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Last Updated: Jul 21, 2008 - 9:40:23 AM |
The conversation about race that Barack Obama says America needs is
already in full swing—and it is a conversation among blacks. Its spark
was a speech that TV star Bill Cosby gave at the NAACP in 2004. In
books and articles, on talk shows and in town meetings, at barbecues
and barber shops, African-Americans have been arguing over his words
ever since. Their impassioned discussion is the most hopeful
development in race relations in years.
With a 50 percent high school dropout rate and a 70 percent
illegitimacy rate, with African-Americans committing half the nation’s
murders though only 13 percent of the population, black
America—especially the poorer part of it—is in trouble. “We cannot
blame white people,” Cosby asserted in his incendiary speech
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board school
desegregation decision. “It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what
we’re not doing.” As Jesse Jackson used to say, Cosby recalls, “No one
can save us from us but us.”
Sure, racism hasn’t vanished, Cosby acknowledges in his 2007 book Come
On People, a follow-up to his speech written with Harvard psychiatrist
Alvin Poussaint. “But for all the talk of systemic racism and
governmental screw-ups, we must look at ourselves and understand our
own responsibility.” Even with lingering discrimination, “there are
more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before
in the history of America,” and “these doors are tall enough and wide
enough” for just about all black people “to walk through with their
heads held high.” So while “there are forces that make the effort to
escape poverty difficult,” African-Americans are by no means merely the
playthings of vast forces and helpless victims of racism. “When people
tell you, ‘You can’t get up, you’re a victim,’ ” Cosby warns, “that’s
when you know it is the devil you’re hearing.”
Why do so many blacks, especially men, find it so hard to grasp the
opportunity that is theirs for the taking? Why are “so many of our
black youth squandering their freedom?” Cosby and Poussaint’s answer is
that the social structure and culture of poor black neighborhoods
distort the psychology of the children who grow up there, often
shackling them in “psychological slavery.” The authors zero in on the
permanently destructive effects of fractured families and slapdash
child rearing—much more slapdash than middle-class parents, with their
years spent nurturing, encouraging, and cajoling their children, could
easily imagine. “In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in,
parenting is not going on,” Cosby told the NAACP. “You have the pile-up
of these sweet beautiful things born by nature—raised by no one.”
Certainly their fathers aren’t raising them. That 70 percent
illegitimacy rate, troubling in itself, isn’t evenly distributed but is
concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where it soars above 85 percent and
can approach 100 percent. “A house without a father is a challenge,”
Cosby and Poussaint write. “A neighborhood without fathers is a
catastrophe.” That’s because mothers “have difficulty showing a son how
to be a man,” a truly toxic problem when there are no father figures
around to show boys how to channel their natural aggressiveness in
constructive ways. Worse still, the authors muse, “We wonder if much of
these kids’ rage was born when their fathers abandoned them.”
To come into the world already abandoned by your father is damaging
enough, but Come On People teems with children abandoned by their
mothers as well. Many end up among America’s half-million foster
children, two-thirds of whom—more than 300,000 abused or cast-off
souls—are black. We meet a Kentuckian born in a housing project and
taken away from her jailed, drug-addicted mother at the age of six.
After a string of foster homes and group facilities, she began doing
“drugs, alcohol, shoplifting, gangbanging, hustling. I was in and out
of jail,” she says. “I was angry. I would fight at the drop of a dime.”
We hear of an eight-year-old smash-and-grab burglar abandoned even more
abruptly. A cop tells the authors about catching him. The boy wouldn’t
say one word, beyond the address of his housing-project home. The
officer drove the boy there, followed him into his apartment, and saw
his mother on the sofa. The boy finally spoke. “She’s dead, ain’t she?”
And she was, with the needle that killed her lying on the floor. The
boy calmly ate a bowl of cereal as he watched the cop deal with the
body.
We hear of children abandoned emotionally if not literally. Another cop
tells of a seven-year-old he picked up for bashing out car windows.
