Cosby Has Harsh Words for Black Community
I’m a little surprised that Rev Jackson agreed with him.
Bill Cosby seems to me to be an angry guy. I think he’s rightfully angered. His arguments about black culture are right on, and he’s similarly disgusted with media images. He should be the next black role model, Jesse Jackson is just a contrarian activist.
Long live foresight.
Bill Cosby has his own personal problems related to education of blacks.
I know there is a movie, “Ennis’ Gift” that deals with one of the Cosby relatives hvind dyslexia/ADHD/or something similar, and later dying.
Not unlikely he has some charge on the issue.
Don’t know what personal probs you are referring to. Ennis Cosby was shot & killed while changing a flat tire.
Be that as it may, Cosby is still dead on with his message. BTW - It’s a message that spans racial borders. Illiteracy and poor parenting is not solely a black issue.
I should have phrased it differently - I didn’t mean it the way it came out. Issues, perhaps rather than problems. I didn’t mean to minimize his position, just point to causes. I think I need to getsome sleep, but I’m addicted to this message board.
A few months ago, Cosby gave a talk at a school in Detroit about education. The speech was replayed on the Detroit radio station I listen to, but I don’t have a link right now to the text. I never saw much publicity about it, but it was a very moving, very real speech about how the whole job of children is to learn, and the teachers are there, ready to teach them, so quit squandering the opportunity. I was in tears by the end and almost ready to sign up for classes to renew my teaching certificate.
Cos has really been speaking some basic truths in very clear, no-punches- pulled language that all of us can benefit from…not just the black community. He asks us to sit up, look at the crap we’ve been tolerating and ask ourselves if this is really the best way to live our lives.
As a personal observation, I have long been confused about the acceptance by the black community of teenage girls having babies (note the plural) well before gaining the right to vote. It seemed to me from what little first-hand knowledge I had that it was an accepted, even encouraged, event. At least I saw no censure. And now of course, it’s not confined to just the black community: most schools near large urban areas seem to have programs designed to keep young moms in school. But three episodes in recent years have shown me I was wrong: the censure was there, just muted. The first came when I read a job application from a black girl who had just graduated. Under the “list your greatest accomplishment-type heading” she wrote that her greatest accomplishment was getting through high school without having a baby. I laughed at first, but a discussion with a black co-worker about the peer pressure to reproduce made me admire the girl.
The second incident I’ve related here before: that same co-worker told me she wanted to pull her 12-year-old son out of public school because he told her he was being made fun of by others in his sixth grade class because he hadn’t fathered a child already. At least four of his classmates were dads, and at least that many girls were moms. At 12. She was so appalled, and distraught, and told me her goals were to make sure her boys were raised well enough to resist the pressure.
The third incident was a conversation by two black professional women that I overheard in my store (not eavesdropping, they were standing right in front of me while I rang them up). They were so upset that the one’s daughter was pregnant again…third child, age 20, three different guys. The anger and dismay and hurt was so apparent…they talked about the embarassment they felt, the disappointment that the daughter wasn’t following in the mom’s footsteps to a degree and a good job. And they weren’t talking for my benefit. I realized then that I had looked at the situation wrong for a long time.
I’m glad Cosby is trying to change some things, and upset that some people think his criticism is disloyal somehow.
I got a different impression, althought a single sentence is not much to go on.
Umm, no he was saying stop blaming the playing field and get your ass together.
IMHO, young people all over the place, of all colors are being bombarded with the message “whatever you are, it’s okay”. No, it’s not okay to be illiterate; it’s not okay to not know how to communicate; it’s not okay to keep popping out babies by different men before you even reach college age. About 20 years ago, society got caught up in an orgy of feeding children’s egos. The message was “if we don’t tell them they’re okay just the way they are, they will feel bad about themselves”. Well, sometimes shame plays a role, in that it can be a great motivator to change! There’s a 12 year old girl across the street from me who can’t tell time on a chronograph clock, and can’t count money! She, my 12-year-old (at the time) and I were playing Monopoly one day; girl across the street had to pay $23.00 rent on a property. Well, she pulled out a $20.00 bill, but didn’t know where to go from there. The school keeps promoting her! Why? Because God forbid we should make her feel inadequate. Well, she is inadequate, dammit! Someone needs to point this out. I think Cosby is perfect for the job. He’s been around long enough that people are comfortable with him. He’s well known, and fairly well respected. I applaud him for pointing out what has been obvious to a lot of people for some time.
. . . If only Bill Cosby would stop making crappy TV shows. Have you seen the promos for Fatherhood? Painful.
One thing I can’t understand is how someone can know history and ignore it. How can you not vote knowing how many people worldwide have been arrested, even died to get the right to vote for others. From the Civil Rights movement to Alice Paul to Tiananmen Square. How can you not make an effort to better yourself knowing what sacrifices people have made to make it possible for women and minorities and the poor, to get an education. It isn’t even obligation I’m talking about…its the sense that maybe, if it was so important to risk your life for or make huge sacrifices to huge groups of people, it might really be important.
