HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAH! You know, sometimes, shit in my life is realllllllllllllllllly, just!? CREEPY! Now? I get up. Mindin my own business. Do a little stretch. Look around like an idiot. Turn my screen on. My internet connection is gone, even though it registers as still connected, thank you Windows 7 Professional where no White People have yet to be sued for intentionally bringing defective Operating Systems to market.
So I have to RESTART my laptop, otherwise I won't be able to get online. Mind you? I go through this EVERY 24 FUCKIN HOURS. Every 24hrs I MUST RESTART MY COMPUTER, DUE TO WINDOWS 7 PROFESSIONALS, PROFESSIONAL, GLITCH!
So?
I restart. Laptop goes through its thing, I do my thing, I'm back up and runnin! I come up on here. Check my gmail and yahoo. Check on articles and information I'm following. I check my stats for this blog. And lo and behold I see that one Search Keyword is this;
I check this out, because I'm wondering why that is there. I type it in just as it is shown in my Seach Keyword for traffic sources to My Blogsite. Lo and behold my post where I point out that Tyler Perry is NEXT for White/White-Jewish DESTRUCTION! I remember the fact that this warning post, got few hits. It makes me laugh. Like so, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! I laugh out loud, because? I woke up and I'm alive, so why not laugh out loud. Like so, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! -_- What? I thought everybody did that. Anyway.
While deleting the bill cosby vs tyler perry words from google, when I've deleted down to the bill cosby part, google shows me a series of things on bill cosby. I honestly don't give a fuck. Why? About 7 - 9 Nazi-Cops in the last 2 - 3 years have been caught having RAPED nearly double-digits apiece of Blackwomen and these things are BREEZED OVER AND COVERED UP. But talking about Bill Cosby raping MOSTLY Whitewomen who COULD HAVE HAD HIM LYNCHED AT ANY TIME WHEN ALL THIS "RAPING" WAS GOING ON, is more important. I won't even get into the fact that Whites had QUAALUDE AND COKE BARS, COCA-COLA SOFT DRINK MIXED WITH QUAALUDE, DURING THE 70'S THAT WERE LEGAL! But as usual, White People's Memories and FAKE +20 IQ points better than Black People, fails them and they can't remember THE SHIT THEY SET UP AND ALLOWED WHEN IT WAS ALL ABOUT THEM.
So for the record, this is why I have ZERO ARTICLES ABOUT BILL COSBY. BECAUSE I'M NOT FUCKIN STUPID AND WHITES HAVE USED THIS TRICK BEFORE. And shout out to the White and White-Jewish Media for NOT POINTING OUT THAT A NUMBER OF THESE WOMEN HAVE HAD THEIR SHITHOLES STUFFED! FOR LYING ON WHITEMEN PREVIOUSLY ABOUT RAPE AND DOMESTIC ABUSE. BUT NOW THAT IT SUITS THE WHITE/WHITE-JEW AGENDA, THEIR WORD IS VALID AGAIN, FOR NOW. You know who the FUCK YOU ARE BITCHES!
So then? I see this list or articles and information on Bill Cosby. One headline STANDS OUT among them and it says "THIS IS HOW WE LOST TO THE WHITEMAN." And I'm like...? That title, looks and sounds familiar. That's when I remembered, OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, SHIT! HE GAVE A SPEECH IN DETROIT AND HE SAID THIS, AHA! THIS IS WHAT GOT HIS BLACK-ASS FRIED EXTRA CRISPY!
He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”
Now? Heh! Now, now ya see? Ya see, you know you done fucked up right.
When Bill Cosby said "Let them, WHITE PEOPLE, say what they want to say about me." -_- Uhhhhhh, he shoulda come clean that he likes to fuck Whitewomen and THEY DO QUAALUDE BEFORE THEY FUCK! Offffffffffffffffffff course THIS WOULD SERIOUSLY DESTROY WHAT HE'S SAYING, BUT!? HE WOULDN'T BE IN THIS MESS RIGHT NOW, NOW WOULD HE! I've said it before and I'll say it again, I even brought it up when I was talking about MYSELF AND STACEY! Every fuckin body has their own sexual fetishes, fantasies, likes and dislikes. SOME OF THAT SHIT WILL SIMPLY MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO SPEAK ON CERTAIN MATTERS AND HAVE ANY VALIDITY OR CREDIBILITY! IT'S JUST THAT FUCKIN SIMPLE! But here is where I believe, NO! I KNOW! WHERE WE AS BLACK PEOPLE HAVE FUCKED UP AT!