“I’m very good at making these kids cry,” the cop said. “But this one,
I couldn’t touch him.” He drove the kid home to what looked like a
shack. The boy opened the door, and there was his mother on a mattress
on the floor, having sex. The boy walked past the couple “and sealed
himself off behind a curtain.” The man fled; the mother signed the form
the cop held out to her, “pulled the covers over her head, and left her
son standing mutely behind the curtain.”
These are the extreme cases, but even among normal poor black
single-parent families Cosby and Poussaint find child-rearing patterns
that prime kids for failure. Since the authors believe that too many
black adults “are giving up their main responsibility to look after
their children,” they make a portion of their book a child-raising
handbook—an inner-city Dr. Spock—whose sound, simply stated advice
makes clear what they think is going wrong in numerous ghetto families.
Their optimistic, encouraging precepts, in spite of themselves, lift
the curtain on a world of heartrending childhood sorrow and suffering,
which ordinarily no one comes to help or comfort, and which leaves
scars that never heal.
Above all, they counsel, spare the rod. “Many black parents use
physical punishment—not just spanking, but also hitting, slapping, and
beating kids with objects,” they report. Indeed, “many black parents
have told us that physical punishment is part of black culture.” But,
Cosby and Poussaint warn, “when they beat their kids they are sending a
message that it is okay to use violence to resolve conflicts,” rather
than helping them develop self-control and a sense of right and wrong.
Too often, physical punishment turns into child abuse; too often,
parents (or caregivers, especially the mother’s boyfriend) “beat their
kids, not to discipline them, but to exorcise their own demons. . . .
They take their anger out on the child,” who “serves as a ‘whupping’
object for peevish adults. . . . These beatings often produce angry
children who treat others as violently as they have been treated.” The
prisons are bursting with grown-up abused children.
In addition to physical abuse, Cosby and Poussaint observe, we’ve all
cringed at hearing inner-city mothers abusing kids verbally as well,
making them feel worthless and unwanted. “Words like ‘You’re stupid,’
‘You’re an idiot,’ ‘I’m sorry you were born,’ or ‘You’ll never amount
to anything’ can stick a dagger in a child’s heart.” Single mothers
angry with men, whether their current boyfriends or their children’s
fathers, regularly transfer their rage to their sons, since they’re
afraid to take it out on the adult males. “If they hear their mom say,
‘Black men ain’t worth s—-,’ the boys wonder whether that includes
them. When their moms yell, ‘You’re no good, just like your father!’
all the doubt goes away.” When such racially tinged verbal abuse takes
the form of “ ‘Nigger, I’ll kick your f——— black a—,’ ” the child ends
up ashamed of being black, as well—a danger anyway in a society where
rumors of black inferiority still echo, if more faintly.
One of black America’s most disabling problems, Cosby and Poussaint
think, is this wounded anger—of children toward parents, women toward
men, men toward their mothers and women in general. Some try
self-sedation, whether by “wallowing in sedated victimhood,” by music
“loud enough to wake the dead,” by “a lover or some crack or, if
nothing else, a bag of burgers.” Another way that “black men have tried
to maintain their dignity and to keep control of their anger is by
being ‘cool.’ . . . Many who feel abandoned by a parent protect
themselves from being hurt by putting on a cool detachment.” Trouble
is, beyond becoming emotionally frigid, they too easily lose their cool
and explode in violence. Still, their effort is better than the
hotheadedness of today’s young black gangstas, as touchy and ready to
duel to the death as the Three Musketeers. “He dissed me so I shot him”
is now a common ghetto refrain, Cosby and Poussaint report. Hence
African-Americans account for 44 percent of U.S. prisoners; six out of
ten black high school dropouts have been in prison before they hit the
age of 40; and what Cosby and Poussaint call “a culture of imprisonment
devastates black families and communities.”
We are celebrating a great civil rights victory, Cosby told the NAACP.
