Wednesday, 17 October 2007
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Bill Cosby is sounding (almost) calm and reasonable, these days, under the influence of Dr. Alvin Poussaint, respected Harvard psychiatrist and co-author with Cosby in a new book. Despite his improved demeanor, Cosby's blame-the-victim worldview remains compatible with the most rightwing foes of African Americans. The no-longer-funny comedian's hectoring and "burnished anecdotes of times past are near-useless as a guide to either personal behavior in the present, or organized community action." But the corporate media gorges itself on the red-meat of Cosby's Black-bashing - and that's all that matters for book sales. Dr. Poussaint can only do so much to fix a 70-year meanness.
Black Psychiatrist's ‘Intervention' Calms Cosby
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
"When presented as a substitute for political action, books like Come On People are great diversions from the tasks at hand, and weapons to bludgeon Black people."
Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry Alvin F. Poussaint has succeed where all other recent efforts have failed: by teaming up with Bill Cosby to write a new book, Dr. Poussaint has softened the tone of the entertainer/philanthropist's crusade against the African American poor. The collaboration adds a sane demeaner, and at least a veneer of previously absent intellectual weight, to the comedic curmudgeon's road show.
NBC went wild over the volume, as the corporate media does with all of Cosby's utterances blaming low-income Blacks for most, if not all, negative aspects of life in their neighborhoods. The co-authors of Come on People, On the Path From Victims to Victors got top billing, the first act in last Sunday's edition of Meet The Press, with Tim Russert, plus free publicity placement of the book's entire first chapter on the program's web site.
Little wonder that NBC found the Cosby/Poussaint team's work compelling; the book's title and content flays poor Blacks with the dismissive "victimhood" language deployed by the Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter and other propagandists for the Right. What's different, here, is the presence of Dr. Poussaint, the highly regarded scholar usually associated with progressive causes. His intervention in billionaire Cosby's downward spiral into public spectacles of ranting and sputtering is at least a cosmetic success. Gone were the dark glasses that some observers suspected served to hide signs of medication - -self or prescribed. The co-authors scrunched together on the network set, their suit jackets touching, Poussaint's foot close enough to deliver a gentle kick should Cosby revert to abusive hectoring and insults against large segments of the The Race.
"Poussaint's intervention in billionaire Cosby's downward spiral into public spectacles of ranting and sputtering is at least a cosmetic success."
Host Tim Russert was, of course, true to corporate media form, digging for quotable bites of bile from Cosby, who has since at least 2004 been more than glad to serve as superstar Black-basher. Poussaint's mission is to clean up and smarten up Cosby's act, both in style and by injecting a modicum of substance.
Poussaint leads off stating that "70 percent of Black babies are born to unwed mothers," a statistical fact. Russert asks, "What's the model for a two-parent home?" - a lame question whose obvious answer is: a home with both parents living in it - but whose purpose is to open the discussion of ingrained deformities in Black social organization, the alleged root of all ghetto evils. Poussaint, who shares with Cosby a primary focus on Black males, says "a lot of these [young] males have a father-hunger, and later on in life this turns to anger." It's a reasoned-sounding observation from a luminary of psychology. The good doctor notes the "availability of Black men" is central to any conversation about marriage rates; that, "in some Black colleges, women outnumber men two to one; and he stresses that, of the 2.2 million prisoners behind bars in the U.S., 919,000 are Black. "In Baltimore," he says, "75 percent of Black males drop out" of high school.
So far, we are on a fact track. But then it's Cosby's turn to respond to Russert's question, "What do we do?"
Cosby starts out well, displaying a calmness and equanimity that has been largely missing since he unloaded his anti-poor passions at a Washington anniversary celebration of the Brown school desegregation decision, three years ago. He admits that racism works in systemic ways. "Let's deal with what people call systemic racism...and this is real." Especially in education, "it is there with a very ugly head...." "BUT" - and here Cosby begins his descent into nonsense - "this is not the first time my race has seen systemic, institutional racism...lynchings...we knew how to protect our children, protect our women."
