Michael Eric Dyson

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

  Ghettocentrists hold that the ghetto, the inner city, the local black neighborhood, is the source, the locus classicus, of authentic black identity and supplies important standards, norms, habits, traits and behaviors for black community. In the past, this category included writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and it now includes athletes like Allen Iverson, hip-hoppers from KRS-ONE to Nas, and millions of ordinary residents as well.

  Gangstas believe that the lifestyle and ideology of the outlaw, the rebel and the bandit challenge the corrupt norms of the state, the government, and the rule of law in society. In the past, it has included Harlem gangsters like Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson and Leroy “Nicky” Barnes and the characters of writers like Chester Himes and Donald Goines. Today, it includes rappers NWA, Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac, and thousands of small-time hoods, gang bangers and anonymous thugs.

  Griots believe in the obligation to preserve cultural memory, racial practice and ethnic solidarity. They argue that the transmission of cultural habits, moral traits and racial wisdom are critical to the flourishing and survival of black culture. In the past, this included cultural nationalist Marcus Garvey, educator Mary McCleod Bethune and writer J. A. Rogers, and in the present, it includes intellectuals Maulana Karenga and Haki Madhubuti and rappers Chuck D. and Talib Kweli.

  Gamers include folk who hustle in a variety of guises—bank employer, local entrepreneur, underground economist—and who seize the metaphor of gaming, prominent in arcane social and philosophical theory, to explain and extend the trickstering tradition in black culture. They are all united by “getting over.” In the past, this included leaders such as Booker T. Washington and entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker, and in the present, it includes entrepreneurs Russell Simmons and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs.

  Gospelers represent the spiritual renewal and religious vitality of black culture. They prize the virtues of moral suasion and decent living as the antidote to personal failure and existential fear. There is a premium on inner peace, spiritual and social transformation, and, especially these days, material security, signifying the split soul of religious piety. In the past, this genre included Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and C. L. Franklin, and today, it includes Kirk Franklin, Yolanda Adams, T. D. Jakes, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Charles Adams, Jeremiah Wright, Freddie Haynes, Lance Watson, Rudolph McKissick, Calvin Butts and Carolyn Knight.

  Gentries are the black aristocrats, the black elite, the Afristocracy, who embody the ideals, norms, behavior and performance of proper society, with a dash of uplift thrown in for good measure. As a class, they both love and loathe black folk, accounting for the ethical schizophrenia of their activities, from helping the poor to haranguing them. In the past, this included the Dobbs and Bonds of Atlanta and the Walkers of Memphis; today, it includes any Negro included in Lawrence Otis Graham’s Our Kind of People.

  Gayz are the aggressively, progressively gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender presence in black America who gain the political meaning of their identity by fighting both racism in gay communities and homophobia in black life. Gayz challenge the monolithic conception of black identity while forging solidarity in the fight against the terrors of race and class. In the past, this category included James Baldwin and, more recently, the late Audre Lorde, and today it includes Barbara Smith, Randall Kenan, E. Lynn Harris, Keith Boykin and Meshell Ndegeocello.

  These types embody some ways that black folk throughout our history have responded to the critical issues of black identity, social struggle and political organization. They also suggest how we have gathered our individual and collective resources to combat racism and other social plagues. Since these types are neither rigid nor pure, there has been quite a bit of traveling back and forth between categories, but I think they still capture major intellectual, social and political orientations in the culture. Perhaps in picturing black culture and identity through these categories, we can understand the persistence of certain beliefs in black culture that trace an ideological, even sociological, vein, and perhaps a class-based one as well, challenging strict precepts about generational difference. To be sure, the generational differences among the types are crucial and should be paid attention to—for instance, contemporary griots may have a more complex vision of the means to transmit black values than their predecessors. But the consistency of orientation may nonetheless be highlighted, and prove useful, as we engage historical arguments about the organization of black life and thought.

  For our purposes, these types suggest that the relentless attempt to tag the current black generation, especially its poor and most vulnerable members, as somehow unalterably alienated from the mainstream of black life, and, most important, from the best traditions of our history, is in fact inaccurate. So much of the criticism endured by young and poor black folk revolves around their alleged ethical estrangement from the black moral mainstream in history. And yet, if we see that types of black people have consistently behaved or thought in a certain fashion—and this without casting an essentialist frame to the proceedings, but offering instead a nuanced, historical exploration of cultural continuity—we may dispense with the vindictive use of history against the black poor and young, such as the one Cosby has appealed to in his recent remarks. In its place, we can offer more sophisticated and subtle analyses of cultural traits and racial behaviors that have roots in antecedent practices. These types point to the heterogeneity of black culture and suggest that internal racial conflicts between different kinds of black folk have as much to do with current clashes over how we view the poor, for instance, as do simple differences in age and time. If nothing more, the existence of these types gestures toward discovering more complex explanations for black behavior beyond the clichés and stereotypes that plague the discussion.