People actually present in the audience “marched and were hit in the
face with rocks” so that black kids could get a decent education. But
now? “What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants
it?” What did those brave marchers achieve if, 50 years later, half of
African-American kids drop out of high school and can’t speak standard
English—especially since all it takes to get started in today’s more
open America is a high school diploma and the ability to impress
potential bosses as articulate, polite, and dependable?
This failure, too, is largely a failure of parenting. Yes, ghetto
schools are bad, Cosby and Poussaint acknowledge, and parents can’t fix
them. “But you can make the best use of what you have to get the best
you can for your child,” they advise. You can make sure he does his
homework and pays attention in class. And much of what a kid learns he
learns at home, after all—especially in his crucial first five years.
“Talking and reading to infants and children help lay down the physical
structures in the brain to develop skills in language,” the authors
point out.
But many ghetto moms aren’t imparting the language and cognitive skills
without which children can’t succeed once they get to school. “Teachers
report that in poor neighborhoods children often begin school not
knowing their colors or the letters of the alphabet,” Cosby and
Poussaint write. “Some have limited vocabularies and little knowledge
of numbers. Some don’t even know that sheep go ‘Baaa.’ ” These deficits
are hard to correct later on. Indeed, “sharp-eyed teachers can identify
the children who will become high school dropouts the day they walk in
the kindergarten door.” The damage is already done.
Readers of Come On People and the thousands who waited for hours to
hear Cosby press home his message in dozens of free town meetings
nationwide will surely profit from his levelheaded advice. They, and
thousands more like them, will talk to their kids (in standard English
and in a tone that doesn’t “sound like a prison guard”), listen to
them, read to them, encourage them, discipline them with gentle
firmness, limit their TV watching, and never give up on them. But these
are the caring parents. The problem is the ones who don’t care—who
don’t understand, as a California doctor tells Cosby, that “you have a
choice as to whether to have children or not” and to “decide who gets
to be your baby’s daddy,” and that once you’ve made that decision,
“both of you are supposed to have something to do with that child for
the rest of its life.” The problem is the girls who view sex, in
Cosby’s terms, as “You see me. I see you. You want it. . . . We’re both
hot. Now let’s do it”—the girls who have “five or six different
children—same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever.”
What will become of all these “kids with different fathers,” who
“compete, often unequally, for whatever attention is going around,” so
that (as with the offspring of polygamous sheikhs) “there is bound to
be bad blood”? What can we expect from families with “grandmother,
mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and
the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three
of them”? How much of the cultivation of civility and virtue, which
makes strong families the building blocks of a strong society, can
happen here? “When we see these boys walking around the neighborhood,”
say Cosby and Poussaint, “we imagine them thirty or forty years down
the road wandering around just as aimlessly, and we want to cry.” For
they are lost.
Black conservatives have said such things for years, only to be
unthinkingly ostracized as race traitors for breaking with orthodoxy.
But no one could dismiss the lovable Cosby: African-Americans are proud
of his success and admire his munificence to black charities. What’s
more, as Princeton prof and sometime rapper Cornel West put it, the TV
star “is not in the right wing. He’s not Clarence Thomas. He is not
Ward Connerly.” Nor could anyone dismiss National Public Radio’s
respected Juan Williams when he emphatically endorsed Cosby’s views in
a 2006 book, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture
of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About
It. When a longtime liberal like Williams embraces these ideas,
something important is changing in the black mainstream—despite racial
arsonist Al Sharpton’s effort to demonize Williams as “the black Ann
Coulter.”
It requires explanation that black leaders don’t mob Cosby with
support, Williams points out, because he is so obviously right. Of
course today’s African-Americans have full civil rights and ample
opportunity. Look at how immigrants from far-flung Ethiopia and
Nigeria—no less black—succeed in their new land of opportunity.
Moreover, notes Williams, Cosby’s views mirror those of the civil
rights greats of old. Booker T. Washington similarly urged education
and self-reliance and cautioned that “we should not permit our
grievances to overshadow our opportunities.” W. E. B. Du Bois, despite
differences with Washington, shared his “goal of black self-reliance.”