Really? Many women and children were among the thousands lynched under Jim Crow terror. Cosby was 18 when 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 - grown enough to vividly remember. The problem with 70-year-old Cosby - an affliction not shared by the 73-year-old Poussaint - is a memory that appears to reinvent itself on such a scale that it revises the history of a people as convenience and the rant-of-the-moment dictate.
Then Cosby gets to the heart of his secular ministry: "People must realize that the Revolution is in their apartment...and then they can fight systemic and institutionalized racism." That is, tend to your personal problems first, clean up your character and straighten up your house, and only then even consider confronting the larger forces that have played the mega-historical role in creating the conditions of Black life that bring misery to millions of people just like you. This is vintage Cosby, the message he's been sending for almost forty years. The no-longer-funny comic has no conception of personal growth and affirmation through struggle in common cause with others. He perceives his own wealth as a measure of human worth and mental health, and tells poor people that their personal faults are the source of most ghetto ills.
"Cosby revises the history of a people as convenience and the rant-of-the-moment dictate."
Under Dr. Poussaint's influence, Cosby mixes his main menu of Black-poor denunciation with a few bows to the real world of racial oppression. But - and there is always the "but" - he quickly returns to the theme: forget about social action until you get yourself straight; until I say so.
Poussaint attempts to redirect the Meet The Press conversation to substance and context. "The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world," he says. There are much higher penalties for possession of crack than for powdered cocaine. "One hundred percent higher," Russert chimes in, wearing that silly grin he puts on when he manages to contribute an actual fact not supplied by his producers. Poussaint cites the litany: three-strike laws, mandatory sentencing, "creating a disaster for the Black community." The learned scientist urges creation of public programs that "do something for these young people when they come out."
Thankfully, we are back in the realm of public and corporate policy. Cosby deigns to acknowledge that families cannot control the flow of destructive commercial culture into their communities. "It's the guy in the boardroom" who pushes gangsta rap, he declares. Cosby tells a story (literally true or not) about a music executive who demands that an underling provide a song with a rape theme, insisting, "Rape is good."
Russert again attempts to depict a vast divide among African Americans, quoting Black Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson: "We seem to be stuck...we need a new language. There is no monolithic Black America with the same values."
Poussaint resists the bait: "No, the Black community is not monolithic." But some things "affect all of it." For example, the race-based justice system exemplified in Jena, Louisiana, strikes a deep chord among all African Americans. At some levels, there is a commonality of Black suffering. "If you are low-income, you catch more of it. What separates us is more of a socio-economic divide. If you are a high school dropout, you are more likely to be poor and go to jail.
"Many people in the Black middle class are involved in programs to help the [poor] Black community," says Poussaint. He mentions 100 Black Men and others.
Thanks to the Black psychiatrist from Harvard, who served from 1965 to 1967 as Southern Field Director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Jackson, Mississippi, according to his bio, "providing medical care to civil rights workers and aiding in the desegregation of health facilities throughout the southern United States," Russert wasn't getting the raw anti-Black meat that could have previously been expected from Cosby, the one-man show.
The comedian, possibly sensing that his longtime spiel was being diluted by his partner's facts and social conscience, once again urged that political activism be put on indefinite back-burner until the ghetto cleanses itself. Build on those things "that you can control, and then you can fight institutional racism," He urges. It's so simple, in Cosby's mind: "If you say, My child is going to do more time for selling crack [than for selling powdered cocaine], you tell your child, Don't sell it."
Nancy ("just say no") Reagan would be proud.
"Thanks to the Black psychiatrist from Harvard, Russert wasn't getting the raw anti-Black meat that could have previously been expected from Cosby, the one-man show."
Tim Russert wants Cosby to respond to educator and author Michael Dyson's contention that Cosby overemphasizes personal responsibility, to the detriment of political action. Dr. Poussaint jumps in, as if to prevent Cosby from going on a rant. There have "always been questions of personal responsibility" in the Black community," says Poussaint, "but I think there are systemic issues that need to be worked on, always." The Cosby rant that Russert anticipated did not materialize. Who knows how long Cosby will be careful not to go into improvisational mode on the book-selling circuit, especially if his busy psychiatrist co-author isn't around to put on the brakes.
