Michael Eric Dyson

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

  That’s a point that Cosby sorely needs to remember.

  It’s a point Cosby might have easily grasped nearly thirty years ago, when he wrote his 1976 doctoral dissertation, or before that, nearly forty years ago, when he hosted a 1968 television special, Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed? These two documents, along with an interview Cosby did in Playboy magazine in 1969, are the rare exceptions when Cosby took off the gloves, and the blinders, to discuss race in public with candor and discernment.4 In Cosby’s career, none of these three performances have garnered anything near the attention paid to his albums, TV series or books. They are radical departures from his color-blind catechism, which explains, perhaps, their relative obscurity in his corpus. I’ve already taken up his dissertation, which bluntly engages the obstacles to black educational achievement, earlier in the book; his provocative, race-conscious narration in Black History, though it packs a rhetorical wallop (when I saw this as a ten-year-old in school, it was high octane fuel to study black culture, and take pride in myself, even more), and while doubtless an expression of his views at the time, was scripted for him to read.

  But Cosby is totally unfettered in his Playboy interview, parts of which I’ve discussed already, and it is here that one finds a reflective soul who was much more willing than he is today to hold white America accountable for its numerous sins against his brothers and sisters. 5 It is tempting to classify Cosby’s remarks as merely a reflection of the racial times in which they were hatched, but that is unlikely, at least not as a primary explanation for their existence, since Cosby so diligently guarded his color-blind bona fides even then. It is more likely that this was an aspect of Cosby’s identity that he routinely suppressed, both in private in mixed-racial company and in a public composed of whites of every ideological stripe, but that he chose, at this moment, to reveal to the open-minded, liberal white readers of a men’s magazine.6

  Cosby’s interlocutor, Lawrence Linderman, asked Cosby about his comedy routines, his role on I Spy, and black stereotypes. Linderman wondered whether Cosby agreed with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver’s belief that a civil war was in the offing if black demands for equality went unheeded. “A lot of black men feel that way, and I can’t say they’re wrong, because America’s resistance to giving the black man a fair shake is almost unbelievably strong,” Cosby replied. “And when black people keep butting their heads against the stone wall of racism, there are those who feel they have to become violent.”7 Cosby suggested that there could be no denying that there should be equality in America, but that the obstacle to equality lay not in black people themselves, as Cosby now contends, but in white society. “[T]he white man doesn’t want us to have it,” Cosby said, “because then he’ll be giving up a freedom of his—to reject us because of color. I really think that black people could march until the end of the world and the majority of whites still wouldn’t want to give up what they see as their precious right to be racists.” Of course, some may decide that Cosby felt as he did then about white resistance because the legal barriers to black equality remained, but that is inaccurate, since by the time of his Playboy interview, all the major civil rights legislation from the ’60s had already been passed: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination illegal in public places, such as restaurants, hotels and theaters; the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which gave black southerners the right to vote; and the 1968 Civil Rights Act (the Fair Housing Act), passed in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination, which outlawed housing discrimination.

  It was King’s assassination that drove Cosby to conclude that “the nonviolent approach appear[s] irrelevant to many black people.” Cosby believed that nonviolence was “as meaningful today as when [King] was alive,” even as he understood the disavowal of the philosophy by activists like Stokely Carmichael, a complexity of thought that shows in Cosby’s mapping of the black ideological landscape. “I don’t think people can arbitrarily be put into neat categories of violent or nonviolent. I can tell you that I don’t believe in letting black people get pushed around when they’re in the right. If a lot of black people no longer believe in nonviolence, it’s because they’ve lost all faith and trust in white men.” That loss of faith, alas, seems to have had little to do with the black failure to take advantage of increasing opportunities and everything to do with the persistence of structural, and, yes, systemic, barriers to progress. Cosby even believed that “[m]any intelligent and educated black people are tired, just tired, of being noble, of not striking back,” a statement that may have revealed Cosby’s own frustration with his colorblind ideals and his political noninvolvement. (In fact, earlier the same year, another reporter noted Cosby’s “remarkable self-control—at what cost in self-repression, tension and future grief, who can say?”)8

  Cosby made a remarkable comparison, one also made by King a year earlier in a little-known sermon, between the condition of blacks and those citizens of the world interred in concentration camps.9 Cosby believed that many whites secretly hoped that blacks would renounce nonviolence so that a law could be produced to “quietly march us off into concentration camps until we learned that this is their country.” When Linderman countered that most whites think that the “concentration camp theory is a myth,” Cosby elaborated.