Martin Luther King “said he wanted above all else to get black people
to shed the idea that they did not control their destiny.” And from the
moment of emancipation, “education was a radical tool of liberation for
black people so recently enslaved and purposely denied the chance to
learn.” From the founding of the Tuskegee Institute to Thurgood
Marshall’s Brown v. Board victory to James Meredith bravely entering
Ole Miss in 1962, the right to education was central to the civil
rights movement. As for out-of-wedlock childbearing, married couples
headed 78 percent of black families in 1950, compared with 34 percent
today.
In the 1960s, this can-do worldview changed. A vast transformation of
American culture combined with the black-power movement and the War on
Poverty to brew a toxic new orthodoxy among black leaders, who remain
stuck in that era to this day. “Very few new ideas are allowed into
this stifling echo chamber,” Williams reports. Despite startling
African-American progress in the intervening half-century, “the
official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. Black
people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase
social spending. . . . Even the most dysfunctional and criminal
behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders”
but must “be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of
blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized.”
Dissent, and you’re an “Uncle Tom and a sellout.”
That half-century of progress, though, makes it hard to profess the
orthodoxy in good faith. Some, such as Barack Obama’s ex-pastor
Jeremiah Wright, whose “black liberation theology” is pure sixties
black-power political radicalism preserved in amber, still spout it
sincerely. But Williams’s view of most of today’s black leaders recalls
Eric Hoffer’s dictum that great causes often start out as movements but
degenerate into rackets. Today’s leaders have made lucrative careers
out of preaching a crippling ideology that ensures that they will never
run out of poor blacks to agitate for. As Cosby quipped in one of his
town meetings, “There are people who want you to remain in a hole, and
they rejoice in your hopelessness because they have jobs mismanaging
you.”
Williams presents a rogues’ gallery of African-American leaders who
harm the people they claim to serve by blinding them to the opportunity
all around them and stoking resentments that serve as excuses for
wrongdoing. Jesse Jackson, “the unofficial president of black America,”
takes pride of place, with Al Sharpton as runner-up. Williams “detects
a smell of extortion” about them; their main business, he says, is
“staging phony protest marches for money.” What blacks has Jackson
benefited, except for two of his sons, whom his pressure tactics helped
win a multimillion-dollar beer distributorship? Sharpton, Williams
thinks, is lower still: he took a campaign contribution from a GOP
operative who aimed to weaken the Democrats by keeping so polarizing a
figure in their 2004 presidential primary.
When black politicians actually have won power, their politics of
victimhood has often proved a rationale for not even trying to help the
black masses but rather for decrying the white racism that supposedly
causes their plight. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, for instance, spewed
charges of racism to block officials from reforming a dysfunctional
(and now closed) Los Angeles hospital that had become a high-paying
jobs program for some blacks but whose poor care was harming its many
black patients. Mayors Sharpe James of Newark and Marion Barry of
Washington, Williams says, “saw political opportunity in making
themselves masters of large pools of black people dependent on state
and federal poverty programs.” The money flowed in, mayoral aides stole
it and went to jail, the schools got worse, crime festered, and finally
prosecutors nailed James himself for rigging the sale of city property
to enrich his mistress. By contrast, Cory Booker, James’s successor, is
(so to speak) the Bill Cosby of urban governance, exemplifying the
right way forward for African-American pols.
If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, Williams argues,
they’d combat the “cultural belief that being ‘authentically black’
does not allow for high quality intellectual engagement in school,” as
columnist Joseph H. Brown put it. They’d demand radical school reform,
including vouchers. It’s a hopeful sign, Williams thinks, that New York
Times editorialist Brent Staples, normally part of black orthodoxy’s
amen choir, has declared that if the civil rights establishment doesn’t
push hard for real school reform, even if it “would discomfort the
teachers among its supporters, . . . it will inevitably be viewed as
having missed the most important civil rights battle of the last
half-century.”
