Michael Eric Dyson (11 page)

But I also thought of Elizabeth Chin’s marvelous ethnographic study of the consumer behavior of poor black children,
Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture
.
⁴¹
Although Cosby targeted poor black parents, a great deal of the consumption for youth in poor communities is done by youth themselves. The point of Chin’s book is to dispel the sort of myths perpetuated by Cosby and many others, black and white, whose perceptions of black youth are strangled by stereotype. She thus chides those who make judgments about black youth based more on “guesswork” than “fieldwork.”
⁴²
Chin contends that black youth are not the “combat consumers” they are portrayed as being: either captives of a powerful fetish for brand names or predatory consumers willing to steal for Air Jordans or kill for a bike. Chin argues that “consumption is at its base a social process, and one that children use in powerful ways to make connections between themselves and the people around them.”
⁴³
Chin also notices that, unlike their middle-class and upper-class peers, the children she studied were made profoundly conscious of what it costs to clothe, feed and take care of them; hence, they usually spent part of the money they had on necessary,
not pleasurable, items. Chin explains her work in a powerful anecdote about the prejudice she confronted and, by extension, the black youth she studied, in examining the consumer behavior of black youth. She says she had developed, as do most researchers, a one-line response to questions at cocktail parties about the nature of her research in New Haven.

Cosby’s gross generalizations about poor black parents and their consumptive behavior—based on his commonsense observations and likely not on a systematic examination of
the buying habits of poor black parents or their children—reinforce the biases that Chin sought to challenge in her study. Cosby belongs to a group of critics who have, according to Chin, made black consumer behavior appear pathological.
⁴⁵
And I couldn’t help thinking when I read Cosby’s “Igno-Ebonics” op-ed (which begins, “I remember one day 15 years ago, a friend of mine told me a racist joke. Question: Do you know what Toys ‘R’ Us is called in Harlem? Answer: We Be Toys,”) of the touching story Chin tells of a shopping trip to Toys “R” Us with a black youth who had never heard of the store before, much less visited it, but who agonized greatly over the choice between two inexpensive toys that would enhance different social relationships.

Cosby’s remark hints at the priorities of poor black parents and youth: are they educationally oriented or materially focused? It is interesting that Cosby expects poor parents, and youth, to be more fiscally responsible than those with far greater resources prove to be. Immediately, the defense of their consumer habits, however, rests on the assertion that wealthier parents and children have more latitude, while poor parents must be ever so careful about how they spend their money. There is a cruelty to such an observation, however; not only is the poor parent, or child, at a great disadvantage economically, but they are expected to be more judicious and responsible than their well-to-do counterparts, with far fewer resources. Moreover, the materialism that obviously can strike poor folk as well is, nevertheless, far less likely to do them or society as much harm as it does those with far greater wealth in our country. The perception that the meager
resources of the poor are somehow atrociously misspent on expensive consumer items is far out of proportion to the facts of the case. And to begrudge poor parents the desire to provide their children some of the trinkets of capital in a profoundly rapacious consumer culture that endlessly promotes acquiring things as a mark of status and citizenship (didn’t George Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, direct Americans to prove they were uncowed by terrorists by returning to the stores?) is plain dishonest.

Perhaps Cosby has forgotten what it was like to be young, black and poor, or to be hungry for even more capital in the wake of a real first taste of money and the comforts it can bring.
Ebony
magazine reports that when Cosby was asked in 1965 why he entered the acting field, he had a one-word reply: “Money!”
⁴⁶
He told the
Saturday Evening Post
that “I’ve got no great artistic ambitions. What show business mainly means to me is cash.”
⁴⁷
Neither should we forget that Cosby was once, and for a long while, one of the most recognized and successful pitchmen in American history, promoting products to the American public—from Jell-O to Ford automobiles, from Coca-Cola to E. F. Hutton—for our eager consumption. (It is not hard to imagine that Cosby, had he come along at the right time, might have pushed $250 sneakers [they don’t cost $500, but we got his point], engaging in what cultural theorists term “the social construction of desire.”) It even led to a brief, pungent, satirical editorial by Edward Sorel, “The Noble Cos,” in
The Nation
in 1986 that assumes Cosby’s voice: “So this buddy says, ‘I didn’t mind your commercials for Jello, Del Monte, Ford cars . . . Ideal Toys, or
Cola-Cola, although Coke does do business in South Africa. . . . But, Bill, why do commercials for those crooks at E. F. Hutton?’ My buddy didn’t understand my commercials improve race relations. Y’see, by showing that a black man can be just as money-hungry as a white man . . . I’m proving that all men are brothers.”
⁴⁸

Cosby’s insistence, in his infamous May 2004 speech and on National Public Radio’s
Talk of the Nation
in July 2004, that black youth are anti-intellectual because they chide high achievement as “acting white,” repeats what is the academic equivalent of an urban legend.
⁴⁹
Claiming that black youth are anti-intellectual is pretending somehow that
America
is not consumed with anti-intellectualism. Cosby’s claim has the dubious virtue of being both true and uninformative. It is not that black anti-intellectualism doesn’t exist, shouldn’t be admitted, or doesn’t reveal itself in ways that need to be vigorously opposed. But it is highly misleading to tag black communities as any more anti-intellectual than the mainstream. Richard Hofstadter wrote a book in 1963 entitled
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
.
⁵⁰
He blamed McCarthyism’s withering assault in the 1950s on “the critical mind” and the choice of Dwight D. Eisenhower—who, as Hofstadter says, was “conventional in mind [and] relatively inarticulate”—over Adlai Stevenson—whom Hofstadter termed “a politician of uncommon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed anything in recent history”—as the defining moments of modern anti-intellectualism.
⁵¹
(One wonders if Hofstadter might today see parallels in the choice of George W. Bush over Al Gore, or even John
Kerry, though Bush isn’t Eisenhower and Gore and Kerry aren’t Stevenson.)

