Michael Eric Dyson

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

  18 Ibid.

  19 In Cosby’s case, this not only applied generally to his career, but quite specifically to his role on I Spy. “At the outset, according to show-business insiders, Cosby was slated to play the familiar Negro role of second banana to the white star, Bob Culp. But as the drive for civil rights gathered momentum, the image of a Negro as a full-fledged costar began to look better and Cosby’s part in I Spy was gradually upgraded.” Stanley Karnow, “Bill Cosby: Variety Is the Life of Spies: For the First Time, a Negro Stars in a TV Series—and He Won’t Sing, Dance or Play the Second Banana,” The Saturday Evening Post, September 25, 1965, p. 88.

  20 “I Spy: Comedian Bill Cosby Is First Negro Co-Star in TV Network Series,” Ebony, September 1965, p. 65.

  21 “‘Raceless Bill Cosby,” p. 131.

  22 Ironically enough, I Spy producer Sheldon Leonard sought to protect Cosby’s character from the stereotype of the hypersexed stud. “I am not going to feed the concept that a Negro only responds to the sex drive. We want him to have girls, but there has to be sweetness and dignity in it.” Newsweek, “Color Him Funny,” January 31, 1966, p. 76. Obviously, Culp worked free of both sexual stereotype and the compulsion to make his sexual encounters sweet and dignified. The point is that even under ostensible equality—and an artistic environment allegedly free of the constraints of color—Cosby’s character still bore the inescapable burden of race.

  23 Smith, Cosby, p. 74. Cosby was emphatic about not wanting to get the white girl, either. “Now don’t get it wrong. It was my decision right from the start to play it that way. As long as I’m on the screen, whether television or films, I will never hold or kiss a white woman. Hey, our black women have just nothing to look forward to in films, nothing to identify with … tell me, how often do you see a black man falling in love and making love with a black woman? So as it is, I want to be seen only with our women—not Chinese or Filipino women, not yellow, green, pink, or white. Just our women, black ones.” Smith, Cosby, pp. 74-75.

  24 Faith Berry, “Can ‘Just for Laughs’ Be Real for Blacks?” New York Times, Dec. 7, 1969, p. D23.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Smith, Cosby, p. 150.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Cosby was also raked over the coals by critic Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice for his performance alongside Raquel Welch in the 1976 film Mother, Jugs and Speed. Sarris accused Cosby of doing “a Stepin Fetchit imitation.” Smith, Cosby, p. 136.

  32 Karnow, p. 88.

  33 Lawrence Linderman, “Playboy Interview: Bill Cosby—A Candid Conversation with the Kinetic Comedian-Actor-Singer-Entrepreneur,” Playboy, May 1969, pp. 74, 76.

  34 Smith, Cosby, p. 69.

  35 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), pp. 583-584.

  36 For an insightful study of The Cosby Show, see Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). For another very smart take on the show, and on black television in general, see Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness [With a New Introduction] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1995] 2004), pp. 79-84. For a brilliant study of black television in relation to the civil rights and black power struggles, see Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Also see Sasha Torres’s fine study, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  37 Zoglin, p. 60.

  38 “Life with Bill Cosby: Pretty Wife, Camille, Swept Along by Husband’s Swift Rise from Obscurity to Stardom,” Ebony, September 1966, p. 40.

  39 Linderman, “Playboy Interview: Bill Cosby,” p. 82.

  40 Brad Darrach, “Cosby!” Life, June 1985, p. 37.

  41 Alvin Poussaint, “The Huxtables: Fact or Fantasy?” Ebony, October 1988, p. 74.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Lynn Norment, “The Cosby Show: The Real-Life Drama Behind Hit TV Show About a Black Family,” Ebony, April, 1985, p. 30.

  44 During slavery, the shrewd use of stereotype was a way that blacks used negative appraisals of their identities by white owners to their advantage. As historian Ira Berlin writes, “In the very stereotype of the dumb, brutish African that planters voiced so loudly, newly arrived slaves found protection, as they used their apparent ignorance of the language, landscape, and work routines of the Chesapeake to their own benefit. Observing the new Negroes on one Maryland estate, a visitor was ‘surprised at their Perseverance.’ ‘Let an hundred Men hew him how to hoe, or drive a Wheelbarrow, he’ll still take the one by the bottom, and the Other by the Wheel.’ Triumphant planters had won the initial battle by gaining control over Chesapeake society and placing their imprint on the process of production, but slaves answered that the war would be a long one.” Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 120.