If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, they’d stop
decrying “police brutality and the increasing number of black people in
jail” and focus instead “on having black people take personal
responsibility for the exorbitant amount of crime committed by black
people against other black people” (which accounts for the exorbitant
number of African-Americans in jail). But they don’t. As Cosby pointed
out to Williams, the NAACP has its headquarters in murder-ridden
Baltimore, but “I’ve never once heard the NAACP say, ‘Let’s do
something about this.’ ” Indeed, Williams notes, “they never marched or
organized, or even criticized the criminals.” Nor did they exhort poor
black people to stop smoking crack.
But black crime devastates African-American communities. Residents live
with “a sense of an enemy within. That enemy is a neighbor, a friend,
possibly a child, any of whom is capable of robbing or assaulting
them.” In some cities, like Baltimore, drug dealers still terrorize
entire neighborhoods, which resemble Sadr City. The thugs are as
vicious as Sadr City militiamen, too. Williams tells of a Baltimore
woman who testified against drug dealers operating outside her house in
2002. The next day, gangbangers firebombed her house, though she
managed to put out the flames. Two weeks later, they firebombed her
house again, this time kicking in the front door and dousing the
staircase with gasoline, incinerating the woman, her husband, and their
five kids. As she was dying, the woman fruitlessly screamed, “Help me
get my children out!”
Even as old-style racism fades, Williams says, the black-crime epidemic
is incubating a new racism. The crime “gives credence to the racist
stereotype of black people, especially young black men, as a race of
marauding, jobless thugs”—a stereotype that even Jesse Jackson shares.
“There is nothing so painful to me at this stage of my life,” Jackson
said in 1993, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and
start thinking about robbery and then look around and see somebody
white and feel relieved.” This grim development makes it all the more
urgent for black leaders to say that “the black criminal is no friend
of black progress.”
So now imagine one of Bill Cosby’s “sweet beautiful things born by
nature—raised by no one”—grown to teen-age, filled with rage and buried
sorrow at abandonment by his father and emotional abandonment, or
worse, by his mother. Imagine that his mother never nurtured his basic
language and cognitive skills, or properly disciplined and encouraged
him, in his crucial first five years, so that learning and even sitting
still in school have been hard for him. No respected civil rights group
has used its moral capital to demand school reform that could give him
the structured, rigorous teaching he especially needs. Almost no
national black celebrity—until Cosby—has come into his neighborhood
exhorting him to stay in school and work hard, because he could become
a physical therapy assistant, say, or a car mechanic, starting at
$35,000 to $50,000 a year. No reverend has come down from his pulpit to
lead a march against the drug dealers and gangbangers who infest his
neighborhood.
Instead, whenever a cop accidentally shoots an unarmed
African-American, he hears of Al Sharpton leading a
rent-a-demonstration, chanting, “No justice, no peace,” a motley relic
of black-power radicalism, which keeps distrust of the police alive in
neighborhoods that, to be livable, need policing more than most. Come
election time, perhaps he hears a local pol or campaign worker rail
against racism and demand more government money. He hears his elders
rage against the stinginess of the welfare office and the injustice of
the Man, a convenient outlet for a deeper anger about more personal
injustice and deprivation.
But most of all, he hears rap. Pumped out from CDs, videos, and
television (especially Black Entertainment Television), which black
kids watch even more excessively than white kids, “nihilistic
glorifications of ‘thug life’ ” and celebrations of gangbangers, drug
dealers, and pimps “as black heroes” constantly wash over him, says
Williams. “Black rappers, dressed for every video in convict style,
posturing with menacing faces, hands flashing gang signals, their heads
wrapped in prison-issue do-rags, pants hanging down in the convict
style, and gangland tattoos covering their bodies” do their part “to
promote black identity as the criminals’ identity.” Rap, says Williams,
markets the idea that “violence, murder, and self-hatred” are “true
blackness—authentic black identity.” It is “an open sewer throwing up
the idea that black men are most genuine, most in touch with their
power, when they are getting vengeance with a gun in hand.”
