The black poor—the
Ghettocracy
—consists of the desperately unemployed and underemployed, those trapped in underground economies, and those working poor folk who slave in menial jobs at the edge of the economy. The Ghettocracy is composed of single mothers on welfare, single working mothers and fathers, poor fathers, married poor and working folk, the incarcerated, and a battalion of impoverished children. Ironically enough, the Ghettocracy extends into the ranks of athletes and entertainers—especially basketball and football players, but, above all, hip-hop stars—whose values and habits are alleged to be negatively influenced by their poor origins. Thus, the conflict between the Afristocracy and the Ghettocracy takes on generational overtones, since the values and behaviors that are detested by Afristocrats are largely—though by no means exclusively—located among the young.
Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
examines, and responds to, the claims made by Cosby—and, by extension, the lunging phalanx of Afristocrats—in his now infamous speech, and in speeches he has since given
across the country in what I have dubbed his “Blame-the-Poor Tour.” I will dissect Cosby’s flawed logic, reveal the thin descriptive web he weaves to characterize the poor, and address the complex dimensions of the problems he bitterly broaches. It is clear that my subtitle is provocative, perhaps inflammatory, though not nearly as inflammatory and offensive as Cosby’s remarks and the wide support they have garnered among black people, especially the black middle classes. Indeed, there are many black middle classes: the one barely a paycheck or two from poverty; the one a notch above, with jobs in the service economy; the one more solidly in the middle, with low-level professional jobs; and the one in the upper stratum, with high-level professional employment and the esteem such labor yields.
Moreover, class in black America has never been viewed in strictly literal economic terms; the black definition of class embraces style and behavior as well. Hence, it is not uncommon to hear “that’s so ghetto” used to describe behavior associated with poor folk, whether one picks up garbage or sets a pick-and-roll on the basketball court for a living. And the charge of “acting seditty”—or, putting on airs—can be leveled at the poor and rich alike. I simply aim to provoke black folk into serious self-examination, the sort we claim the poor should undertake, but one that we in other classes may seek to avoid. If Cosby’s implicit claim is that the black poor have lost their way, then I don’t mind suggesting, with only half my tongue in cheek, that the black middle class, of which I am a member, has, in its views of the poor and its support of Cosby’s sentiments, lost its mind. I hope to lay bare the vicious assault
of the Afristocracy on the Ghettocracy and offer a principled defense of poor black folk, one rooted in clear-eyed acknowledgment of deficiencies and responsibility but anchored by an abiding compassion for the most vulnerable members of
our
community.
Introduction
An Afristocrat in Winter
“Do you view Bill Cosby as a race traitor?” journalist Paula Zahn bluntly asked me on her nighttime television show.
Zahn was referring to the broadside the entertainer had launched against irresponsible black parents who are poor and their delinquent children. Cosby’s rebuke came in a May 2004 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education
. Not content with a one-off tirade, Cosby since then has bitterly and visibly crusaded against the declining morality and bad behavior of poor blacks. Six months into his battle, Zahn snagged the comic legend turned cultural warrior for his first in-depth interview. Cosby clarified his comments and reinforced his position. No, he wasn’t wrong to air the black community’s dirty laundry. Yes, he would ratchet up the noise and
pace of his racial offensive. And he surely didn’t give a damn about what white folk thought about his campaign or what nefarious uses they might make of his public diatribe. One could see it on Cosby’s face: This is war, the stakes are high and being polite or politically correct simply won’t do.
Since I was one of the few blacks to publicly disagree with Cosby, I ended up in numerous media outlets arguing in snippets, sound bites, or ripostes to contrary points of view. In the
New York Times
a few days after his remarks, I offered that Cosby’s comments “betray classist, elitist viewpoints rooted in generational warfare,” that he was “ill-informed on the critical and complex issues that shape people’s lives,” and that his words only “reinforce suspicions about black humanity.”
