Michael Eric Dyson (8 page)

First, by attacking the poor, Cosby has made tragic use of his public capital. Despite black folk criticizing and begging him for forty years, Cosby has refused to explore race in his comedy, rejected the role of crusader or leader on issues of race and resisted bearing the burdens of racial representation in public with grace. Not only has Cosby refused to speak
for
black folk, but he has refused, with rare exception, to speak
against
a host of ills during his day, including white supremacy, unfair housing practices, segregated public accommodations, Jim Crow laws, unequal health insurance, racial disparities in wealth, disproportionately high infant mortality rates, unjust criminal justice sentencing practices, unequal higher education access, environmental racism, crumbling ghetto infrastructures, lead poisoning and asbestos consumption among poor children, and, on the evening he made his infamous remarks about the ghetto poor at a ceremony commemorating
Brown v. Board
, the persistent and harmful resegregation of black children in schools across the country.

Cosby has chosen instead to direct one of the most powerful and influential voices in the culture, and one of the brightest media spotlights in the land,
against
some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, who are in need of support and love, not humiliation and belittlement. It is tempting to dismiss Cosby as a crotchety, self-loathing hypocrite—after all, he has suffered, sometimes publicly, from some of the very ills he deplores (including admission of an affair and charges of a child out of wedlock, though the latter claim has not been proved). But that would be too easy and in some ways unfair, since Cosby’s claims are either true or false regardless of his moral status. However, Cosby’s standing does have relevance in discussing whether or not he has been able to as strictly adhere to his lessons as he counsels. As we shall see later, he hasn’t.

Cosby’s media assault has been defended by those who say he’s built up sufficient capital to diss poor blacks through his majestic philanthropy over the years. (The word literally means “love of humanity,” but writers have also warned of the concentration of power in the hands of the few in a “philanthocracy” that is peculiarly American, and distinctly plutocratic.)
⁶⁸
But that’s like saying that it’s all right to rape a young lady because you’ve given a million dollars to a women’s college. One is never granted permission to do wrong as the reward for doing right. One can’t accumulate enough goodwill to undermine the common good of the neediest members of our culture.

Second, Cosby has lurched far beyond the circumference of his talent in making sweeping social pronouncements on
race. It is not merely a matter of whether one agrees or not with Cosby; it is the fact that Cosby has not been practiced or articulate in matters of public negotiation with the subtleties, nuances and complexities of racial rhetoric. He has been ingenious, if misled, in creating comedy that has insisted on the nonexistence of race as the condition of our agreement on universally recognized values. In his nonracial comedy, Cosby has been sharp, luminous, humorous and sometimes sophisticated. Even when he was feigning anger or enacting bluster, he was usually analytically generous—that is, in his search for the roots of the behavior he lampooned, he was willing to cede the humanity of the people he surveyed. Cosby was often lucid and elegantly improvisational, even multivocal, playing to his strengths in routines honed over a brilliant stand-up career where, like a jazz artist, he constructed narratives of sometimes haunting ethical beauty that offered insight into the human condition.

In striking contrast, as a social critic of late, Cosby, in his observations about the black poor, is flat, univocal, literal, his monologue marred by dreadful analysis and wailing monotones, his speech bruised by disgust and nearly uncontrollable contempt. In the past, he has been mostly unwilling to speak up in traditional, representational fashion when it might count for the poor black people he now attacks. One of his defenders even admitted that “Cosby would not be at his best as a professional civil rights leader, a Black Panther, or the head of a poverty program.”
⁶⁹
Or, he might add, as a social critic. Although Cosby has chided
the black poor for failing those brave blacks who “marched and were hit in the face with rocks,” he fails to mention that when he had the chance to join the pioneers he now pits against the poor, he reneged. “I don’t want to go someplace where they’re throwing rocks unless I have some rocks to throw back,” Cosby said.
⁷⁰
And when he went on the
Phil Donahue Show
in 1985, he resented being asked about the black culture whose poor members he now unhesitatingly discusses. “I am not an authority on blackness,” Cosby angrily insisted. “I didn’t come on this program to discuss blackness. I came on this show to discuss human beings and let’s get into that. . . . I don’t want to spend the time when a black person shows up on a show talking about blackness and what you all have to do in order to make America better. . . . Right now, why don’t you see if I can be a h-u-m-a-n b-e-i-n-g.”
⁷¹

Cosby’s recent crusade underscores how much he has contradicted his color-blind, leader-reluctant principles, and suggests the manner in which he has scarily ranged far from his arena of competence. On the
Donahue Show,
when audience members wanted to learn Cosby’s views on racial matters and to know what they could do to improve race relations, he rebuffed them with surprising gruffness. Apparently Cosby was neither ready nor willing to impart his wisdom. Only now he can’t keep quiet; the unguarded words tumble from his mouth in unforgiving fury. And they hurt poor black people much more than anything Cosby has done to help them in the past. His relentless attack is symptomatic of the huge generational
and class divide in black America. Our response is a measure of our willingness to meet him on the intellectual and cultural battlefield and provide good reasons why he is wrong. The reputation of millions of young people and poor folk hangs in the balance.

Bill Cosby, by his own admission, was a bad student, and “compiled a lackluster academic record from the moment he set foot in school.”
¹
His sixth-grade teacher noted on his report card that “William would rather clown than study.”
²
He dropped out of high school after he flunked the tenth grade
three
times. He enlisted in the navy, where he got his GED, and then enrolled at Temple University, where he dropped out to pursue a show business career. His unfinished bachelor’s degree from Temple was eventually bestowed on him because of “life experience.”
³
Cosby enrolled as a part-time doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, which awarded him the Ed.D. degree in 1977 for a dissertation on
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
. But not even that degree was unsullied by controversy: A professor who served on Cosby’s dissertation committee, Reginald Damerell, said that Cosby hardly took a class—and that he got course credit for appearing on
Sesame Street
and
The Electric Company
, “and wrote a dissertation that analyzed the impact of his show.”
⁴
Damerell concluded that degrees like Cosby’s “do not attest to genuine academic achievement. They are empty credentials.”
⁵
(While I think Damerell’s conclusion is harsh and unfair, it does underscore the ironic route Cosby has traveled to become nearly as acclaimed for his educational pedigree as for his comedic genius.) Given his difficult educational background, it’s a good thing Cosby didn’t have Bill Cosby around to discourage him from achieving his goals by citing statistics about black high school dropouts that don’t square with the facts. It’s a shame that Cosby skewered the victims of educational neoapartheid, the very folk that
Brown v. Board
sought to help, instead of pointing to the social inequities and disparities in resources that continue to make American schools “separate and unequal.” And for Cosby to overlook how the criminal justice system mercilessly feeds on social inequality is just as tragic.

It may be partially accurate to describe the contemporary social and educational landscape for blacks in Dickensian terms: It is the best and worst of times, but only if we admit that one’s perception of the times rests on rigid class divisions in black communities. For an expanded black middle class, which enjoys unprecedented success at work and in school,
the times are much better than before
Brown
, though exorbitant optimism must be chastened by the racist barriers that remain. In 1954, the year of the
Brown
decision, the neonatal mortality rate for blacks per one thousand live births registered at 27 percent, compared to 17.8 percent for whites. The maternal mortality rates per one thousand live births were 14.4 percent for blacks and only 3.7 percent for whites. The average black household income was $2,890, 55 percent of the white average of $5,228. In 1952, black illiteracy for those age fourteen and above was 10.2 percent, five times the 1.8 percent level of white illiteracy. At the time, more than a quarter of black males had no more than four years of schooling, compared to less than 9 percent for white males.
⁶