  If Cosby’s discussion of the poor has been hampered by such clichés and stereotypes, and a failure to recognize the racial and cultural continuities suggested by these types, his apparent ignorance of the vast body of literature on the lives of the poor, or his deliberate rejection of its claims, especially about obstacles poor parents face, is even more problematic, and even depressing. It would take a gargantuan act of will to overlook the work of William Julius Wilson, Michael Katz, Robin D. G. Kelley, Elijah Anderson, Katherine Newman and literally hundreds of other scholars who have intelligently and in great detail specified the barriers poor parents face, from dwindling public capital to lethal public policies, including welfare reform, and the obstacles we have known about for decades, including social demobilization precipitated by structural changes in the economy—for instance, the shift from manufacturing to service industries, the heightened technological monopoly of labor, and the disappearance of work.80 Cosby has shown no familiarity with the depressing statistics that make life hell for the poor, for instance, that more people die younger in Harlem than in Bangladesh, that nearly 25 percent of black America is poor, and that the minimum wage has plummeted by nearly 35 percent since 1968.81 And what of the best-selling books that document the plight of the working poor, those citizens who rise every day out of commitment to the work ethic but who are repaid with wages that place them below the poverty line? Surely Cosby read Barbara Ehrenreich’s masterly journalistic exposé of the cruel predicament of the working poor, Nickel and Dimed, or David Shipler’s sobering portrait of the same population, with a title as austere and elegant as the subject it describes, The Working Poor, whose opening lines should haunt Cosby and all of us: “Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, ‘working poor,’ should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.”82 Even Cosby’s attacks on single black mothers contain an irony: Their numbers have actually gone down. In 1970, for black females between ages fifteen and seventeen, there were 72 pregnancies per 1,
000, while in 2000, there were 30.9 per 1,000.83 Despite his defenders’ suggesting that Cosby has a right to blast the poor because he was one of them, a crucial distinction must be made: Cosby was a poor child, not a poor parent. Even though there are numerous liabilities of being poor as a child, one of them isn’t shouldering moral responsibility and social stigma for one’s plight, a regular occurrence for poor parents.

  There was a time when Cosby was much better informed and much more compassionate about the poor, earlier in his career, when he wasn’t yet so far from poverty’s orbit that he could fly off into rage against its victims. In an interview, Cosby painted a poignant portrait of what it was like to be poor.

  I think whites should begin to understand how personally destructive poverty is. Drive through Harlem sometime; if a cat’s got no bread, he’s just not going to look good. He’ll look bad enough not having a job and having no money coming in; but if he comes out of a one-room apartment with three or four brothers, and his father has no job, how can he possibly look good? And when you’re poor, nobody wants to have anything to do with you… . The point is: The poorer you are, the uglier you are. And that poverty creeps into every part of black people’s lives: poor education, poor housing, poor sanitation, poor medical care and, as a result of all these, poor jobs… . But the truth of the matter is that no parent can command a kid’s respect if the parent doesn’t have a strong game going for himself—if the father doesn’t have a job. The kid will hear his mother chewing the old man out because he’s not working. Or he’ll hear them both moaning and groaning because there’s no money coming in… . If the kid’s working and the old man isn’t, he’s not the father, man; he’s just an older guy who can beat you up … because he’s bigger and stronger, but he certainly isn’t anybody you can use as an example of what you want to be when you grow up… . Men on relief should be taught skilled jobs. That’s only half of it, though, because it isn’t enough just to teach skills. We must also make sure there are jobs available to use the skills.84

  That’s the Cosby we need to revive: a critical, clear, compassionate analyst, perhaps even an informal ethnographer, of the lives of the poor. We need not pity the poor, nor should we deny the huge problems among the parents of the black poor, but we should never lose sight of the colossal barriers they face just to get up in the morning, just to put one foot in front of the next, just to make ends meet. What we need more of is the relentless effort to help lift the poor from their condition even as we enable them to respect themselves and support their families through the hard work for which they are often given little credit. In this era of family values, we must learn to value all families. As Cosby’s family troubles prove, one need not be poor to experience failure or setback, and as the lives of so many poor folk suggest, you need not be wealthy to act decently in society and to love, and be loved, at home.

  Chapter Five

  Shadow Boxing with a Scapegoat?

  (or, Do White People Matter?)

  I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was losing badly, “David, listen to me. It’s not what’s he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing.” (laughter).

  We cannot blame white people. White people (clapping) … white people don’t live over there. They close up the shop early. The Korean ones still don’t know us well enough…they stay open 24 hours (laughter)…Brown Versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We’ve got to take the neighborhood back (clapping)… Now look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing.