Cosby, according to the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Paige, eschewed activism back in the Sixties. As Paige recalls: "It was 1968, but he didn't want to talk about black power, Black Panthers or cultural revolutions. He wanted to complain about why so many young blacks of my generation were wasting the great opportunities that hard-won civil rights victories had brought us."
Paige now tends to be in Cosby's corner, he says. Cosby continues preach from same soapbox as he did forty years ago. In May, 2000, he exhorted students at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, not to dabble in campus politics, or challenge the orthodoxy of those in power at the institution. Shut up, until after you've made your career move:
"Those of you going to grad school, listen to me carefully... I know you have an idea of how you want to make a change in the world. That is not what grad school is for. Do what they tell you to do and then when you graduate, do what you want to do. That is what grad school is for. If you're gonna argue with the professor you're going to not get a good grade, you're not going to graduate in grad school. Okay? So take your young idea, study what they want you to study, kick tail and then when you get your turn to write your dissertation then you tell it the way it ought to be told. It is not for you to stand up and argue... You get an A on all the tests and then, make your move."
If the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists Dr. Poussaint assisted, more than four years ago, had heeded Cosby's warning, Jim Crow terror would have enjoyed a much longer life.
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Bill Cosby is sounding (almost) calm and reasonable, these days, under the influence of Dr. Alvin Poussaint, respected Harvard psychiatrist and co-author with Cosby in a new book. Despite his improved demeanor, Cosby's blame-the-victim worldview remains compatible with the most rightwing foes of African Americans. The no-longer-funny comedian's hectoring and "burnished anecdotes of times past are near-useless as a guide to either personal behavior in the present, or organized community action." But the corporate media gorges itself on the red-meat of Cosby's Black-bashing - and that's all that matters for book sales. Dr. Poussaint can only do so much to fix a 70-year meanness.
Black Psychiatrist's ‘Intervention' Calms Cosby
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
"When presented as a substitute for political action, books like Come On People are great diversions from the tasks at hand, and weapons to bludgeon Black people."
Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry Alvin F. Poussaint has succeed where all other recent efforts have failed: by teaming up with Bill Cosby to write a new book, Dr. Poussaint has softened the tone of the entertainer/philanthropist's crusade against the African American poor. The collaboration adds a sane demeaner, and at least a veneer of previously absent intellectual weight, to the comedic curmudgeon's road show.
NBC went wild over the volume, as the corporate media does with all of Cosby's utterances blaming low-income Blacks for most, if not all, negative aspects of life in their neighborhoods. The co-authors of Come on People, On the Path From Victims to Victors got top billing, the first act in last Sunday's edition of Meet The Press, with Tim Russert, plus free publicity placement of the book's entire first chapter on the program's web site.
Little wonder that NBC found the Cosby/Poussaint team's work compelling; the book's title and content flays poor Blacks with the dismissive "victimhood" language deployed by the Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter and other propagandists for the Right. What's different, here, is the presence of Dr. Poussaint, the highly regarded scholar usually associated with progressive causes. His intervention in billionaire Cosby's downward spiral into public spectacles of ranting and sputtering is at least a cosmetic success. Gone were the dark glasses that some observers suspected served to hide signs of medication - -self or prescribed. The co-authors scrunched together on the network set, their suit jackets touching, Poussaint's foot close enough to deliver a gentle kick should Cosby revert to abusive hectoring and insults against large segments of the The Race.
"Poussaint's intervention in billionaire Cosby's downward spiral into public spectacles of ranting and sputtering is at least a cosmetic success."
Host Tim Russert was, of course, true to corporate media form, digging for quotable bites of bile from Cosby, who has since at least 2004 been more than glad to serve as superstar Black-basher. Poussaint's mission is to clean up and smarten up Cosby's act, both in style and by injecting a modicum of substance.
Poussaint leads off stating that "70 percent of Black babies are born to unwed mothers," a statistical fact. Russert asks, "What's the model for a two-parent home?" - a lame question whose obvious answer is: a home with both parents living in it - but whose purpose is to open the discussion of ingrained deformities in Black social organization, the alleged root of all ghetto evils. Poussaint, who shares with Cosby a primary focus on Black males, says "a lot of these [young] males have a father-hunger, and later on in life this turns to anger." It's a reasoned-sounding observation from a luminary of psychology. The good doctor notes the "availability of Black men" is central to any conversation about marriage rates; that, "in some Black colleges, women outnumber men two to one; and he stresses that, of the 2.2 million prisoners behind bars in the U.S., 919,000 are Black. "In Baltimore," he says, "75 percent of Black males drop out" of high school.