We have taken on the same BULLSHIT STANCE as Whites, regarding the fact that we speak on shit that we KNOW we WON'T HAVE LEG TO STAND ON IF THIS OR THAT COMES OUT ABOUT US! ESPECIALLY. REGARDING OUR PERSONAL, SEXUAL, LIVES! Whites were willing to keep Cosby's SECRETS for as long as he wasn't using his wealth or his voice to do things THAT THEY DID NOT WANT HIM DOING. And when I say THEY. I mean ANY NUMBER OF WHITES AND WHITE-JEWS WHO MAKE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY OUT OF AND OFF OF, OUR PEOPLE CONTINUING TO DESTROY OURSELVES!
This one? Is an OPEN AND SHUT CASE. Many, MANY BLACKS! Have thought it was MAD ODD! And yes I said, MAD ODD! That the bullshit about Bill Cosby JUST HAPPENS TO FLARE UP WHEN ALL THE NAZI-COP KILLINGS FINALLY CAUSED BLACK PEOPLE TO REBEL AGAIN! So the first thing was AND IS. To TRY TO DISTRACT AWAY FROM THIS WITH AN EQUALLY POWERFUL BOMBSHELL OF NEWS THAT CAN DOMINATE THE HEADLINES! BUT NOTE!
Even Bill Cosby's CHEATING, which for ALL I KNOW, MAY ACTUALLY BE CONDONED BY HIS WIFE! Mind you, ONLY WHITES WILL GIVE WHITES THE GREEN-LIGHT TO SAY IT IS OKAY FOR THAT. Don't look at the computer screen funny, YOU READ WHAT YOU READ AND I TYPED WHAT THE FUCK I JUST TYPED! CURSE WORDS AND ALL! White People will give the THUMBS-UP TO MARILYN MONROE WHO WAS A WHITE-TRASH WHORE TO JOHN F. KENNEDY AND ANYBODY ELSE THAT COULD GET HER FURTHER ALONG IN HOLLYWOOD! BUT THIS BITCH IS SAINTED BY WHITES! AND ALL SHE WAS WAS A WHORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRE!
JFK, sainted by Whites and all he was was a MANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN-WHORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRE.
Lemme wrap this up because I've brought up ENOUGH SHIT TO MAKE YOU THINK AND LOOK AT FACTS. Everybody knows that a Blackman RAPING ALL THESE WHITEWOMEN? Matter of fact, GO BACK! LOOK AT THE TIMELINE THESE WHITEWOMEN ARE TALKING ABOUT AND YOU WILL FIND THAT IN SOME OF THEM BLACKMEN WERE LYNCHED THAT YEAR FOR LESS! Yet? Bill Cosby, who WASN'T SHIT THEN!? They were givin up the ass, GETTING RAPED AND NOT SAYING SHIT WHEN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY MADE IT CLEAR THAT WHITEWOMEN COULD LIE! FLAT OUT FUCKIN LIE! AND WHITE PEOPLE WILL COME RUNNING AND KILL THAT BLACKMAN DEAD!
Then you're talking about A CLIMATE where ACTUAL CONVERSATION ABOUT SEX, SEXUAL PREFERENCES, FETISHES AND FANTASIES, IS ONLY OKAY WHEN IT IS WHITE PEOPLE TALKING AND DOING CRAZY SHIT! And YES! I HAVE CAPS MUTHAFUCKA! CAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
And I have caps. Because I don't want small-minded idiots and assholes to honestly read and understand what I've typed. Because this is a very real. Very serious conversation. That for all of Nazi-America's claims of open and honest talk, it is a lie. A lie that we as Black People cannot afford to continue to play around with. Our People were never ashamed of themselves or their bodies or talking openly and honestly about sex, till we lost our ability to control and dictate our destiny to Whites and Arabs. Both of whom have a long history of skittishly childish INABILITY to deal with sex, nudity, the human body, and the human psyche when it comes to sex and a persons likes, dislikes, etc. When you cannot have honest conversation about these things, then you usually cannot handle honest conversation in other critical areas, too.
Here is the article that got Bill Cosby destroyed. Because he did not come to terms with the fact that once he decided to AGGRESSIVELY PUSH BLACK PEOPLE, whether you like him or not. Then he was threatening the status-quo of White Power Supremacy. He should have come out and admitted his sexual preferences and behaviors and outed all of these women right alongside himself. Yes. It would have been embarrassing. Maybe even HUMILIATING. But? I'd rather be embarrassed and humiliated instead of being labeled a rapist. Meanwhile? The Whites and White-Jews found out that their media trump card, failed. No Black People were thrown off track about Nazi-Cops killing us. Because Whites and White-Jews DECIDED TO STOP COVERING FOR BILL COSBY. Whether we as Black People see it or not or know it or not. I am TELLING YOU SO YOU KNOW.