World Eater, I think you are right and wrong. Rev Jackson was admitting that the playing field can’t get leveled without blacks doing something. Write every black a large check for slavery reparations (a horrible idea, IMHO, but lets just say), and - given the culture Cosby describes, it will take ten years for things to be just as bad or worse than they are now. Few people would be lifted up long term.
I hope people, and not just black people, do listen to Cosby’s rantings. To me he kind of sounds like and old guy railing against ‘the youth of today’, but I don’t think that makes the message any less important. There is too much worship of fancy cars and high dollar clothing in some segments of society, and too little concern for making a productive life for oneself through basic education and employment.
I deal with pregnant women in my job. I don’t understand the desire to produce children in the way some women present it to me. One young lady told me “I want to get my kids out of the way while I’m young”. There was no question about whther or not to have kids- just when to have them.
Another said “I wanted to give him a baby”. I wondered (but did not ask)why as he had not been very involved since the conception and was likely to have not much to do with the raising of the child.
Both women were very young and had other small children by other fathers. There is also a (newish?) tradition in this group to have the children, but pass them on to their own mothers for the actual raising of the children. There is apparantly at least a couple of generations of this in some families. It may make some sense in a relatively powerless group- having kids during prime reproductive years, but having them raised by the more econimically stable and mature women in the group.
Hope away, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Metaphorically, the channel that Cosby is on is just not being tuned in to. They people he wants to reach don’t KNOW the things that Dangerosa is talking about, so they’re not going to change based on someone’s “struggle”. The people that do change are the ones who would’ve without the message.
I can’t really speak about poor black neighborhoods, but I’ve lived in (and I mean in, as in sandwiched between row-houses occupied by 3 generations of the same poor family), and bordering on, a poor white section of Baltimore for almost 10 years. What people don’t get is that these people’s entire universe is poor, uneducated, rundown. There are NO models of success.
The pressure to be a part of it comes from friends, siblings, parents, just like any other group. It’s wrong to even call it pressure. It’s just their existence, their universe, their life, like mine was to be like the people I was raised around: college educated, stable job, house.
Norinew has got it wrong if s/he thinks that stuff like this started 20 years ago. These people I know have poor grandmothers that had kids when they were 16, who had kids when they were 16. You don’t have 55 year old great-grandmothers if these things started 20 years ago. You just have a culture that lives that way. And, from personal knowledge, I’m just talking about whites here.
But to me, it’s just being poor. And a lot of the poor white folks blame it on the blacks, just as some blacks seem to blame it on the whites. Everyone’s got an excuse.
I’m somewhat defeatist about it: poverty just exists, always has, always will. Blacks in urban America don’t have a monopoly on it.
I don’t think Cosby’s message is going to do anything to change it.
Maybe people don’t know. You’re assuming that the people Cosby’s talking about have been properly educated about their history.
Or, maybe when people live desolate lives, it’s hard to see that sacrifices have been made on their behalf. Maybe for people who have been at the bottom generation after generation, they can’t see that things are different. To them, the Cosby’s of the world are aliens, and the message they deliver does not make sense.
I’m confused by this. What kind of “unmuted” censure do you expect? Jesse Jackson et al. to appear on the six o’clock news condemning teenage mothers? A rash increase in black teens put on the street for having babies? I don’t hear white people openly “censuring” their deliquent, irresponsible behaving children. I don’t know why black people have to be more public with their condemnation or airing of their dirty laundry.
All I know is that there would have been plenty of “censuring” in my parents’ household if I had showed up pregnant.
If it’s so obvious, why do we need Cosby to point it out? It’s like what I said a couple of months ago in the thread discussing his first controversial speech. He is preaching to the choir. He is addressing “the black community”–but he was in a roomful of commuity activists! People who are doing the right thing! I tell you, if I had to be vehemently lectured to about teens having babies and Ebonics and all the other “ills” of the black community, I would walk right out of the goddamn room. He needs to go the prisons or to the community centers with that message. Go to the source of the problem directly. Don’t yell at me. And also, don’t expect me to feel shame or guilt. Don’t be put some extra burden on my shoulders. The Talented Tenth shit is played out.
This may surprise many of you, but Cosby’s message is not new at all. I can’t go to a black church without hearing the “we’re so jacked up” message ad naseum. Pleease. Black people know we’re jacked up. I can’t drive down the street without thinking that. The only thing that Cosby has done has made this disdain apparent to the general public, without the comic stylings of Chris Rock. Whoop-tee-doo. So stop breaking out the champagne like he’s made some break-through within the “black community”. As much as I respect the guy, his un-PCness is special only because he’s famous.
No, I’m actually not assuming it. I’m well aware that most people are clueless (tell me you knew who Alice Paul was before I mentioned her). I’m kind of making a case for teaching it. Making struggle part of our cultural history.