So far, we are on a fact track. But then it's Cosby's turn to respond to Russert's question, "What do we do?"
Cosby starts out well, displaying a calmness and equanimity that has been largely missing since he unloaded his anti-poor passions at a Washington anniversary celebration of the Brown school desegregation decision, three years ago. He admits that racism works in systemic ways. "Let's deal with what people call systemic racism...and this is real." Especially in education, "it is there with a very ugly head...." "BUT" - and here Cosby begins his descent into nonsense - "this is not the first time my race has seen systemic, institutional racism...lynchings...we knew how to protect our children, protect our women."
Really? Many women and children were among the thousands lynched under Jim Crow terror. Cosby was 18 when 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 - grown enough to vividly remember. The problem with 70-year-old Cosby - an affliction not shared by the 73-year-old Poussaint - is a memory that appears to reinvent itself on such a scale that it revises the history of a people as convenience and the rant-of-the-moment dictate.
Then Cosby gets to the heart of his secular ministry: "People must realize that the Revolution is in their apartment...and then they can fight systemic and institutionalized racism." That is, tend to your personal problems first, clean up your character and straighten up your house, and only then even consider confronting the larger forces that have played the mega-historical role in creating the conditions of Black life that bring misery to millions of people just like you. This is vintage Cosby, the message he's been sending for almost forty years. The no-longer-funny comic has no conception of personal growth and affirmation through struggle in common cause with others. He perceives his own wealth as a measure of human worth and mental health, and tells poor people that their personal faults are the source of most ghetto ills.
"Cosby revises the history of a people as convenience and the rant-of-the-moment dictate."
Under Dr. Poussaint's influence, Cosby mixes his main menu of Black-poor denunciation with a few bows to the real world of racial oppression. But - and there is always the "but" - he quickly returns to the theme: forget about social action until you get yourself straight; until I say so.
Poussaint attempts to redirect the Meet The Press conversation to substance and context. "The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world," he says. There are much higher penalties for possession of crack than for powdered cocaine. "One hundred percent higher," Russert chimes in, wearing that silly grin he puts on when he manages to contribute an actual fact not supplied by his producers. Poussaint cites the litany: three-strike laws, mandatory sentencing, "creating a disaster for the Black community." The learned scientist urges creation of public programs that "do something for these young people when they come out."
Thankfully, we are back in the realm of public and corporate policy. Cosby deigns to acknowledge that families cannot control the flow of destructive commercial culture into their communities. "It's the guy in the boardroom" who pushes gangsta rap, he declares. Cosby tells a story (literally true or not) about a music executive who demands that an underling provide a song with a rape theme, insisting, "Rape is good."
Russert again attempts to depict a vast divide among African Americans, quoting Black Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson: "We seem to be stuck...we need a new language. There is no monolithic Black America with the same values."
Poussaint resists the bait: "No, the Black community is not monolithic." But some things "affect all of it." For example, the race-based justice system exemplified in Jena, Louisiana, strikes a deep chord among all African Americans. At some levels, there is a commonality of Black suffering. "If you are low-income, you catch more of it. What separates us is more of a socio-economic divide. If you are a high school dropout, you are more likely to be poor and go to jail.
"Many people in the Black middle class are involved in programs to help the [poor] Black community," says Poussaint. He mentions 100 Black Men and others.
Thanks to the Black psychiatrist from Harvard, who served from 1965 to 1967 as Southern Field Director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Jackson, Mississippi, according to his bio, "providing medical care to civil rights workers and aiding in the desegregation of health facilities throughout the southern United States," Russert wasn't getting the raw anti-Black meat that could have previously been expected from Cosby, the one-man show.
The comedian, possibly sensing that his longtime spiel was being diluted by his partner's facts and social conscience, once again urged that political activism be put on indefinite back-burner until the ghetto cleanses itself. Build on those things "that you can control, and then you can fight institutional racism," He urges. It's so simple, in Cosby's mind: "If you say, My child is going to do more time for selling crack [than for selling powdered cocaine], you tell your child, Don't sell it."