We know that this message reaches its listeners, says Williams, when we
see ghetto kids “dress like rappers . . . and act hard-core, using
nigger, cursing, and fighting on the way to school, in school, and
after school—assuming they are still in school.” And we know it as well
from the crime statistics.
We know that rap’s message about sex also hits home. Its cartoon-simple
sentiment, says Williams: “All black women are sexually crazed, lack
discrimination about men, and deserve to be treated as mindless
bitches—dogs.” In rap, Cosby once said, there is “nothing about I care
for you, nothing about may I go for a walk with you . . . just I’m hot,
I’m leaking, I’m dripping, come on, and I know you want it too”—or, as
the title of one rap song has it, “Face Down, Ass Up, C’mon.” There is
something tragic, Williams says, about poor black girls “trying to find
a way to feel good about their identity in a culture that gives little
reinforcement to black women” being asked to dance to music that
describes them as whores and bitches. “Rap’s pumped up message to them
is to get naked and shake it before giving it up to do the wild thing,”
he says. And many will do just that, bearing another generation of
doomed innocents, who, despite the evil done them, grow up to be
responsible for their own acts.
Of course, white kids listen to this music and see these videos, too,
including kids who will grow up to be corporate America’s bosses, and
it affects the way they see black people, Williams says. They will come
away with an image of black women as indiscriminate sluts, and black
men, as African-American journalist Stanley Crouch puts it, as
“monkey-moving, gold-chain-wearing, illiteracy-spouting, penis-pulling,
sullen, combative buffoons.” “Who would hire such a person?” Williams
asks. “Who would want to live next to them?” This $4-billion-a-year
industry, in which blacks are the performers, the designers, and many
of the executives, presents African-Americans to the entire world in
terms the Ku Klux Klan would use. Where are the civil rights leaders?
Williams’s rogues’ gallery includes—beside the stuck-in-the-sixties
civil rights pooh-bahs, the racketeering reverends, the corrupt pols,
and the exploitative rappers—also the nutty black-studies professors. A
typical specimen, Georgetown prof Michael Eric Dyson, leaped into the
Cosby debate in 2005 with Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle
Class Lost Its Mind? Dyson’s attack, just the old victimology with a
twenty-first-century twist, usefully underscores how specious and
destructive that orthodoxy is. It also calls into question academe’s
push for the black “perspective” on its faculties, when that
perspective is by definition the harmful one of victimhood and
grievance.
Cosby’s “blaming of the poor,” Dyson says, is the traditional attitude
of an African-American elite “fatally obsessed with white approval” and
persuaded that an embrace of “Victorian values” will win “acceptance
from the white majority.” But the “pathologies” of the poor subvert
their efforts, “ruining the reputation of the race.” And so, beginning
long ago, the black aristocracy began “a program of moral rebuke
disguised as social uplift.” Like Cosby, “they policed poor black
communities from the . . . lectern,” trying to impose on them
“temperance, thrift, refined manners, and Victorian sexual morals.”
But they were wrong to think that “if only the poor were willing to
work harder, act better, get educated, stay out of jail and parent more
effectively, their problems would go away.” It is not the personal
behavior of the black poor but American society’s “structural
barriers,” including the “export of jobs and ongoing racial stigma,”
that prevent blacks from rising. Similar “structural barriers” hold
black kids back educationally. While the suburbs boast “$60-million
schools with state-of-the-art technology, . . . inner-city schools
fight desperately for funding,” ensuring that “our children will
continue to spiral down stairwells of suffering and oppression.”