  Look, it’s possible to have concentration camps in Chicago—or in almost any large city—by simply blocking off the ghetto, putting barbed wire around it and not letting anybody in or out. This isn’t going to happen until we give the whites a little more of a reason for putting us in a concentration camp, but it isn’t too far away. … Farfetched as it may sound, black people will actually go to war if they’re driven to it: Not all black people, but the ones who feel they’re willing to give up their lives in order to mess up this country, to bring America to its knees.10

  Linderman asked Cosby whether such a war could be averted and he bluntly replied, “That’s up to the white man. He’s at the point now where he will either have to allow the black man his civil rights or try to wipe him out.” Cosby expertly mapped the escalating methods of black dissent called into being by staunch white resistance: singing, sit-ins and marching; enduring beatings, burnings and bombings; the assassinations of black leaders; and the sparking of urban rebellions. When Linderman evoked Malcolm X’s famous application to black struggle of the adage that the squeaky hinge got the oil—that only black violence could get white America to respond—Cosby proved to be Malcolm’s metaphoric match, and perhaps even more emphatic in his blistering indictment of the genocidal intentions of the white establishment.

  I really think that, all along, the white man has been oiling the hinge with the secret intention of slamming the door. And when he finally slams it shut for good—and has his genocidal war—he won’t have to worry about the squeak anymore. What will be left won’t exactly be a country, but at least the place will be well run. Except that America will have to find someone else to dance to its music. The Mexicans will folk-dance for a while, and then Puerto Ricans, and then the Chinese people will be dancing; but soon enough, that squeaky-hinged door will be slammed shut, too—and padlocked.11

  Cosby spoke powerfully about how racist white leaders foment tension between the races. He argued that the easy access to guns heightened racial tensions—“The way I look at it is that guns are sold to protect whites against blacks”—especially between blacks and poor whites, since the “leaders of bigotry have got to keep the poor, ignorant white cat really upset and nervous, so that their friends the gun manufacturers can sell him some guns and maybe even some bazookas as well.” Cosby wasn’t sure whether race war could be prevented, but if that prospect was to be strengthened, it rested in amassing black political power, such as had occurred in Cleveland and Gary, Indiana, with the election of the nation’s first black mayors. But Cosby admitted that these politicians would most likely be hamstrung by white boards of directors and city planners who would block the path of racial progress. Cosby also revealed that most blacks
don’t trust black politicians who are beholden to white interests. He colorfully explored the “field nigger” versus “house nigger” dichotomy, perhaps most famously employed by Malcolm X as a way to distinguish between blacks on plantation fields, who had the fate of the race in mind, and those in the house with the master, who made his interests, not the well-being of blacks, the highest priority.

  Cosby was equally eloquent about the misleading belief among some critics that the immigrant experience cast a chastising lens on blacks who failed to match the achievements of citizens who hailed from foreign shores. Cosby anticipated some of the arguments made by contemporary scholars about how ethnic Europeans are remade as white Americans in the crucible of race, while blacks continue to be excluded from the privileges of white skin in the mainstream.

  When the French, Poles and Czechs come off the boat, they’re welcomed to America, “the land of the free, the home of the brave.” The Statue of Liberty welcomes them, but it doesn’t welcome the man who was born here—the black man. There’s no lamp lit for him; so the black man has to climb up there and light it himself… . If all these European countries are so groovy, then how come when their guys get off the boat, they turn out to be bigots?12

  For Cosby, the “unkept promises and half-truths” of whites to blacks have issued in a “justifiable distrust” of white America. He argued that it was just for black folk to run their own organizations, “even at the risk of alienating white friends,” since true white friends would understand the need for racial autonomy.

  Although Cosby has recently urged an almost blind devotion to self-help strategies while leaving aside concern for structural factors, he encouraged a vastly different approach years ago. When Linderman posed to Cosby the results of a poll suggesting that “most white people believe there’s no real difference in the way they grow up and the way blacks grow up—and conclude that blacks themselves are totally responsible for all their social and economic problems”—a statement that very much reflects Cosby’s current mindset, showing that he’s only now caught up to what white folk believed thirty-five years ago, the same white folk he deemed as hurtful to black interests—Cosby sang a different tune.

  I find it hard to believe that white people don’t know what life is like for the average American black. Did his mother have to pay more than $200 for a couch that costs white people $125? A guy in the slums buys a car for $150 and has to pay $400 a year insurance on it. The ghetto supermarkets sell food you can’t find anywhere else; did you ever eat green meat and green bread? How many winters have white people spent with rats scurrying around their apartments at night, with windows boarded up but not keeping out the cold, and with no heat? Try to get a ghetto slumlord to fix up an apartment and you’ll know what frustration and bitterness is.13

  Not only did Cosby call out the extraordinary shortsightedness, and unfairness, of whites’ believing that black folk had caused their own problems, but he discerned as well that “most black people have finally discovered they’ve been deluding themselves.” In answer to Linderman’s terse, “About what?” Cosby brilliantly summarized the insight of many blacks torn between fighting for justice and acknowledging the bone-deep refusal of whites to accept them. The civil rights movement under King’s leadership had forced racism “out into the open, so the world could see it.” It was then that blacks “found out that most whites just didn’t want them to have a growing place in America’s future.” That realization, Cosby says, was the seed of blacks’ finding salvation in their own race, and “we turned to ourselves for help, as we had to.” Building a haven to nurture a proud black identity was crucial to these self-help measures. For Cosby, many blacks had begun to go to necessary extremes to bolster their identities and to reject

  white power, white imperialism and … [t]he main white value—greed. Through greed, whites have been fooled into thinking that freedom for black people means they’ll lose their jobs, their homes, even the clothes off their backs. Certain ideas have been laid on the white man to exploit his greed, and the windup is that whites, because of greed, think all black men are lazy and shiftless and everything else represented in racist stereotyping. But this has all been the result of lies, and white people now have to listen to the truth: Freedom, for any man, is a need like food and water. The black man needs his freedom and he is determined to get it—now. If white America chooses to withhold equality from the black man, the result is going to be disaster for this country. But if whites allow the black man the same civil rights they themselves take for granted, then they’re really in store for a shock: this country will turn into the coolest and grooviest society the world has ever seen.14