Nancy ("just say no") Reagan would be proud.
"Thanks to the Black psychiatrist from Harvard, Russert wasn't getting the raw anti-Black meat that could have previously been expected from Cosby, the one-man show."
Tim Russert wants Cosby to respond to educator and author Michael Dyson's contention that Cosby overemphasizes personal responsibility, to the detriment of political action. Dr. Poussaint jumps in, as if to prevent Cosby from going on a rant. There have "always been questions of personal responsibility" in the Black community," says Poussaint, "but I think there are systemic issues that need to be worked on, always." The Cosby rant that Russert anticipated did not materialize. Who knows how long Cosby will be careful not to go into improvisational mode on the book-selling circuit, especially if his busy psychiatrist co-author isn't around to put on the brakes.
Cosby, according to the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Paige, eschewed activism back in the Sixties. As Paige recalls: "It was 1968, but he didn't want to talk about black power, Black Panthers or cultural revolutions. He wanted to complain about why so many young blacks of my generation were wasting the great opportunities that hard-won civil rights victories had brought us."
Paige now tends to be in Cosby's corner, he says. Cosby continues preach from same soapbox as he did forty years ago. In May, 2000, he exhorted students at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, not to dabble in campus politics, or challenge the orthodoxy of those in power at the institution. Shut up, until after you've made your career move:
"Those of you going to grad school, listen to me carefully... I know you have an idea of how you want to make a change in the world. That is not what grad school is for. Do what they tell you to do and then when you graduate, do what you want to do. That is what grad school is for. If you're gonna argue with the professor you're going to not get a good grade, you're not going to graduate in grad school. Okay? So take your young idea, study what they want you to study, kick tail and then when you get your turn to write your dissertation then you tell it the way it ought to be told. It is not for you to stand up and argue... You get an A on all the tests and then, make your move."
If the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists Dr. Poussaint assisted, more than four years ago, had heeded Cosby's warning, Jim Crow terror would have enjoyed a much longer life.
The Book
Come on People, On the Path From Victims, or at least the first chapter, is filled with simplistic homilies and is frequently condescending in tone. At times, one has the impression it was written for 12 - 15 year olds. Cosby's often-carping voice is unmistakable, while Poussaint makes his presence felt in the more substantive passages, especially regarding the criminal justice system and youth. But overall, there is little to learn from the book other than what happens when a noted Black psychiatrist struggles to make a bitter old man with a severe case of the rants seem calm and reasonable.
"We learn what happens when a noted Black psychiatrist struggles to make a bitter old man with a severe case of the rants seem calm and reasonable."
NBC poured the hype on thick for the Cosby-Poussaint venture, publishing Chapter One on the Meet The Press website and pulling quotes under various subject categories - tons of free publicity. Right up top, NBC featured the authors' reaction to criticism:
On critics: "Many of those who accuse us are scholars and intellectuals, upset that we are not blaming everything on white people as they do. Well, only blaming the system keeps certain black people in the limelight but it also keeps the black poor wallowing in victimhood."
There's that word, "victimhood," the assertion that African Americans are, in today's world, more tormentors of each other than by people in power, an absolution of whites for past and present crimes and for failing to construct even a semblance of a social contract with the historical "Other."
And who are these "certain black people" in the limelight? The authors have a whole book to name names, but prefer to assign words, thoughts and intentions to anonymous malefactors. That's cowardly and dishonest. If you can't name, don't complain.
Cosby's venom is unmistakable in the scorning reference to "scholars and intellectuals," spit out in the manner of Rush Limbaugh. One wonders how Poussaint, the noted scholar and intellectual, allowed this sneer to pass. The slur against intellectuals and scholars is more ironic, in light of Cosby's insistence that he be addressed as "Dr. Cosby," in deference to his PhD (1977) in education from the University of Massachusetts.
Naturally, NBC highlighted what Cosby-Poussaint had to say on "victimhood":
"It is time to think positively and act positively. Black communities and families must provide our youth with the love and guidance that keeps them strong and on that positive path. Blaming white people can be a way for some black people to feel better about themselves but it doesn't pay the electric bills."