  Ever since Bill Cosby pilloried the poor, he has been praised for at long last breaking the silence about black pathology and the failure of lower-class blacks to see that their miserable lot is all their doing. Blaming white folk is a game that black folk have got to give up, and fast, before lacerating denials of our self-imposed downfall take all the wind from our cultural sails. For Cosby, self-initiative, not systemic solutions, is the way to black salvation. But taking Cosby seriously can only mean the continued frustration of all good people in the quest to figure out the causes of black suffering. It’s not that taking responsibility for oneself is in any way damaging to the poor, and, in fact, it is quite a good thing for them, and for all of us, to do. It is, rather, the heartless rider to such a belief that is the problem: the illusion that by assuming such responsibility the problems of the poor will disappear. It’s no sweat off Cosby’s back if he turns out to be wrong; but it may bring greater social stigma to the poor, and threatens to plunge those who buy Cosby’s argument deeper into regretful self-loathing because they believe they haven’t solved the riddle of their poverty. In truth, Cosby’s position vividly revives the embarrassment over the bad behavior of the poor that the black elite have felt for more than a century. Cosby says he doesn’t care what whites think, but in truth, his embarrassment suggests he cares a great deal.

  Cosby’s position is dangerous because it aggressively ignores white society’s responsibility in creating the problems he wants the poor to fix on their own. His position is especially disingenuous because he has always, with two notable exceptions, gone soft on white society for its role in black suffering. Now that he has been enshrined by conservative white critics as a courageous spokesman for the truth that most black leaders leave aside, Cosby has been wrongly saluted for positions that are well staked out in black political ideology. This false situation sets him up as a hero and a dissenter, when he is neither. Self-help philosophy is broadly embraced in black America; but black leaders and thinkers have warned against the dangers of emphasizing self-help without setting it in its proper context. It creates less controversy and resistance—and, in fact, it assures white praise—if black thinkers and leaders make whites feel better by refusing to demand of them the very thing that whites feel those leaders should demand of their followers, including the poor: responsibility. Like so many black elite before him, Cosby, as a public figure who has assumed the mantle of leadership, has failed in his responsibility to represent the interests, not simply demand the compliance, of the less fortunate.

  It should surprise no one that Bill Cosby has let white folk off the hook for the problems of black America. Cosby, as we’ve seen, has never been comfortable in confronting white society over the legacy of white supremacy. His emphasis on color-blind comedy, and his retreat from social activism, were as much about avoiding the discomforts of race—including, oddly enough, the responsibility to represent as a fortunate black the interests of other blacks—as they were about overcoming racism. That’s the case because deciding to “work white” meant that the white audience, his bread and butter, must never be toasted. “People have to like you if you’re going to be a comic,” Cosby said in 1969. “After a cat establishes the fact that he’s funny, 40 percent of the pressure is eased up on him because, when he walks out, people already like him.”1 Cosby’s likability extended to The Cosby Show in large part because he refused to put white folk on the spot by speaking about race at all. Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, in their empirical study of The Cosby Show, point out a disturbing consequence of the show’s success: that it made white America believe that everything was fine in black America, that racism was no longer a bother and that whites wouldn’t have to wrestle with their role in a society that was still plagued by racial inequality. As Jhally and Lewis write:

  Our argument is, in essence, a simple one: programs like The Cosby Show encourage the viewer to see the real world through rose-tinted spectacles… . [T]he viewers’ ability to distinguish the TV world from the real one does not prevent them from confusing the two. The Cosby Show, we discovered, helps to cultivate an impression, particularly among white people, that racism is no longer a problem in the United States. Our audience study revealed that the overwhelming majority of white TV viewers felt racism was a sin of the past; The Cosby Show, accordingly, represented a new “freedom of opportunity” apparently enjoyed by black people. If Cliff and Clair can make it, in other
words, then so can all blacks. The positive images of blacks promoted by shows like Cosby have, therefore, distinctly negative consequences by creating a conservative and comfortable climate of opinion that allows white America to ignore widespread racial inequality.2

  Not only did The Cosby Show encourage whites to be racially oblivious (Cosby debuted halfway through Ronald Reagan’s rule and, like the president, the comedian possessed the uncanny ability to make millions of citizens feel very good about being American, an easy enough feat since they were joined at the hip of nostalgic patriarchy, Cosby as Father, Reagan as Grandfather, a partnership fueled by racial amnesia), but it also shifted the blame for poor blacks who weren’t like the Huxtables onto the poor themselves. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues that the images on The Cosby Show, much like those on the controversial early ’50s series Amos ’n’ Andy, took on a life of their own in the culture and reinforced harmful conservative political beliefs.

  This helps to explain why “Cosby” makes some people uncomfortable: As the dominant representation of blacks on TV, it suggests that blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgment of the severely constricted life opportunities that most black people face. What’s troubling about the phenomenal success of “Cosby,” then, is what was troubling about the earlier popularity of “Amos ’n’ Andy”: it’s not the representation itself (Cliff Huxtable, a child of college-educated parents, is altogether believable), but the role it begins to play in our culture, the status it takes on as being, well, truly representative. As long as all blacks were represented in demeaning or peripheral roles, it was possible to believe that American racism was, as it were, indiscriminate. The social vision of “Cosby,” however, reflecting the miniscule integration of blacks into the upper middle class (having “white money,” my mother used to say, rather than “colored” money) reassuringly throws the blame for poverty back onto the impoverished.3