Bill Cosby is Not the Cure
An Editorial on Social Responsibility
Do I think that African Americans are oppressed? Statistically there's proof. There are proportionally more Black poor than any other ethnicity in the country saving a growing number of poor Latino Americans; there are statistically many more Black men in prison than there are white or Latino. But the pressing question for me isn't whether or not African Americans are oppressed in this country as a whole; it's why we continue to look for blame for our oppressions rather than fix them. Bill Cosby thinks we should simply lay our buckets where they are, pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and get on back out to work. I hope to God he knows better than to assume that's realistic.
The problem of the 20th century, Dr. DuBois said, was the problem of the color line. By the time Brown Vs. The Board of Education came along in the Supreme Court, Dubois' then 50-year-old warning had just begun to be solved: integration legislation was a matter solely of freeing up resources to black folks, a reaction to moral appeals by groups like the SCLC and to open threats from ex-UNIA members and NOI ministers; it had nothing to do with changing the nation's mind - as it very well should have tried to do. Since the government at the time (i.e., old white men) was still largely representative of the ruling class of the country (i.e., old white men), it was assumed that they'd throw the Voting and Civil Rights Acts into the larger cannon in hopes to quell the image of oppression so blatantly upheld before. And it took another thirty years for any significant amount of black folk to see the actual benefits on a scale greater than two or three percent of the population.
By the time the Black Middle class emerged as a political force outside of the Urban League and NAACP in the eighties, Bill Cosby had been rich for over three decades while most people were still trying to catch up to median living standards. By the time the color- and socio-economic lines finally began to blur (gradually into this century,) our favorite Jello representative and the single most loved entertainer in Black America forgot about the entire last century and condemned his sons and daughters as ..lower economic people.. who weren..t doing their part to survive. He forgot that the community at large got less and less organized as our median incomes gradually rose to where they are today. So he lost my respect as a young man and as a member of the black community.
Why do I think, then, that the Black community continues to be oppressed? It's not because we haven't the work ethic to "pull ourselves by our bootstraps" as he suggests we do, or that our language skills are less than those in power, or that we truly lack the resources to achieve ethical means of living in our own country. If we have a weakness at all, it's in our inability to rebuild the broken wills of those who haven't come above the life of the continual working- to- unemployed poor; it's that we as a Middle class long told ourselves that we were somehow better than those who didn't make it. It's that we send people like Bill Cosby to reinforce the notions that those on the bottom of the food chain will remain there for the rest of their lives. We owe ourselves not lectures and blame, but solutions.
Published by David Harewood
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I'm all right with self-reliance; in fact, I find most of the Democratic party to be lost in an obnoxious white liberalism that tends to do little but breed contempt. And in temrs of my needing to "listen" to dr. Cosby, consider this: he was raised in an era in which communities were real and viable and strong. They were smaller, it's true; that might have been the reasonf or their strength. He was preaching at an audience of people without a community, surrounded by folks who never trust anyone. Dr. Cosby forgot that.