1
Still, I don’t consider Cosby a traitor, and I said so to Zahn. In fact, I defended his right to speak his mind in full public view. After all, I’d been similarly stung by claims of racial disloyalty when I wrote my controversial book on Martin Luther King, Jr. I also said that while Cosby is right to emphasize personal behavior (a lesson, by the way, that many wealthy people should bone up on), we must never lose sight of the big social forces that make it difficult for poor parents to do their best jobs and for poor children to prosper. Before going on Zahn’s show, I’d already decided to write a book in response to Cosby’s relentless assault. But my appearances in the media, and the frustrating fragmentation of voice that one risks in such venues, pushed me to gain a bigger say in the issues Cosby has desperately if clumsily grabbed hold of. This book is my attempt to unpack those issues with the clarity and complexity they demand.
Of course, the ink and applause Cosby has won rest largely on a faulty assumption: that he is the first black figure to stare down the “pathology” that plagues poor blacks. But to believe that ignores how figures from black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, in varying contexts, with differing results, have spoken controversially about the black poor. Equally intriguing is the leap of faith one must make in granting Cosby revered status as a racial spokesman and critic. He has famously demurred in his duties as a racial representative. He has flatly refused over the years to deal with blackness and color in his comedy. Cosby was defensive, even defiant, in his views, as prickly a racial avoider as one might imagine for a man who traded so brilliantly on dimensions of black culture in his comedy. While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle, he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table. Thus it’s hard to swallow Cosby’s flailing away at youth for neglecting their history, and overlooking the gains paid for by the blood of their ancestors, when he reneged on its service when it beckoned at his door. It is ironic that Cosby has finally answered the call to racial leadership forty years after it might have made a constructive difference. But it is downright tragic that he should use his perch to lob rhetorical bombs at the poor.
For those who overlook the uneven history of black engagement with the race’s social dislocations and moral struggles—and who conveniently ignore Cosby’s Johnny-come-lately standing as a racial critic—Cosby is an ethical pioneer, a racial hero. In this view, Cosby is brave to admit that “lower economic people” are “not parenting” and are
failing the civil rights movement by “
not
holding up their end in this deal.” Single mothers are no longer “embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband.” A single father is no longer “considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father” of his child. And what do we make of their criminal children? Cosby’s “courage” does not fail. “In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. . . . I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol?” Before he is finished, Cosby beats up on the black poor for their horrible education, their style of dress, the names they give their children, their backward speech and their consumptive habits. As a cruel coda, Cosby even suggests to the black poor that “God is tired of you.”
It is not remarkable that such sentiments exist. Similar comments can be heard in countless black spaces: barbershops and beauty shops; pulpits and pavement platforms; street corners and suite hallways; and civil rights conventions and political conferences. These cultural settings give such ideas an interpretive context that they often lack when they bleed beyond ghetto walls and comfortable black meeting places and homes into the wider world. Cosby bypassed, or, more accurately, short-circuited, the policing mechanism the black elite—the Afristocracy—habitually use to keep such thoughts from public view.
2
(This is done not so much to spare the poor but to save the black elite from further embarrassment.
And no matter how you judge Cosby’s comments, you can’t help but believe that a great deal of his consternation with the poor stems from his desire to remove the shame he feels in their presence and about their activity in the world.)
Usually the sort of bile that Cosby spilled is more expertly contained, or at least poured on its targets in ways that escape white notice. Cosby’s remarks betray seething class warfare in black America that has finally boiled over to the general public. It is that general public, especially white social critics and other prophets of black ethical erosion, that has been eager for Cosby’s dispatches from the tortured front of black class war. Cosby’s comments let many of these whites off the hook. If what Cosby says is true, then critics who have said the same, but who courted charges of racism, are vindicated. There’s nothing like a formerly poor black multimillionaire bashing poor blacks to lend credence to the ancient assaults they’ve endured from the dominant culture.
