And, in an act of supreme intellectual and moral irresponsibility, we have as a society—hence, we have been socially
irresponsible as well—enlarged the myth of individualism that holds that most folk who make it in our culture have done so on merit and talent alone, that they have been personally responsible, denying that they have also benefited from skin color, social class and gender preference, social forces that put individuals of predictable pedigree in the right place at the right time either to enhance their innate gifts or to have their mediocre skills overlooked in a social order that favors them despite their deficits. And many black folk who have climbed upward are morally and intellectually irresponsible when they benefit from affirmative action—not because they lack talent, but because they possess it but have been historically denied the opportunity to exercise it—and then blast the black poor who have not received the slightest benefit from this measure of compensatory justice. Moreover, huge corporations benefit from their own variety of welfare, as do the rich in the form of untold subsidies and tax breaks. We hold the poor immediately responsible for mastering their domain, and yet society bears the ultimate responsibility for making their social environment a cruel obstacle course of severely limited options while virtually assuring their failure with poorly arranged alternatives to their suffering. This is not to deny the need for the poor to exercise personal responsibility; it is simply a demand that we not be intellectually and morally irresponsible by overemphasizing its role in removing the barriers they confront, barriers that have a relationship to their ability to thrive. To paraphrase Dorothy Day, the great Catholic social activist who spent her life working with and loving the poor, but not pitying them, we must work
toward a world in which it is easier for the poor to behave decently.
41
Cosby’s rabid insistence on personal responsibility to the exclusion of every other variety of responsibility has predictably won him plaudits from black and white conservatives, from Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and Star Parker to the
National Review
’s Jonah Goldberg and assorted online ideologues. Of course, Cosby was widely celebrated by black columnists of every ideological stripe for his views about personal responsibility, while only a few of them insisted on broadening the view to include at least a nod to social responsibility. For the most part, the black press, and blacks in the press—with the notable exception of a few online writers like William Jelani Cobb,
Time
magazine’s Christopher John Farley, and the
Village Voice’s
Ta-Nehisi Coates—did little more than rubber-stamp Cosby’s opinions, evoking unsettling memories, if not in tone then at least in effect, of their elitist kin from the last century.
44
As disappointing as the capitulation of the black press was—and, quite frankly, so was the fawning, or silent, surrender of most black intellectuals, pundits and public figures, even those who might have openly disagreed with a celebrity of lesser wattage, or one not so beloved in the race—it is perhaps the affirming signal that Cosby’s vicious assaults send to equally vicious right-wing interests that is most damaging. Cosby’s insistence on self-help lets society off the hook, including governmental bodies, segments of private industry and certainly racist quarters of the culture that have like vultures picked at the bones of the black suffering that they,
or their ideological predecessors, helped to impose. It is intellectually irresponsible for Cosby to spout his gospel of self-help and personal responsibility without paying strict attention to the social forces that have pulverized the black families he now attacks in terms that are, he unapologetically admits, “vulgar.”
42
In the aftermath of his comments, Cosby has been heralded by the white folk, including conservatives, he claims not to care about. But the dead giveaway that Cosby truly cares about what whites think is his contention during his speech that “The white man, he’s laughing, got to be laughing.” I think it is Cosby’s embarrassment for the poor in the sight of “the white man” that has caused him to go off on the poor. As a result, Cosby has been embraced by white pundits and critics. Not only have they heaped praise on his head, but they have heaped scorn on the black poor, and other black leaders, in the name of the freedom to emote that Cosby’s comments gave rise to. As Jonah Goldberg stated in the
National Review:
Conservatives have long argued that the best thing for the black community is, in the late Pat Moynihan’s celebrated (though misunderstood) phrase, a policy of “benign neglect.” Most people faced with the choice of sinking or swimming will swim. And there’s no reason to believe, conservatives argued, that blacks wouldn’t swim like anybody else if they had to. Many immigrants come to this country far poorer than the average poor black but still work their way into the middle class, because they
bring with them a set of values our society tends to reward. They also usually have an ethnic social network waiting for them, which helps them get on their feet. Why should blacks be any different? If blacks were cut off without a dime from the federal government, non-racist conservatives argued, blacks would develop individually and as a community, the habits and institutions necessary for as decent a life as anybody could expect—much as they had, ironically, during segregation. That’s not an argument for segregation, of course, but for the sort of self-help blacks relied on before the government started “helping” them. As countless callers to black radio point out, that self-help involved shaming those who were letting the rest of the community down. . . . Bill Cosby knows the answer, and he should be congratulated for shaming those who deserve—and need—to be shamed.