  45 Cosby would surely disagree with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on his views of Amos ’n’ Andy. Gates says that one “of my favorite pastimes is screening episodes of ‘Amos ’n’ Andy’ for black friends who think that the series was both socially offensive and politically detrimental. After a few minutes, even hardliners have difficulty restraining their laughter. ‘It’s still racist,’ is one typical comment, ‘but it was funny.’ The performance of those great black actors—Tim Moore, Spencer Williams and Ernestine Wade—transformed racist stereotypes into authentic black humor. The dilemma of ‘Amos ’n’ Andy,’ however, was that these were the only images of blacks that American could see on TV. The political consequences for the early civil rights movement were thought to be threatening. The N.A.A.C.P. helped to have the series killed.” Gates, “TV’s Black World Turns—But Stays Unreal,” New York Times, Sunday, November 12, 1989, p. 40.

  46 “Died,” Newsweek, December 2, 1985, p. 104.

  47 For a discussion of the cultural and racial context in which Wayans’s show and other black series either flourished or floundered on the Fox network in the 1990s, see Kristal Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  48 Alison Samuels, “Cosby in Winter,” Newsweek, November 3, 2003, p. 62.

  49 For instance, see Alison Samuels, “We Are Losing …” Newsweek, March 17, 1997, p. 58.

  50 Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000).

  51 Mos Def, sound recording, Black on Both Sides, Rawkus Records, 1999.

  52 “Compared to What,” written by Gene McDaniels, on the sound recording Swiss Movement by Les McCann and Eddie Harris, Atlantic Records, 1969.

  53 New York Times, Sunday, November 12, 1989, p. H1.

  54 Ibid, pg. 40.

  55 “Color Him Funny,” p. 76.

  56 Morgan, p. 78.

  57 Tiger Woods, Media Statement, cited in Jay Nordlinger, “Tiger Time: The Wonder of an American Hero,” National Review, April 30, 2001, p. 41.

  58 Morgan, p. 78; Nachman, pp. 572-573; Smith, p. 46.

  59 Smith, p. 70.

  60 “I Spy,” Ebony, p. 66; Smith, pp. 70-71.

  61 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

  62 Quoted in Nachman, p. 573.

  63 Du Bois, Souls, p. 11.

  64 Nachman, p. 572.

  65 Cited in Mel Watkins, On The Real Side, p. 503.

  66 Smith, p. 57. The italics are found in the first edition of Smith’s book, published in 1986 by St. Martin’s Press; in the second edition, the italics are removed. I have kept them because I think they accurately convey Cosby’s frustration.

  67 For insta
nce, when Chris Rock’s comedy stirred controversy among African Americans, and led to the charge of his “stereotyping” black culture, “Rock and his supporters [said] the controversy misses the point of his art, which turns images upside down in the interest of promoting new thinking in America.” Kevin Chappell, “Bigger, Better, and Hotter! Chris Rock Talks About Fame, Controversy and the Challenge of Being No. 1,” Ebony, October 1999, p. 163.

  68 Mark Dowie, American Foundations: An Investigative History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. xvi, xxi-xxiii, 7, 12.

  69 A.S. Doc Young, cited in Smith, p. 92.

  70 Smith, p. 75.

  71 Ibid., p. 168.

  Chapter Two Classrooms and Cell Blocks

  1 Lawrence Linderman, “Playboy Interview: Bill Cosby—a Candid Conversation with the Kinetic Comedian-Actor-Singer-Entrepreneur,” Playboy, May 1969, p. 73.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Richard Zoglin, “Cosby, Inc.: He Has a Hot TV Series, a New Book—and a Booming Comedy Empire,” Time, September 28, 1987, p. 59.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid. In the acknowledgments to his doctoral dissertation, Cosby thanks Damerell, who, he says, “guided me in the writing of the technical and creative components of my television research.”

  6 Howard Fuller, “The Struggle Continues,” Education Next, Fall 2004, pp. 27-28.

  7 Alec Klein, “A Tenuous Hold on the Middle Class,” Washington Post, December 18, 2004, p. A1.

  8 Mary Pattillo-McCoy, “Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class,” in Dalton Conley, Editor, Wealth and Poverty in America: A Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 106.

  9 Klein, p. A1. “Vital Signs,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Autumn 2003, p. 73.

  10 “Black Middle Class: Getting Squeezed,” The Middle Class Squeeze, Rep. George Miller, Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats, July 15, 2004, Issue # 8, www.house.gov/georgemiller; “Vital Signs,” p. 73.

  11 Klein, p. A1.

  12 Ibid.

  13 “Black Middle Class: Getting Squeezed” and “Vital Signs,” p. 73.

  14 “Vital Signs,” p. 73.

  15 Linda Darling-Hammond, “The Color Line in American Education: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement.” Du Bois Review 1:2 (2004), p. 214.

  16 Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, p. 3, cited in Darling-Hammond, p. 215.

  17 Kozol, pp. 236-237, cited in Darling-Hammond, p. 25.

  18 “The Racial Wealth Gap Has Become a Huge Chasm That Severely Limits Black Access to Higher Education,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 2005, pp. 23-25.

  19 Gary Orfield, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation (Cambridge, Mass.: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2001).

