Fascinating article over at The Atlantic, "The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism," on Bill Cosby’s controversial crusade to deliver to the black masses some old-fashioned, Booker T. Washington-esque gospel of self-reliance. The author writes:
Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Some were there with their sons. Some were there in wheelchairs. The audience was packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to capture the overflow. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. Clutching a cordless mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared remarks and comic ad-libs. A row of old black men, community elders, sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. The rest of the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man! Teach!”
He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”
Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.
The article, which you should read, gets into all sorts of very complicated issues about how a focus on the racism of whites can shade into a self-defeating victimology and cultural pessimism but also how a black nationalistic focus on self-reliance and the morals and manners of black culture can prove ineffective against the realities of systemic racism.
I find myself compelled to digress, however, as I do whenever I’m reminded of Bill Cosby and of the get-out-of-jail-free card we’ve decided, as a culture, to grant Cosby after very briefly acknowledging, in 2006, that he appears to be a serial rapist. The article touches on this, very briefly, by noting that "In 2006, Cosby settled a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that he had sexually assaulted her; other women have come forward with similar allegations that have not gone to court." But really, it was much worse than that makes it sound. Cosby settled the suit because the plaintiff had another 13 women on hand ready to testify that Cosby had drugged and raped them too.
Anyway, I think there’s something to what Cosby’s saying (though, as the article points out, it’s nothing that a million black folk aren’t saying to each other all the time; what’s different is someone like Cosby saying it, so loudly, in front of the white folk). But he’s not, at the end of the day, a serious person, a person of character and integrity, or a serious thinker (I’m not even sure, after seeing him on TV a few times recently, that he’s even mentally balanced anymore) and for that reason everything he says should be taken with a giant grain of salt.