I don’t buy that when you’ve been at the bottom so long, you just give up. If that were the case, there would be no civil rights movement. On the other hand, the rhetoric we are currently using - the “equal” and yet “everyone knows discrimination still exists” gives people a good excuse to give up. “See, someone worked for it, and got it, and nothing has changed.” Except it has, but they haven’t worked to take advantage of it.
I understand (or at least have a clue) about the cycle of poverty. One of the things that really pisses me off is not when the cycle of poverty gets repeated, but when kids raised relatively middle class join the cycle. Its almost like some people make a concious decision to live off a middle class mom and dad, have their kids young, never hold a job - then when mom and dad pass on…wonder what will become of them now that no one is around to support them.
One of the problems is that in today’s society, we expect instant change and/or correction for problems. In this case it’s not going to happen. The slide down this slippery slope was started generations ago, and it’s going to take a concerted effort over generations to fix it.
I hate to sound like and ol’ fuddy duddy, but the best fix for this is a cultural change. Core family/parental values must be re-established along with personal responsibility. This will have to be something that grows from within the community, not just another government program.
I don’t know that Cosby’s efforts will pay off, but if somebody doesn’t speak up and start the ball rolling then things will just continue to get worse. What would help would be if some of the younger minority celebrities would climb on Cosby’s bandwagon and help deliver the “it ain’t cool to be a fool” message (or something like that).
A slide from what? Some point where blacks in this country generally lived a middle class existence?
Let’s not present this like we need to return to some idyllic time from the past.
Present what you’re really advocating: the eradication of poverty, unprecedented in the history of the world.
Just be like me: Poverty exists. We support people through public funds to a point that we’re all reasonably content with – somewhere above having the poor living in tar paper shacks with a stream of hepatitis running through the front yard. But somewhere below giving them means for the merest of luxuries.
I think when people like Cosby speak out on the “obvious,” it’s to lend it credibility and to get people to acknowledge it and take it seriously.
And just for the record, Cosby may appear to be coming from out of nowhere with these criticisms, but his record of valuing education and a strong work ethic have been there for decades. He valued his own education and strove, even though he was already a highly successful comedian, television and movie star, to get his own post-graduate degree. He produced and acted in dramatic t.v. shows on black life, trying to portray images of strength and character in black life.
And IIRC, he took Eddie Murphy to task some 15 years or so ago for using foul language in his act, suggesting it was not only a cheap way to get a laugh but also was a negative image to portray to blacks.
He walks the walk and talks the talk. He could just as easily while away his time being a rich and pampered celebrity enjoying the good life, but he has too much strength of character and too much desire to see positive change to do so, and I think that as he nears the final years of his life he probably has come to feel that he’d better speak out now while he still has the chance.
I didn’t say everyone who’s at the bottom gives up. Everyone was not needed for the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was not initiated by people at the very bottom, anyway. The Duboise’s, Booker T. Washington’s, Ralph David Abernathy’s, Angela Davis’s, Anne Moody’s, and Martin Luther King’s of the CRM were not scrubbing people’s toliets to make a living. They came from something.
Those in the direst of circumstances had to be persuaded that their vote counted, that marching and boycotting could work, and that education was a “way up”. I’m sure Martin Luther King went home with sick headaches on countless occassions after dealing with hankerchief head negroes who had given up.
Not all slaves rebelled or wanted emancipation. Not all negroes were brave or willing enough to fight for first-class citizenship. And not all black people think they are capable of rising out of poverty on their own. Giving up for many people is the most natural thing to do.
Many people argue that there is no “black community”. Rather, the thing called one community is actually two: the upper to regular middle-class and then them. Them don’t have a college pedigree. Them talk funny. Them hang out on the street corner with pregnant bellies and do-rags. Them attend embarrassing public schools. Them have the screwed up values.
The first and second communities represent roughly the same proportion in that amorphous thing called Black Community. The first group has never given up. That second one, though, has many “hankerchief heads”. Just as it always has. It’s going to take more than one man–however famous and well-respected by the mainstream–to break through a hankerchief that’s hundreds of years old.
But it’s like what I said before: The Message Is Not New. I bet there was not a single person in the audience that did not know that “men should stop beating their wives” and that “many kids don’t know how to read”. Hell, a community activist knows what’s going on, even if everyone else doesn’t.
And who’s left? The people who read read and watch the news. If you’re reading and watching the news, chances are you are not a part of the problem. If it’s obvious to you, why do you need it pointed out to you? It’s not like you need confirmation that there’s a problem.
Will Cosby’s message inspire someone to become a mentor? I don’t know. The skeptic in me thinks it will only provides comfort to people who love to talk negatively about black people, while ignoring the bad behavior in their own “community”.
Right. We all know that Cosby = good negro. But the reason he’s getting press on this is because he’s famous and non-threatening. Not because he’s an expert in education (which he isn’t).
Which makes me respect him less. Eddie Murphy was hella funny back in his cursing, foul-behaving days. Now look at him!
Yeah, very well could be. My interpretation changes everytime I read it. 