Great job My People.
In not allowing YOURSELVES to be distracted.
Let's keep it up and get back on the same page and start getting Our Businesses back up.
One more thing to note in the article. DO NOT allow this article to tell you that Malcolm X was Conservative and So-n-So was Liberal. Those are WHITE SHILL-GAMES USING WHITE-IDEOLOGIES AND LABELS. So be mindful of that and yes I am aware the article was written by a Black Person and also pay attention to the header. "The Audacity of Bill Cosby's Black Conservatism" and REMEMBER that this is a BLACK PERSON writing this? And also note that as Black People we have no business putting Black in lower case when we are talking about OUR PEOPLE, OUR RACE, not a GODDAMN COLOR! You will see that from Day-1 of this blog I have NEVER put Black in lower case when I am talking about US. Little things sometimes show large glaring gaping holes in a person and whenever I see a Black Person doing that I know to be mindful of them and pay attention;
‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’
The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”
Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.
Cosby was wearing his standard uniform—dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher learning. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”
It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. F. Hutton, Kodak, and Jell-O Pudding Pops. And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results. Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Indeed, we are now enjoying a moment of national self-congratulation over racial progress, with a black man running for president as the very realization of King’s dream. Barack Obama defied efforts by the Clinton campaign to pigeonhole him as a “black” candidate, casting himself instead as the symbol of a society that has moved beyond lazy categories of race.
Has Dr. Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved television households, seen the truth: that the dream of integration should never supplant the pursuit of self-respect; that blacks should worry more about judging themselves and less about whether whites are judging them on the content of their character? Or has he lost his mind?
From the moment he registered in the American popular consciousness, as the Oxford-educated Alexander Scott in the NBC adventure series I Spy, Cosby proffered the idea of an America that transcended race. The series, which started in 1965, was the first weekly show to feature an African American in a lead role, but it rarely factored race into dialogue or plots. Race was also mostly inconspicuous in Cosby’s performances as a hugely popular stand-up comedian. “I don’t spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act,” Cosby told Playboy in 1969. He also said that he didn’t “have time to sit around and worry whether all the black people of the world make it because of me. I have my own gig to worry about.” His crowning artistic and commercial achievement—The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992—was seemingly a monument to that understated sensibility.
Offstage, Cosby’s philanthropy won him support among the civil-rights crowd. He made his biggest splash in 1988, when he and his wife gave $20 million to Spelman College, the largest individual donation ever given to a black college. “Two million would have been fantastic; 20 million, to use the language of the hip-hop generation, was off the chain,” says Johnnetta Cole, who was then president of Spelman. Race again came to the fore in 1997, when Cosby’s son was randomly shot and killed while fixing a flat on a Los Angeles freeway. His wife wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that white racism lay behind her son’s death. “All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors,” she wrote. “Most people know that facing the truth brings about healing and growth. When is America going to face its historical and current racial realities so it can be what it says it is?”
His anger and frustration erupted into public view during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary ofBrown v. Board of Education. At that moment, the shades of mortality and irrelevance seemed to be drawing over the civil-rights generation. Its matriarchs, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, would be dead within two years. The NAACP’s membership rolls had been shrinking; within months, its president, Kweisi Mfume, would resign (it was later revealed that he was under investigation by the NAACP for sexual harassment and nepotism—allegations that he denied). Other movement leaders were drifting into self-parody: Al Sharpton would soon be hosting a reality show and, a year later, would be doing ads for a predatory loan company; Sharpton and Jesse Jackson had recently asked MGM to issue an apology for the hit movie Barbershop.
That night, Cosby was one of the last honorees to take the podium. He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”
Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”
Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa— with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock.
After what has come to be known as “the Pound Cake speech”—it has its own Wikipedia entry—Cosby came under attack from various quarters of the black establishment. The playwright August Wilson commented, “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” One of the gala’s hosts, Ted Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, called his comments “a harsh attack on poor black people in particular.” Dubbing Cosby an “Afristocrat in Winter,” the Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson came out with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, that took issue with Cosby’s bleak assessment of black progress and belittled his transformation from vanilla humorist to social critic and moral arbiter. “While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle,” argued Dyson, “he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table.”
The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the 20th century, Washington married a defense of the white South with a call for black self-reliance and became the most prominent black leader of his day. He argued that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land.