  Cosby’s intelligent and unsparing dissection of white supremacy, a rare public gesture by this color-blind figure, offers stirring testimony against his present refusal to hold white society responsible for its role in black suffering at all, or more than perfunctorily, in asides that serve as begrudging concessions and preludes to more attack. (“And please don’t give me anything about systemic racism,” Cosby said in a Detroit stop on a national Blame-the-Poor Tour billed as A Conversation with Bill Cosby. “Yes, it’s there, but why is your mouth not working?”)15 Cosby’s ill-tempered insistence that the poor not blame white folk for their troubles appears to be at once a caricature of how the black poor think of their condition and a flat disavowal of the history he so eloquently covered in his Playboy interview.

  The black poor, like most black people, have a more sophisticated and perhaps more complex understanding than we might imagine about how they have come to be poor and what they must do about it. Few studies of the black poor portray them as endlessly griping about “the white man,” and when they do, they understand “the white man” not literally but rather in metaphoric terms, as a symbol of the myriad forces that have helped to determine their plight. Many black poor, as we have seen, share some of the same values that motivate the mainstream—hard work, when they can get it; the desire for their children to prosper; the dream of upward mobility; and the soulful embrace of decent living. If they know, as most of them surely do, that they have kept their values and made every effort to climb out of the endless pit of poverty, they may sadly conclude that they are cursed, with social scientists and critics right there to confirm their suspicions, while no amount of corrective theology will remove its trace completely from their souls, especially in this age of the gospel of prosperity. (The gospel says, “If you’re blessed and favored, you’ll be prosperous, and showered with material goods, and if not, you’re praying and living wrong,” another way to blame the poor for their plight, except now it’s more lethal because it’s under God’s signature.) Or they may believe that they are blessed because they’re poor, adjusting to their inevitable plight and seeing in it, defensively, for their salvation and sanity, the design of The Spirit, which, in some cases, is nearly as bad as feeling cursed. Or they see that they are the victims of forces beyond their control but against which, with God’s help, or with the help of more secular consolations, they are pledged to fight, if not for themselves, then for their children’s sake.

  Those poor who arrive at the latter conclusion (and it is the bulk of them, it miraculously seems), even if they are taunted by the lure of the first two options, have already mobilized a keen sense of self-determining action. Too often, some of them take on conservative beliefs about why they are poor as a kind of wish fulfillment: If they conform to the narrative that hard work leads to success, despite the contrary testimony of their lives and those of many of their friends, they may strike the existential lottery and get out of the ghetto. Ironically, the more desolate their condition, the more determined some poor people are to strictly abide by such beliefs, because they are so desperate for it to be true. They are even willing at times to sacrifice their survival skepticism, the instincts that screen errors and lies, in the hope that they can trade distrust of their own instincts for rewards—of upward mobility and material security. Given the war on
the poor being fiercely waged in the culture, the moral counternarratives, the ones that admit to continuing obstacles and that proclaim their worth not because they’re poor but because they have managed to remain human in inhuman circumstances, wither on the vine. Cosby’s blaming of the poor for failing to take the blame for their lives (though in truth many more poor people than should already do) and for blaming, instead, the white man, deprives the poor of a reasonable, empirical explanation for their plight and keeps them from connecting to a venerable legacy of social action, both of which were symbolized in Cosby’s Playboy interview.

  What, then, has led Cosby to withdraw his kindly countenance from the poor and to offer them, instead, a menacing scowl, while rejecting the explanations he offered in his Playboy interview? As far as I can tell, there are two factors. First, he is embarrassed by how poor black folk behave. Cosby’s embarrassment is widely shared among the black elite and harkens back a century to when black aristocrats promoted a philosophy of racial uplift to prove to racist whites that blacks were human—a favorite Cosby theme. As a result, upper-class blacks became moral cops: They policed poor black communities from the pulpit, the lectern, the convention floor, and the fraternity and sorority hall, damning the pathologies they believed were ruining the reputation of the race. Cosby’s views are little more than an update of this mode of racial reckoning. Second, Cosby seems to have departed in fatal ways from the hard-won racial wisdom about the individual traits and societal forces that influence one’s economic and social standing. There is often a critical ideological balance in black communities that colors our beliefs about poverty—about what explains why some people are born poor but escape, while others remain trapped. Cosby’s beliefs tap into complex views held by blacks about the causes of poverty that we will need to explore before situating his comments.