43
In Goldberg’s eyes, Cosby’s politics of shame, glimpsed in his relentless assaults on poor blacks, represent an exemplary moral, and political, response to poverty, when in fact Cosby’s approach, as we’ve seen, is much more deeply rooted in destructive class politics than most critics seem to realize. What is clear is that Cosby’s stance has emboldened white conservative interests in their public attacks on poor blacks. Cosby thinks that such unsolicited—but, surely, it can’t be claimed, unforeseen—support may be the price he has to pay to get a hearing in the culture. “If I have to make a choice between keeping quiet so that conservative media does not speak negatively, or ringing the bell to galvanize those who
want change in the lower economic community, then I choose to be a bell ringer,” Cosby said in a statement. “I think it is time for concerned African-Americans to march, galvanize and raise the awareness about the epidemic to transform our helplessness, frustration and righteous indignation into a sense of shared responsibility and action.”
44
The effect of white conservatives on Cosby’s thinking is unmistakable, especially as he lashes out at leaders and thinkers with a more complex vision of how one truly helps the poor. “The poverty pimps and the victim pimps keep telling the victim to stay where they are,” Cosby told an audience in Detroit in January 2005. “You’re crippled, you can’t walk, you can’t get up, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. And I’m saying, you’d better get up.” That quip so pleased conservatives that it made both
The O’Reilly Factor
and
Hannity & Colmes
on the Fox News Network.
45
Of course, if Cosby were willing to actually explore the social responsibility for the suffering of the black poor, and to stop telling a narrow truth about them, such a statement might signal the possibility of helpful, hopeful dialogue—and put to rest his need for off-the-cuff ranting and raving. Even a Cosby defender, Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, had to admit that “it’s much easier for a black multimillionaire to dismiss white people’s opinions than it is for a black man or woman living paycheck to paycheck.”
46
Many in the black community have come to Cosby’s aid, suggesting that his “airing dirty laundry,” even at the risk of offending the poor, was both a valiant departure from tradition and a necessary safeguard of just the sort of free speech that
might help us confront grave social crises. I, for one, applaud the move away from quarantining black discourse in supposedly private black quarters, which were ostensibly open to most black folk but in truth were relatively closed and antidemocratic spaces. What was usually meant by hashing things out in private was gatherings of the leaders of black organizations, or on the convention floors, platforms and meeting halls of groups to which the masses of blacks were not necessarily invited. Open, democratic, honest dialogue is best. That, for sure, is not what is occurring with Cosby’s tirades; they are one-sided, intimidating displays of rhetorical bluster and misdirected passion that have the effect of quelling, not sparking, true, robust, open-ended, just and democratic conversation. Besides, these same folk failed to defend the producers of the film
Barbershop
, which, it was believed, soiled the reputation and savaged the images of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. No one claimed that the charges about King—that he had extramarital affairs—were wrong. Most folk simply argued that such charges should not be irresponsibly portrayed in a film piped to sections of a white world that looked to seize on any negative information about a beloved black leader, in fact, the most beloved leader of all, to justify their racist attacks. The message seems to be that while it’s horrible, perhaps even racist, to pounce on King’s reputation and image, it’s just fine to beat up on poor blacks in an equally “irresponsible” fashion.