  20 Orfield, cited in Darling-Hammond, p. 217.

  21 William Henry Cosby, Jr., An Integration of the Visual Media Via Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning, University of Massachusetts, September 1976, p. vi.

  22 Ibid., pp. 3, 4, 5.

  23 Cited in “Bill Cosby and the Politics of Race,” in Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 85.

  24 Cosby, p. 8.

  25 Ibid., p. 11.

  26 Ibid., pp. 11-12.

  27 “Vital Signs,” Autumn 2003, p. 73.

  28 “The State of the Dream 2004,” report by United for a Fair Economy, 2004, p. 16.

  29 “Vital Signs,” Autumn 2003, p. 73; “State of the Dream,” p. 17.

  30 See Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).

  31 Among the voluminous research, see J. L. Dillard, Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York: Random House, 1972); William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America [1977] (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986); John Baugh, Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure and Survival (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1994); Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickdord, Guy Bailey and John Baugh, Editors, African-American English: Structure, History and Use (New York: Routledge, 1998); Theresa Perry and Lisa Delpit, Editors, The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); John Rickford and Russell John Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000); Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Marcyliena Morgan, Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, Arthur K. Spears, Editors, Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas (New York: Routledge, 2003).

  32 James A. Harrison, “Negro English.” Anglia 8 (1884), p. 232, cited in Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 42.

  33 James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985), p. 650.

  34 Cited in Candace Murphy, “The Cosby Sweater Has Unraveled; Cosby has unraveled some woolly memories the past few months by lambasting African-American parents for their parental failures,” Oakland Tribune, August 8, 2004.

  35 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Ebonics! Weird Names! $500 Shoes! Shrill Bill Cosby and the Speech That Shocked Black America,” Village Voice, May 26-June 1, 2004.

  36 Bill Cosby, “Elements of Igno-Ebonics Style,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 1997, p. A10.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Lawrence Linderman, “Playboy Interview: Bill Cosby—a Candid Conversation with the Kinetic Comedian-Actor-Singer-Entrepreneur,” Playboy, May 1969, p. 175.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Jonathan D. Rockoff, “Phonics Called Helpful to a Point: Many Md. Educators Favor Comprehensive Approach,” Baltimore Sun, January 14, 2005.

  41 Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

  42 Ibid., p. 9.

  43 Ibid., p. 129.

  44 Ibid., pp. 60-61.

  45 Ibid., p. 60.

  46 “I Spy: Comedian Bill Cosby Is First Negro Co-Star in TV Network Series,” Ebony, September 1965, p. 68.

  47 Stanley Karnow, “Bill Cosby: Variety Is the Life of Spies,” The Saturday Evening Post, September 25, 1965, p. 88.

  48 Edward Sorel, “The Noble Cos,” The Nation, September 6, 1986, p. 243.

  49 National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation, July 7, 2004.

  50 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963).

  51 Ibid., pp. 3-4.

  52 Ibid., p. 6.

  53 Les Christie, “Endangered: The American Reader,” CNNmoney, July 12, 2004, http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/09/news/bookreading.

  54 Vladimir I. Chuprov, “Youth in Social Reproduction.” Russian Social Science Review, September-October 1999, vol. 40.

  55 Seon-Young Lee, Bonnie Cramond, and Jongyeun Lee, “Korean Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Academic Brilliance.” National Association for Gifted Children, Winter 2004, vol. 48.

  56 Walter E. Houghton, “Victorian Anti-Intellectualism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 13:3 (June 1952), pp. 291-313.

  57 Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White,’” The Urban Review 19:3, pp. 176-206.

  58 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Breaking the Silence
,” The New York Times, Section 4, p. 11; “Transcript: Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama,” Washingtonpost.com. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wedyn/articles/A1975-2004July27.html.

  59 Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, “Weighing the Burden of ‘Acting White’: Are There Race Differences in Attitudes Toward Education?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Spring 1997, pp. 256-278.

  60 “‘Acting White’: Is It the Silent Killer of the Educational Aspirations of Inner-City Blacks?” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Autumn 1997, p. 94.

  61 Ibid.

  62 Douglas Massey, Camille Z. Charles, Garvey Lundy and Mary J. Fischer, The Source of the River, cited in Tim Wise, Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 146; “Vital Signs,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Winter 2003/2004, p. 65.

  63 “Vital Signs,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Winter 2003-2004, p. 65.

  64 Massey et al., cited in Wise, p. 146.

  65 Karolyn Tyson, William Darity & Domini Castellino. Breeding Animosity: The “Burden of Acting White” and Other Problems of Status Group Hierarchies in Schools. Paper # SAN04-03, September, 2004. Also see Paul Tough, “The ‘Acting White’ Myth,” New York Times Magazine, December 12, 2004.

  66 Ibid.

  67 Ibid.

  68 “Vital Signs,” Autumn 2004, p. 73.