W. E. B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the black vote was heretical. History ultimately rendered half of Washington’s argument moot. His famous Atlanta Compromise—in which he endorsed segregation as a temporary means of making peace with southerners—was answered by lynchings, land theft, and general racial terrorism. But Washington’s appeal to black self-sufficiency endured.After Washington’s death, in 1915, the black conservative tradition he had fathered found a permanent and natural home in the emerging ideology of Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, its patron saint, turned the Atlanta Compromise on its head, implicitly endorsing segregation not as an olive branch to whites but as a statement of black supremacy. Black Nationalists scorned the Du Boisian integrationists as stooges or traitors, content to beg for help from people who hated them.
Black conservatives like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, have at times allied themselves with black liberals. But in general, they have upheld a core of beliefs laid out by Garvey almost a century ago: a skepticism of (white) government as a mediating force in the “Negro problem,” a strong belief in the singular will of black people, and a fixation on a supposedly glorious black past.
Those beliefs also animate Come On People, the manifesto that Cosby and Poussaint published last fall. Although it does not totally dismiss government programs, the book mostly advocates solutions from within as a cure for black America’s dismal vital statistics. “Once we find our bearings,” they write, “we can move forward, as we have always done, on the path from victims to victors.”Come On People is heavy on black pride (“no group of people has had the impact on the culture of the whole world that African Americans have had, and much of that impact has been for the good”), and heavier on the idea of the Great Fall—the theory, in this case, that post–Jim Crow blacks have lost touch with the cultural traditions that enabled them to persevere through centuries of oppression.
He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him. This is the audience that flocks to Cosby: culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.
“There are things that we did not see coming,” Cosby told me over lunch in Manhattan last year. “Like, you could see the Klan, but because these things were not on a horse, because there was no white sheet, and the people doing the deed were not white, we saw things in the light of family and forgiveness … We didn’t pay attention to the dropout rate. We didn’t pay attention to the fathers, to the self-esteem of our boys.”
Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”
The rise of the organic black conservative tradition is also a response to America’s retreat from its second attempt at Reconstruction. Blacks have watched as the courts have weakened affirmative action, arguably the country’s greatest symbol of state-sponsored inclusion. They’ve seen a fraudulent war on drugs that, judging by the casualties, looks like a war on black people. They’ve seen themselves bandied about as playthings in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan (with his 1980 invocation of states’ rights” in Mississippi), George Bush (Willie Horton), Bill Clinton (Sister Souljah), and George W. Bush (McCain’s fabled black love-child). They’ve seen the utter failures of school busing and housing desegregation, as well as the horrors of Katrina. The result is a broad distrust of government as the primary tool for black progress.
In response to these perceived failures, many black activists have turned their efforts inward. Geoffrey Canada’s ambitious Harlem Children’s Zone project pushes black students to change their study habits and improve their home life. In cities like Baltimore and New York, community groups are focusing on turning black men into active fathers. In Philadelphia last October, thousands of black men packed the Liacouras Center, pledging to patrol their neighborhoods and help combat the rising murder rate. When Cosby came to St. Paul Church in Detroit, one local judge got up and urged Cosby and other black celebrities to donate more money to advance the cause. “I didn’t fly out here to write a check,” Cosby retorted. “I’m not writing a check in Houston, Detroit, or Philadelphia. Leave these athletes alone. All you know is Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson. Forget about a check … This is how we lost to the white man. ‘Judge said Bill Cosby is gonna write a check, but until then … ’”
Instead of waiting for handouts or outside help, Cosby argues, disadvantaged blacks should start by purging their own culture of noxious elements like gangsta rap, a favorite target. “What do record producers think when they churn out that gangsta rap with antisocial, women-hating messages?,” Cosby and Poussaint ask in their book. “Do they think that black male youth won’t act out what they have repeated since they were old enough to listen?” Cosby’s rhetoric on culture echoes—and amplifies—a swelling strain of black opinion: last November’s Pew study reported that 71 percent of blacks feel that rap is a bad influence.
The shift in focus from white racism to black culture is not as new as some social commentators make it out to be. Standing in St. Paul Church on that July evening listening to Cosby, I remembered the last time The Street felt like this: in the summer of 1994, after Louis Farrakhan announced the Million Man March. Farrakhan barnstormed the country holding “men only” meetings (but much larger). I saw him in my native Baltimore, while home from Howard University on vacation. The march itself was cathartic. I walked with four or five other black men, and all along the way black women stood on porches or out on the street, shouting, clapping, cheering. For us, Farrakhan’s opinions on the Jews mostly seemed beside the point; what stuck was the chance to assert our humanity and our manhood by marching on the Mall, and not acting like we were all fresh out of San Quentin. We lived in the shadow of the ’80s crack era. So many of us had been jailed or were on our way. So many of us were fathers in biology only. We believed ourselves disgraced and clung to the march as a public statement: the time had come to grow up.