Who ever said simply complaining pays the utilities - although fighting the utility companies is a venerable American pastime? Again, the book makes up both antagonists and "victims," putting words in their mouths. Cosby's drool is over it.
"The book makes up both antagonists and "victims," putting words in their mouths."
Deeper in the chapter, a storybook African American past emerges from Cosby's addled memory:
"[S]ex, we don't need to tell you, has been around since Adam and Eve. So has shame. We knew that if one of us got a girl pregnant, not only would she have to go visit that famous ‘aunt in South Carolina,' but young Romeo would have to go too, not to South Carolina maybe, but somewhere. It would be too embarrassing for Romeo's family for him to just sit around in the neighborhood with a fat Cheshire cat smile on his face. And there was something else we understood: that girl likely had a daddy in the home. And he'd be prepared to wipe that grin off Romeo's face permanently."
Oh, so that's how it was in the good old days when Black folks had their full quota of shame. Some of us who were conscious during the Jim Crow era don't remember it quite that way, although surely such scenarios unfolded in some places and at some times other than in Cosby's TV and movie script-laden, revisionist recollections.
More to the point, the burnished anecdote of times past is near-useless as a guide to either personal behavior in the present, or organized community action. Are all those aunts in South Carolina going back into the business of sheltering pregnant girls from public eyes?
Chapter One is flecked with gems like these:
"Black males and females must take the time to talk about their relationships with each other and with the children."
"And please, whatever you do, don't let the gangs raise your children."
Only in those sections in which Poussaint's voice rises above Cosby's banalities does some glimmer of public-policy discussion appear. Here's one:
"The Dellums Commission in Washington DC on which Dr. Poussaint served as honorary vice chair, issued a 2006 report that recommended, among other initiatives, the repeal of mandatory sentencing, an increase in the minimum wage, and a restriction of zero-tolerance policies in schools.
"We must listen to these voices of wisdom and fight for state and local governments to help us salvage as many black men - and women - as possible. This includes financial support for programs providing counseling, education, and job-training skills. Men need a good steady job that gives them a chance in life; otherwise, they end up back in jail or on the streets. Such men can become permanently alienated from the world, which can be hell on the community and heartbreaking for the children."
The words, "Listen to these voices and fight..." are chapter's only nod to at least some vague concept of confrontation with the powers-that-be.
Despite Dr. Poussaint's reasoned statements on the racially-skewed criminal justice system, the following two sentences reveal a frightening authorial mindset:
"To be sure, the justice system disfavors black males, and some are in the system who should not be. But tragically, too many of our sons deserve to be right where they are."
Does anyone deserve to suffer myriad cruel and unusual punishments, to be vulnerable to rape or conditioned to become the rapist? Whoever wrote those words or allowed them to remain in the manuscript harbors a bestial opinion of Black people. The best that can be said, is they might not be aware of what actually happens in prison - a willful ignorance that does not remove their guilt.
The plural pronoun in our next bite from the book indicates Dr. Poussaint and Dr. Cosby are of the same mind:
"We're not saying there is no discrimination or racial profiling today, but there is less than there was in 1950. These are not ‘political' criminals. These are people selling drugs, stealing, or shooting their buddies over trivia."
What do they mean, there is less racial profiling today than in 1950? Hyper-surveillance of Black communities, the spring that winds up the "intake" process for the entire "scoop up the Blacks" machine, has exponentially increased since the mid-Twentieth Century. So have the ratios of cops-to-citizens, especially in the South, thanks initially to massive infusions of federal law enforcement monies in the Sixties. Whole communities are designated "drug zones" in which everyone is suspect, where plainclothes squads pounce without warning, and constitutional rights barely exist. The authors have confused the arbitrary harassment of past generations of African Americans with recent decades of a systematic public policy of selective Black mass incarceration - which begins with hyper-surveillance and profiling on a community-wide scale.
That's why the prisons are full of Blacks.
"The authors have confused the arbitrary harassment of past generations of African Americans with recent decades of a systematic public policy of selective Black mass incarceration."