Other black critics argue that Cosby said the right thing, but at the wrong time in the wrong place. Others say that Cosby was saying little more than what we hear regularly, in equally unvarnished manner, in the barber’s chair or on the
street corner. I think a more accurate analogy is that Cosby is like the person who sounds good to himself singing in the shower but, when he hits the stage, he’s lost all the conditions that made his song soar: the claustrophobic acoustics of a confined space; the protection of privacy; the guarantee of a positive, if subjective, assessment of one’s skill; and the lack of a critical audience to offer feedback. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., asked why “the huge flap over Bill Cosby’s insistence that black teenagers do their homework, stay in school, master standard English and stop having babies? Any black person who frequents a barbershop or beauty parlor in the inner city knows that Mr. Cosby was only echoing sentiments widely shared in the black community.”
47
Except most brothers in the barber’s chair aren’t invited to appear on CNN to spread their views, and neither does that qualify them to take a position—or, for that matter, to be offered one—on Professor Gates’s black studies faculty at Harvard.
While white conservatives embraced Cosby’s comments lashing out at poor blacks, the same conservative establishment pilloried his wife, Camille, when she bravely penned an op-ed in the aftermath of their son Ennis’s murder by an immigrant from the Ukraine. Camille Cosby, who, like her husband, earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, was as blunt as her husband, except her righteous indignation and impassioned reasoning were directed at white racism.
I believe America taught our son’s killer to hate African-Americans. After Mikhail Markhasev killed Ennis
William Cosby on Jan. 16, 1997, he said to his friends, “I shot a nigger. It’s all over the news.” . . . Presumably, Markhasev did not learn to hate black people in his native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero. Nor was he likely to see America’s intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the Soviet Union before the killer and his family moved to America in the late 1980s. . . . Yes, racism and prejudice are omnipresent and eternalized in America’s institutions, media and myriad entities. . . . Ennis William Cosby was shot and killed in a middle- to upper-middle income, predominately white community. The misperception immortalized daily by the media and other entities is that crimes are committed in poor neighborhoods inhabited by dark people. All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors. Sadly, my family and I experienced that to be one of America’s racial truths. Most people know that facing the truth brings about healing and growth. When is America going to face its historical and current racial realities so it can be what it says it is?
48
Predictably, Mrs. Cosby’s comments were met with harsh resistance from the white conservative press, and from some black conservatives. Although she wasn’t nearly as visible as her husband in his crusade, Mrs. Cosby did respond briefly in writing to the critiques of her commentary, insisting that
“racism is at the heart of America’s past and present histories, and all of us have been stung by it.” Then she made a structural link that her husband had made in his
Playboy
interview, but which he had wholly neglected in his comments about the poor. “America’s institutions have a fundamental responsibility to be just, unprejudiced and truthful to all of its people.” She wrote that racism “continues to divide our country; therefore, constructive dialogue and action are needed for America to have a healthy populace.” Mrs. Cosby also stated that the “focal point [of my article] was institutional racism—that is, entities in both the public and private sectors which have practiced, influenced and sustained biased values that Black people are inferior.”
49
Camille Cosby’s provocative essay set off quite a different media firestorm than the one that blazes around her husband. It was, too, a much more courageous commentary than the one offered by Bill Cosby. Camille Cosby’s commentary was surely much more likely to offend deep-pocketed private and public interests in the white mainstream. Camille Cosby’s views cut across the amnesia and dishonesty that fuel the continued distortion of race in America. And she used her perch as one of the wealthiest and most beloved black women in the nation to identify with the masses of black folk, including the poor, fighting the vicious legacy of white supremacy. And her insistence on the social responsibility the country owes to its citizens to educate them about racism, and to confront its brutal consequences in American life, was especially powerful. Unlike her husband in his recent comments, Camille Cosby sought to
speak directly to the sources of so much suffering among black folk in the country.