What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.
Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments. “The early effort of middle-class blacks to respond to segregation was, aside from a political agenda, focused on a social-reform agenda,” says Khalil G. Muhammad, a professor of American history at Indiana University. “The National Association of Colored Women, Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro, all shared a sense of anxiety that African Americans were not presenting their best selves to the world. There was the sense that they were committing crimes and needed to keep their sexuality in check.” Adds William Jelani Cobb, a professor of American history at Spelman College: “The same kind of people who were advocating for social reform were denigrating people because they didn’t play piano. They often saw themselves as reluctant caretakers of the less enlightened.”
At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? “The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,” wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, “are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police.”
Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there’s still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you’d have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop’s popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too—many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
The accepted wisdom is that such studies are a comfort to black people, allowing them to wallow in their misery. In fact, the opposite is true—the liberal notion that blacks are still, after a century of struggle, victims of pervasive discrimination is the ultimate collective buzz-kill. It effectively means that African Americans must, on some level, accept that their children will be “less than” until some point in the future when white racism miraculously abates. That’s not the sort of future that any black person eagerly awaits, nor does it make for particularly motivating talking points.
If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights. He chides activists for pushing to reform the criminal-justice system, despite solid evidence that the criminal-justice system needs reform. His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations. After the Million Man March, black men embraced a sense of hope and promise. We were supposed to return to our communities and families inspired by a new feeling of responsibility. Yet here we are again, almost 15 years later, with seemingly little tangible change. I’d take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
On the day last summer when Cosby met me for lunch in the West Village, it was raining, as it had been all week, and New York was experiencing a record-cold August. Cosby had just come from Max Roach’s funeral and was dressed in a natty three-piece suit. Despite the weather, the occasion, and the oddly empty dining room, Cosby was energized. He had spent the previous day in Philadelphia, where he spoke to a group in a housing project, met with state health officials, and participated in a community march against crime. Grassroots black activists in his hometown were embracing his call. He planned, over the coming year, to continue his call-outs and release a hip-hop album. (He has also noted, however, that there won’t be any profanity on it.)
Cosby was feeling warm and nostalgic. He asked why I had not brought my son, and I instantly regretted dropping him off at my partner’s workplace for a couple of hours. He talked about breaking his shoulder playing school football, after his grandfather had tried to get him to quit. “Granddad Cosby got on the trolley and came over to the apartment,” he recalled. “I was so embarrassed. I was laid out on the sofa. He was talking to my parents, and I was waiting for the moment when he would say, ‘See, I told you, Junior.’ He came back and reached in his pocket and gave me a quarter. He said, ‘Go to the corner and get some ice cream. It has calcium in it.’”Part of what drives Cosby’s activism, and reinforces his message, is the rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred. As the comedian Chris Rock put it in one of his infamous routines, “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … It’s like a civil war going on with black people, and it’s two sides—there’s black people and there’s niggas, and niggas have got to go … Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I’d do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.” (Rock stopped performing the routine when he noticed that his white fans were laughing a little too hard.) Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain. Like the people he preaches to, Cosby has grown tired of hanging his head.
Cosby is fond of saying that sacrifices of the ’60s weren’t made so that rappers and young people could repeatedly use the word nigger. But that’s exactly why they were made. After all, chief among all individual rights awarded Americans is the right to be mediocre, crass, and juvenile—in other words, the right to be human. But Cosby is aiming for something superhuman—twice as good, as the elders used to say—and his homily to a hazy black past seems like an effort to redeem something more than the present.
When people hear Bill Cosby’s message, many assume that he is the product of the sort of family he’s promoting—two caring parents, a stable home life, a working father. In fact, like many of the men he admonishes, Cosby was born into a troubled home. He was raised by his mother because his father, who joined the Navy, abandoned the family when Cosby was a child. Speaking to me of his youth, Cosby said, “People told me I was bright, but nobody stayed on me. My mother was too busy trying to feed and clothe us.” He was smart enough to be admitted to Central High School, a magnet school in Philadelphia, but transferred and then dropped out in 10th grade and followed his father into the service.
But the twists and turns of that reality seem secondary to the tidier, more appealing world that Cosby is trying to create. Toward the end of our lunch, in a long, rambling monologue, Cosby told me, “If you looked at me and said, ‘Why is he doing this? Why right now?,’ you could probably say, ‘He’s having a resurgence of his childhood.’ What do I need if I am a child today? I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change. I need people to stop saying I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. They say that’s a myth. But these other people have their mythical stories—why can’t we have our own?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- TA-NEHISI COATES is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and the forthcoming Between the World and Me.
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