But, according to Hofstadter, the plague of anti-intellectualism is even more ancient than the 1950s. Hofstadter says that “[o]ur anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity.”
⁵²
And a recent National Endowment for the Arts report says that book reading has dramatically declined in the United States over the last ten years.
⁵³
Neither is the anxiety especially American: There is hand-wringing over anti-intellectualism around the globe. There is the study that decries the effect of modernization on Russian youth, saying that anti-intellectualism might result if Russian intellectual life is ignored while Western education is celebrated.
⁵⁴
And then there is the study, first done in the ’60s and replicated in the ’80s, of anti-intellectualism among Korean teachers because they favored athletic and nonstudious pupils over academically brilliant, studious and nonathletic pupils.
⁵⁵
That certainly shreds the myth of the Asian model minority. And then there is the study of “Victorian Anti-Intellectualism.”
⁵⁶
The twist here is that it was the middle and upper classes who scorned intellectual engagement. Cosby should take note: They weren’t worried about Puffy; they were putting down Puffendorf!

The notion that black youth who are smart and who study hard are accused by their black peers of “acting white” is rooted in a single 1986 study of a Washington, D.C., high school conducted by Signithia Fordham, a black anthropologist at Rutgers University, and John Ogbu, the late Nigerian professor of anthropology at the University of California at
Berkeley.
⁵⁷
According to Fordham and Ogbu, many black students at the school didn’t study and deliberately got bad grades because their classmates thought they were “selling out” and “acting white.” Fordham and Ogbu’s study has gained iconic status in the anecdotage not only of Cosby but of figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the pages of the
New York Times
and Barack Obama in his thrilling keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.
⁵⁸

The trouble with such citations is that they help to circulate and give legitimacy to a theory that is in large part untrue. First, in 1997, Duke professor Philip J. Cook and Georgetown professor Jens Ludwig set out to determine, through field research, if the alleged grief visited upon those black students who study actually existed.
⁵⁹
While Fordham and Ogbu studied one school, Cook and Ludwig studied 25,000 public and private school students, following them from eighth grade through high school. Cook and Ludwig concluded that black students were just as eager to excel in school as whites and that black students dropped out of school only slightly more than white students, largely due to low family incomes or absent fathers.
⁶⁰
Cook and Ludwig discovered that blacks and whites with similar family characteristics cut class, missed school and completed homework at nearly the same rate.
⁶¹

Cook and Ludwig uncovered an intriguing fact: that the black students who were members of academic honor societies were
more
likely than other black students to view themselves as “popular.” Further, they found that students who belonged to honor societies in predominantly black schools
were more popular than their peers who had not received such an honor. Cook and Ludwig concluded that there was little evidence to support the notion of an oppositional peer culture to black academic achievement. In fact, other studies suggest that the parents of black students are more likely than white or Asian parents to have assisted their children with their homework or met with their children’s teachers, and just as likely to encourage them to put forth their best effort in school. Black parents are more likely than white parents to place their children in educational camps, attend PTA meetings, check their children’s homework and reward their children for academic success.
⁶²
Moreover, while only 6 percent of white students in grades 6 through 12 reported discussing national news events with a parent on a daily basis, 26 percent of black students in comparable grades reported that they did so.
⁶³
And there is evidence that high school black peer groups were more likely than comparable white peer groups to believe that it is important to study hard and get good grades, leading to the conclusion that white, not black, academic peer culture opposes academic achievement.
⁶⁴

More recently, University of North Carolina professors Karolyn Tyson, a sociologist, and William Darity, Jr., an economist, coordinated an eighteen-month ethnographic study of eleven schools in North Carolina and concluded that black and white students are fundamentally the same when it comes to the desire to succeed, knowing that doing well in school can positively impact later life, and feeling good about themselves when they do well.
⁶⁵
They also concluded that when anti-intellectual activity occurs in white culture, “it is
seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as racial neurosis.”
⁶⁶
The authors also argue that the single case where they found any evidence of the anxiety of “acting white” occurred at a school where there was an overrepresentation of whites in gifted-and-talented classes and a drastic underrepresentation of black students. But the anxiety occurred most frequently not among the students, but among the teachers and administrators, who accused the black students of being “averse to success” and placing a low value on education, underscoring how racial hierarchy and the social mythology of low black academic desire collude to deprive black students of an equal education.
⁶⁷

Finally, Cosby’s remarks about black youth and the criminal justice system are incredibly naïve, mean-spirited or woefully uninformed. While it is true that most black men who are incarcerated are not “political prisoners,” that doesn’t mean that their imprisonment doesn’t have political contexts and consequences. For instance, Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs”—which, as both Lani Guinier and Tupac Shakur contended, is a war on black and brown people—inaugurated changes in public policy and policing measures (leading eventually to racial profiling) that greatly increased the odds that blacks would do serious time for nonviolent, and often first-time, offenses. This political decision had grave, and foreseeable, consequences that disproportionately affected young blacks: They were more likely to become incarcerated. The increase of black incarceration was driven by political considerations, not a boost in, for instance, drug consumption. In
fact, self-report surveys of students and adults suggest that black folk do not report greater rates of illegal drug consumption than do whites. In fact, it’s often lower. For instance, in 2003, 26.5 percent of white students in the twelfth grade reported using illegal drugs within the past thirty days; for the same cohort among blacks, it was just 17.9 percent.
⁶⁸
However, by a huge margin, black folk are much more likely to be arrested and to serve real prison time for drug-related offenses. This situation is unavoidably, unmistakably political, contrary to what Cosby contends.