A high Justice Department official recently admitted that the increase in the U.S. prison population since 1975 "...wasn't really about crime. It was about how we chose to respond to crime." Hyper-surveillance, a form of mega-profiling, has achieved levels of Black imprisonment undreamed of in 1950 or 1960 or 1970. As BAR's Bruce Dixon writes in the October 10 issue, "Government, the state itself has been refashioned into a punitive and carceral machine whose main function is to contain and control this unworthy, dishonored and dangerous poor and black population."
Finally, here's a folktale, doubtless conjured up by Cosby, offered to somehow help present-day poor Black people deal with pregnancies outside marriage:
"[S]ex, we don't need to tell you, has been around since Adam and Eve. So has shame. We knew that if one of us got a girl pregnant, not only would she have to go visit that famous ‘aunt in South Carolina,' but young Romeo would have to go too, not to South Carolina maybe, but somewhere. It would be too embarrassing for Romeo's family for him to just sit around in the neighborhood with a fat Cheshire cat smile on his face. And there was something else we understood: that girl likely had a daddy in the home. And he'd be prepared to wipe that grin off Romeo's face permanently."
Oh, so that's how it was in the good old days when Black folks had their full quota of shame. Some of us who were conscious during the Jim Crow era don't remember it quite that way, although surely such scenarios unfolded in some places and at some times other than in Cosby's TV and movie script-laden, revisionist recollections.
More to the point, the burnished anecdote of times past is near-useless as a guide to either personal behavior in the present, or organized community action. Are all those aunts in South Carolina going back into the business of sheltering pregnant girls from public eyes?
"Cosby's burnished anecdotes of times past are near-useless as a guide to either personal behavior in the present, or organized community action."
Chapter One is flecked with gems like these:
"Black males and females must take the time to talk about their relationships with each other and with the children."
"And please, whatever you do, don't let the gangs raise your children."
If everybody gets married, and the young people stay in school and avoid sex, then Sarah Jane won't have to get sent off to South Carolina in shame to have her and Romeo's baby.
On its face, this kind of wistful pablum is too irrelevant to do much harm. But when presented as a substitute for political action, and endorsed by hostile corporate forces intent on destroying the last vestiges of the Black Freedom Struggle (from which Cosby was actively estranged), books like Come On People are great diversions from the tasks at hand - more, they are weapons to bludgeon Black people and "culture."
Bill Cosby forgets no insult and makes up everything else. So let us not forget his recent history, and the scope of rehabilitation that has been required since Cosby's explosion of cruel, blanket insults against less fortunate Blacks, in 2004.
Bill Cosbyisms
Cosby on the Black poor:
"Lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.' "
Cosby on Black youth culture:
"People putting their clothes on backwards: Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong? ... People with their hats on backwards, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up to the crack and got all type of needles [piercings] going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damn thing about Africa."
Cosby on civil rights:
"Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. We have to go in there - forget about telling your child to go into the Peace Corps - it is right around the corner. They are standing on the corner and they can't speak English."
Cosby on literacy:
"Basketball players - multimillionaires - can't write a paragraph. Football players - multimillionaires - can't read. Yes, multimillionaires. Well, Brown versus Board of Education: Where are we today? They paved the way, but what did we do with it? That white man, he's laughing. He's got to be laughing: 50 percent drop out, the rest of them are in prison."
Cosby on poor Black women:
"Five, six children - same woman - eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you are going to have DNA cards to tell who you are making love to. You don't know who this is. It might be your grandmother. I am telling you, they're young enough! Hey, you have a baby when you are 12; your baby turns 13 and has a baby. How old are you? Huh? Grandmother! By the time you are 12 you can have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I'm just predicting."
Cosby on the sons and daughters of poor, Black, unmarried mothers:
"...with names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed [!] and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail.
Cosby on Blacks shot by police:
"These are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"
Dr. Alvin Poussaint has had a calming effect on Bill Cosby, for the time being. But the core Cosby still keeps struggling to break out in the new book and in interviews. To the extent this keeps Cosby in the public eye, an enthusiastic indicter of the culture and lifestyles of the Black poor, Dr. Poussaint becomes, not the troubled comedian's reasonable and coherent alter-ego and counselor, but his Black-bashing enabler.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.comThis email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .