Michael Eric Dyson (3 page)

Cosby’s comments betray the ugly generational divide in black America. His disregard for the hip-hop generation is not unique, but it is still disheartening. Cosby’s poisonous view of young folk who speak a language he can barely parse simmers with hostility and resentment. And yet, some of the engaged critique he seeks to make of black folk—of their materialism, their consumptive desires, their personal choices, their moral aspirations, their social conscience—is broadcast with much more imagination and insight in certain quarters of hip-hop culture. (Think of Kanye West’s track, “All Falls Down,” which displays a self-critical approach to the link between consumption and the effort to ward off racial degradation.)
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Cosby detests youth for their hip-hop dress, body piercing and the pseudo-African-sounding names they have. Yet, body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines. There are generational tensions over self-definition; arguments over clothes and body markings reflect class, age and intracultural conflicts as well. I think that, contrary to Cosby’s argument, it
does
have something to do with the African roots of black identity, and perhaps with Cosby’s ignorance of and discomfort with those roots. And Cosby’s ornery, ill-informed diatribe against black naming is a snapshot of his assault on poor black identity. Names like Shaniqua and Taliqua are meaningful cultural expressions of self-determination and allow relatively powerless blacks to fashion their identities outside the glare of
white society. And it didn’t just start in this generation. Cosby’s inability to discern the difference between Taliqua and Muhammad, an ancient Muslim name, is as remarkable as it is depressing—and bigoted in its rebuff to venerable forms of black identity and culture.

Cosby’s comments don’t exist in a cultural or political vacuum. His views have traction in conservative (and some liberal) circles because they bolster the belief that
less
money, political action and societal intervention—and more hard work and personal responsibility—are the key to black success. While Cosby can surely afford to ignore what white folk think, the majority of black folk can’t reasonably dismiss whites in influential places. Cosby has said that he’s not worried about how the white right wing might use his speech, but it certainly fits nicely with their twisted views of the black poor. The poor folk Cosby has hit the hardest are most vulnerable to the decisions of the powerful groups of which he has demanded the least: public policy makers, the business and social elite, and political activists. Poor black folk cannot gain asylum from the potentially negative effects of Cosby’s words on public policy makers and politicians who decide to put into play measures that support Cosby’s narrow beliefs.

Cosby also contends that black folk can’t blame white folk for our plight. His discounting of structural forces and his exclusive focus on personal responsibility, and black self-help, ignore the persistence of the institutional racism Cosby lamented in his dissertation. To be sure, even when black folk argued for social justice, we never neglected the simultaneous pursuit of personal responsibility and self-help, since that’s
often the only help we had. In the end, Cosby’s views may make white and black liberal fence-sitters unfairly critical of the black poor. Cosby may even convince them that personal behavior will help the poor more than social programs, thus letting white and black elites off the hook. There is a strong counterpoint to Cosby’s evasive, and dismissive, racial politics in his own home. I think it is important to recall the famous letter Cosby’s wife, Camille, penned in 1998 in
USA Today
—written in the aftermath of the tragic murder of their son by a Russian immigrant, excoriating America for teaching her son’s murderer the bigotry that fueled his lethal act. Unlike Cosby’s comments, Camille’s essay drew the ire and rebuke of pundits and the political establishment. Camille Cosby was told that America provided the opportunity for her husband to become a rich artist. By contrast, Bill Cosby’s remarks were embraced by the same establishment, as Cosby was praised for his self-help strategy of pulling himself up from poverty to plenty. Thus, these critics want it both ways. I think when it comes to the issues at hand, contrasting Camille’s letter and Cosby’s remarks proves that she is the Cosby with genuine insight into race relations.

It is clear that Cosby has touched a raw nerve of class and generation in black America. What he said—and our response to it—goes far beyond a single speech before a group of blacks who were celebrating the achievements of the past. This story is so powerful and controversial, and continues to resonate in our society, because it goes to the heart of the struggle for the identity of a culture. It also embodies the different visions put forth by older and younger members of the
race. In a sense, Cosby is Moses, Elijah and King Lear rolled into one. Like Moses, he has laid down the law, but he is realizing, as we all must at some point, that he may not get the chance to see the Promised Land in his own day. The sweet reward of hard work slips through the hands as easily as water in a rushing stream. But finally, as it says in the book of Hebrews, “these all died in faith not having received the promises.”
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We must all face the reality at some point that the fulfillment of our hopes and dreams is ever in the distance, flung to a horizon that recedes as we march forward, and can only be brought closer in the collective push ahead, and often not through one’s own energy but through the efforts of some Joshua—the younger helper of Moses, the one God appointed to lead the people after Moses’ great journey came to a close. It’s hard to hand over the reins and embrace the transition, but it must be done. This doesn’t mean that old prophets and sages are of no use; it means they must learn to coexist with an upcoming phalanx of rebels with new spirits and vision. Even if they wear dreads and baggy pants or speak in ways foreign to the elders.

Like Elijah, Cosby has thrown in the towel and embraced his frustration; like Elijah, he has said, “It is enough!”
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Elijah felt that he was the only one left to do God’s work and that everyone else had sold out to godless hedonism and corrupt morality. But God told Elijah to rest up, since he was exhausted—Cosby, too, has said, “I’m a tired man”—and, after replenishing himself, to recognize God not in the thunder but in the still small voice, in the serenity of inner circumstances that nourish hope. And then God pointed out to
Elijah that there were literally thousands more who had a righteous cause and who were not in Elijah’s camp. Cosby must accept that others have the truth, too, and that they are working in their own way to make things better—for the race, the culture, the community and our struggle.