Cosby’s overemphasis on personal responsibility, not structural features, wrongly locates the source of poor black suffering—and by implication its remedy—in the lives of the poor. When you think the problems are personal, you think the solutions are the same. 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’s hard to argue against any of these things in the abstract; in principle such suggestions sound just fine. But one could do all of these things and still be in bad shape at home, work or school. For instance, Cosby completely ignores shifts in the economy
that give value to some work while other work, in the words of William Julius Wilson, “disappears.”
3
In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won’t create better jobs with more pay. And without such support, all the goals that Cosby expresses for the black poor are not likely to become reality. If the rigidly segregated educational system continues to miserably fail poor blacks by failing to prepare their children for the world of work, then admonitions to “stay in school” may ring hollow.
In this light, the imprisonment of black people takes on political consequence. Cosby may be right that most black folk in jail are not “political prisoners,” but it doesn’t mean that their imprisonment has not been politicized. Given the vicious way blacks have been targeted for incarceration, Cosby’s comments about poor blacks who end up in jail are dangerously naïve and empirically wrong. Cosby’s critique of criminal behavior among poor blacks neglects the massive body of work that catalogs the unjust imprisonment of young blacks. This is not to suggest an apologia for black thugs; instead, it suggests that a disproportionate number of black (men) are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. Moreover, Cosby seems to offer justification for the police killing a young black for a trivial offense (the theft of a Coca-Cola or pound cake), neglecting the heinous injustices of the police against blacks across the land. Further, Cosby neglects to mention that crime occurs in all classes and races, though it is not equally judged and prosecuted.
Cosby also slights the economic, social, political and other structural barriers that poor black parents are up against: welfare reform, dwindling resources, export of jobs and ongoing racial stigma. And then there are the problems of the working poor: folk who rise up early every day and often work more than forty hours a week, and yet barely, if ever, make it above the poverty level. We must acknowledge the plight of both poor black (single) mothers and poor black fathers, and the lack of social support they confront. Hence, it is incredibly difficult to spend as much time with children as poor black parents might like, especially since they will be demonized if they fail to provide for their children’s basic needs. But doing so deflects critical attention and time from child-rearing duties—duties that are difficult enough for two-parent, two-income, intact middle-class families.
4
The characteristics Cosby cites are typical of all families that confront poverty the world over. They are not indigenous to the black poor; they are symptomatic of the predicament of poor people in general. And Cosby’s mean-spirited characterizations of the black poor as licentious, sexually promiscuous, materialistic and wantonly irresponsible can be made of all classes in the nation. (Paris Hilton, after all, is a huge star for just these reasons.) Moreover, Cosby’s own problems—particularly the affair he had that led to the very public charge that he may have fathered a child—suggest that not only poor people do desperate things. In fact, as we reflect on his family troubles over the years, we get a glimpse of the unavoidable pain and contradictions that plague all families, rich and poor.
Cosby’s views on education have in some respects changed for the worse. His earlier take on the prospects of schooling for the poor was more humane and balanced. In his 1976 dissertation, Cosby argued against “institutional racism” and maintained that school systems failed the poorest and most vulnerable black students. It is necessary as well to acknowledge the resegregation of American education (when in truth it was hardly desegregated to begin with). The failure of
Brown v. Board
to instigate sufficient change in the nation’s schools suggests that the greatest burden—and responsibility—should be on crumbling educational infrastructures. In suburban neighborhoods, there are $60-million schools with state-of-the-art technology, while inner city schools fight desperately for funding for their students. And anti-intellectualism, despite Cosby’s claims, is hardly a black phenomenon; it is endemic to the culture. Cosby also spies the critical deficiency of the black poor in their linguistic habits, displaying his ignorance about “black English” and “Ebonics.” But the intent of Ebonics, according to its advocates, is to help poor black youth speak “standard” English while retaining an appreciation for their dialects and “native tongues.” All of this suggests that structural barriers, much more than personal desire, shape the educational experiences of poor blacks. In fact,
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
, Cosby’s lauded ’70s television cartoon series, won greater acceptance for a new cast of black identities and vernacular language styles. Cosby has made money and gained further influence from using forms of Black English he now violently detests.