blacks of an earlier generation, for instance, as is evident in observations from Morals and Manners, who laid full responsibility for the poor on their shoulders, while today folk like Cosby flow steadily in their wake. Then there were folk who emphasized structural elements that might help explain why poor parents had a tough time of it—mothers going to work outside the house, poor workers struggling to make ends meet, the hostile racial and economic conditions of the times. The same is true for certain social analysts today. There were people a century ago who railed against the evils of popular entertainment, just as there are today critics of the consumption of hip-hop and rap; there were also folk in earlier decades who celebrated the joys and consolations of secular music and, like their contemporaries, drew from it sustenance for their lives. In homage to Sterling Brown—who divided the black character types in American literature into seven categories: the contented slave, the wretched freeman, the comic Negro, the brute Negro, the tragic mulatto, the local color Negro and the exotic primitive—I want to suggest seven types of black folk in the cultural imagination who straddle generational lines in their interests, identities and insights: ghettocentrists, gangstas, griots, gamers, gospelers, gentries and gayz.