Even black crime has a structural component, since society has
consigned the black poor to “conditions that offer them limited
options, which often, yes, lead to poor choices”—so that society is
partly to blame. Moreover, the war on drugs “is a war on black and
brown people,” and innovations in “policing measures (leading
eventually to racial profiling) . . . greatly increased the odds that
blacks would do serious time for nonviolent and often first-time
offenses”—assertions with an untruth in almost every word. But white
America has a reason for its war on minorities. “The prison-industrial
complex literally provides white economic opportunity across class
strata,” Dyson explains. “Big money is at stake when it comes to making
a crucial choice: to support blacks at the state university or the
state penitentiary.” Cosby’s call for personal responsibility is thus
doubly cruel: it asks the black poor to feel undeserved blame for their
own victimization, while excusing whites from coming to their rescue.
Dyson spruces up the old-style victimology with a dash of hip,
multiculti relativism. In thinking he has achieved a universal humanity
beyond race, because the virtues he embodies are supposedly universal,
Cosby has made an error that most whites and many blacks (thanks to
white dominance) make, says Dyson: that “white identity [is] normative,
and hence universal.” But for black people to aspire to that identity
requires “unhealthy doses of self-abnegation” and “conscious rejection
of the identity they have inherited or invented.”
Much better, says Dyson, for black people to “ ‘keep it real,’ which
often means honoring the ghetto roots of black identity.”
African-Americans should value the “elements of mass black culture that
enable black folk to resist oppression, transcend their suffering and
transform their pain.” Hence Cosby is wrong to reject black
English—which “grows out of the fierce linguisticality of black
existence, the insistence by blacks of carving a speech of their
own”—and to scoff at supposedly African names like “Shaniqua, Shaligua,
Mohammed.” Though such names may be African “only in that they
reflected flair and creativity,” Dyson says, the important thing is
that they recall “the freedom to name themselves” that blacks asserted
under slavery, “refusing to tie their identities to the names their
owners gave them.”
Cosby is at his most wrong, though, Dyson says, in his hatred of rap,
which expresses the authentically black “gangsta” belief that “the
lifestyle and ideology of the outlaw, the rebel and the bandit
challenge the corrupt norms of the state, the government, and the rule
of law in society.” So too with hip-hop fashion, with its “hats on
backward, pants down around the crack” that Cosby deplored in his
speech. “Fashion in black urban circles rises to performance art,”
Dyson tells us. “The more daring their fashions, the less cooperative
they are with bourgeois elegance, and the more they undermine bland
conformism, the more likely black youth are to understand their bodies
as battlefields of fierce moral contest.” Do their pants hang low?
“This may be understood as sympathy dress,” an “overidentification”
with relatives “who may have been caught up in a bloody urban drama. .
. . It is a way of reclaiming the body of a loved one from its
demobilized confinement and granting it, vicariously, the freedom to
walk on the streets from which it has been removed.” And in truth,
“many black youth who wear baggy pants may feel that they are already
in prison, at least one of perception, built by the white mainstream
and by their dismissive, demeaning elders.” Thus does the idle
sophistry of armchair elites come to ratify cultural patterns once
recognized as fatal to the poor.
The debate raging throughout black America is the more historic because
it is also raging within the soul of America’s first black presidential
nominee. Which Obama will prevail? The old-orthodoxy Obama, who sat for
20 years listening to Reverend Wright saying “God damn America” and
claiming that the government purposely infected the ghetto with AIDS,
who brought his daughters to hear him, and who named a book after one
of his sermons? The Obama whose wife, in her grievances and
resentments, her whine that America is “just downright mean,” uncannily
embodies the black bourgeois attitudes that Ellis Cose described 15
years ago as The Rage of a Privileged Class? Or will it be the Obama
who will truly usher in the age of postracial politics, as he seemed to
promise when he first emerged as so fresh and attractive a candidate?
The Obama who marked Father’s Day with a moving speech on black
America’s need for responsible fathers that Bill Cosby would cheer?
At the very least, his nomination, as he himself has said, shows how
much progress black America has made. Let’s hope the African-American
majority will take the lesson to heart.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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