And finally, like King Lear, Cosby is at war with his children, feeling their fatal betrayal of his fatherly leadership, saying, as did Lear, that “I am more sinned against than sinning.” That, to be sure, is the claim of every generation, of every visionary who feels that the people he has loved and brought along have somehow fatally departed from the path of wisdom and morality when they go their own way. There are undoubtedly lethal circumstances afoot in black America, and we do indeed need the voices of the elders to ring out and the wisdom of the fathers and mothers to resonate loudly. But transition and transformation bring inevitable struggles between generations, or at least between their leading lights, and sometimes the wrestling is bloody and unraveling. We must resist the temptation to take refuge in hurt feelings and raging resentment as we grapple with how our children live, or choose to leave us, or even how we handle our recognition of their betrayals and disaffections. Loyalty to particular figures may not be as important, in the end, as loyalty to the cause of enlarging the hopes of the individual and racial family.

The conversation that Cosby has started endures because the people who must engage him, and the issues he has raised, are likewise enduring. Thus, what Cosby said reflects on the griefs and hopes and losses and pains of an entire generation of noble men and women who nonetheless, like the rest of us,
are human and at times frail and misled. We must learn from each other, listen to each other, correct each other and struggle with each other if the destiny of our people is to be secure. And we must fight for the best that is within our reach, even if that means disagreeing with icons and resisting the myopia of mighty men. What Cosby started is left to us to finish.

For most of his career Bill Cosby has avoided race with religious zeal. His role as racial prophet to lower-class blacks, therefore, screams of irony and suggests Cosby’s profound confusion and the tragic misuse of his fame to assault the poor. By
tracing his career against the backdrop of race, we gain a clearer understanding of how Cosby’s present position departs dangerously from his storied path—and how that departure signals the sacrifice of his principles and points to his being way out of his depth. I think Cosby’s faults are both poor comprehension and thin description of the problems he sees.

Cosby came of age during a shift in cultural sensibilities that shaped comedy’s landscape. Stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory cast off the social conformity of the 1950s and sank their comic fangs into the repressed psyches and repressive politics of Cold War America. Gregory built on the work of black comics who were among the first to perform before mainstream crowds, including Timmie Rogers, Nipsey Russell, George Kirby and Slappy White.
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But his penetrating racial observations catapulted Gregory to greater acclaim and a bigger white audience than any black comic before him. By the time Cosby burst onto the national scene (joined later by Godfrey Cambridge, Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor), Gregory’s influence was at once mythic and smothering. Any young black comic hoping to share even a fraction of Gregory’s spotlight would have to shine with the gifts Gregory bequeathed: acerbic attacks on the color line, witty self-mockery and telling the truth about black life in white America.

At first, Cosby was content in Gregory’s shadow. He did his best to harness the master’s rhetorical fire. He conjured just enough anger to be authentically black in the comic mold Gregory had forged. The
New York Times
took notice of young Cosby and lauded him for “hurling verbal spears at the
relations between whites and Negroes.”
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Soon Cosby gave up hope of matching Gregory’s wily racial shtick. “I was telling racial jokes then,” Cosby recalled in 1964. “You know, the biting, witty kind about the Negro’s role in America. But pretty soon critics began to regard me as a sort of hip Nipsey Russell and a Philadelphia Dick Gregory. Well, I decided then and there that I had to be original if I wanted to fulfill my aspirations of becoming a big man in show business.”
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Cosby’s originality lay in reclaiming the comedic and literary past to fashion a distinctive comic style. He told stories about his childhood, football and public transportation, sprawling, jazz-like tales that unfolded over as much as half an hour, just like the stories he had heard his mother read to him from the writings of Mark Twain, the brothers Grimm, Swift and the Bible.
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But Cosby’s revamped comic vision was even more radical: He would discard the use of color in his comedy since it was little more than a “crutch.”
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Cosby was challenged by a fellow comic’s argument that if he changed color tomorrow he’d have no material, sending him in search of jokes that bypassed pigment. He took comfort in neither the spoiled clichés of color nor the comic relief they offered. Cosby was even convinced of the divisive consequences of racial humor. “Color humor, like off-color humor, makes audiences uncomfortable,” Cosby said in 1965. “When I began telling racial jokes, the Negroes looked at the whites, the whites at the Negroes, and no one laughed—and then I had to tell the jokes all over again. So I tried reaching all the public, so folks would say, ‘Hey, man, here’s a Negro who doesn’t use racial
material.’”
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Cosby’s resort to color-blind rhetoric wasn’t simply a means to bridge the racial gap in his audiences; it also suggested his philosophy of race beyond the comedy club. “I don’t think you can bring the races together by joking about the differences between them. I’d rather talk about the similarities, about what’s universal in their experiences.”
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Cosby’s determined effort to keep race from coloring his life and career gained more visibility when he won a role in 1965 alongside Robert Culp on NBC’s
I Spy
. As one half of an interracial duo who trotted the globe entangled in espionage, Cosby shattered television’s race barrier as the first Negro to star in a network series, leading
Variety
magazine to tag him “TV’s Jackie Robinson.”
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Cosby’s meteoric rise made news, but just as much ink was devoted to his racial politics as to his acting, which, as a twenty-seven-year-old novice, he had surely not refined. The press noted Cosby’s adroit stereotype-shattering—his character on
I Spy
had been a Rhodes Scholar, was fluent in seven languages and didn’t sing, dance or widen his eyes in paroxysms of fear like so many black actors before him were forced to do. But they couldn’t resist noting that Cosby’s race on the series was no big deal at all, a point that made him the darling of many white critics.