Bill-Cosby

Cosby made headlines in May when he upbraided some poor blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them. He shot back Thursday, saying his detractors were trying in vain to hide the black community’s “dirty laundry.”

“Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s cursing and calling each other n— as they’re walking up and down the street,” Cosby said during an appearance at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund’s annual conference.

“They think they’re hip,” the entertainer said. “They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.”

In his remarks in May at a commemoration of the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, Cosby denounced some blacks’ grammar and said those who commit crimes and wind up behind bars “are not political prisoners.”

“I can’t even talk the way these people talk, ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ … and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk,” Cosby said then. “And then I heard the father talk … Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.”

Cosby elaborated Thursday on his previous comments in a talk interrupted several times by applause. He castigated some blacks, saying that they cannot simply blame whites for problems such as teen pregnancy and high school dropout rates.

“For me there is a time … when we have to turn the mirror around,” he said. “Because for me it is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us. And it keeps a person frozen in their seat, it keeps you frozen in your hole you’re sitting in.”

Cosby lamented that the racial slurs once used by those who lynched blacks are now a favorite expression of black children. And he blamed parents.

“When you put on a record and that record is yelling ‘n— this and n— that’ and you’ve got your little 6-year-old, 7-year-old sitting in the back seat of the car, those children hear that,” he said.

He also condemned black men who missed out on opportunities and are now angry about their lives.

“You’ve got to stop beating up your women because you can’t find a job, because you didn’t want to get an education and now you’re (earning) minimum wage,” Cosby said. “You should have thought more of yourself when you were in high school, when you had an opportunity.”

Cosby appeared Thursday with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the education fund, who defended the entertainer’s statements.

“Bill is saying let’s fight the right fight, let’s level the playing field,” Jackson said. “Drunk people can’t do that. Illiterate people can’t do that.”

Cosby also said many young people are failing to honor the sacrifices made by those who struggled and died during the civil rights movement.

“Dogs, water hoses that tear the bark off trees, Emmett Till,” he said, naming the black youth who was tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for whistling at a white woman. “And you’re going to tell me you’re going to drop out of school? You’re going to tell me you’re going to steal from a store?”

Cosby also said he wasn’t concerned that some whites took his comments and turned them “against our people.”

“Let them talk,” he said.

Last month, Bill Cosby broke the unwritten rule of keeping black dirty laundry in black washing machines. While at a multiracial gala dinner in Washington, D.C. commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Cosby targeted under-educated lower-income blacks as the source of various social problems. Among his comments: “People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around…the lower economic people are not holding up their end of the deal. These people are not parenting.” And he mocked the way some blacks name their children: “With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all that crap, and all of them are in jail….They are standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.” Let’s hope Fantasia Barrino, Shaquille O’Neal and Muhammad Ali never see a transcript of Cosby’s comments.

After Cosby’s speech, a number of my friends and relatives, some of whom were in attendance some of whom heard about the furor afterwards, expressed dismay at the statements — but several were more horrified that he had gone public, not at the opinions themselves. Cosby’s comments did not contain any new arguments. As far back as 1942, the writer Zora Neale Hurston lamented the attacks of those who would scapegoat the black underclass: “My people! My people! From the earliest rocking of my cradle days, I have heard this cry go up from Negro lips. It is forced outward by pity, scorn and hopeless resignation. It is called forth by the observations of one class of Negro on the doings of another branch of the brother in black.”

Cosby’s commentary is also strikingly similar to the words of a younger, hipper cultural critic: comedian Chris Rock. In Rock’s “Niggas vs. Black people” routine from his breakthrough 1996 “Bring the Pain” tour, Rock contrasted the values of middle class blacks with lower-income blacks who had succumbed to a kind of gangsta despair. Among Rock’s observations: some blacks liked watching movies in cinemas, other liked shooting them up; some blacks tried to be responsible, others thought if they merely took care of their babies they were doing something special. “There’s like a civil war going on with black people,” Rock announced. “There are two sides: there’s black people, and there’s niggas. And niggas have got to go.”

Cosby was trying to get at some of the same ideas as Rock. But Rock made his his serious point with humor; Cosby made his serious point using seriousness. Comics who get all grave can be a drag. Nobody really wants to hear Seinfeld’s take on Halliburton unless it’s accompanied by a laughtrack. Also, Cosby’s comments deriding non-standard English seemed particularly off-base. Without non-traditional language, we wouldn’t have Public Enemy rapping “Don’t Believe The Hype,” Diana Ross singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” or Bob Marley declaring he had “So Much Things to Say.” Without slang, we wouldn’t have the blues poems of Langston Hughes, or some of the patois-infused verse of Derek Walcott.

Yes, Cosby is right that education is important and kids should master English — but they should also be taught that vernacular black culture has worth. Certainly Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote such vernacular classics as Their Eyes Were Watching God — understood that. “Zora chose to write in dialect because she thought the language of ordinary, rural, self-educated black folk was beautiful,” Valerie Boyd, author of the Hurston biography Wrapped in Rainbows told me. “She thought this language — the language of her youth, her primary language as a storyteller — was poetic and rich and full of vivid imagery and worthy of being celebrated and immortalized in literature.”

What’s really needed isn’t a black civil war or more uncivil speech. The real problem may not be that blacks and whites are having separate conversations — that’s been true for 400 years — it’s that comments such as the ones Cosby made could be used as bricks for different groups of blacks to wall themselves off from each other. That would be a shame. Right now, on Broadway, Cosby’s erstwhile sitcom wife, Phylicia Rashad, is co-starring in A Raisin in the Sun alongside one of the most successful current purveyors of hip-hop slang, rapper/would-be actor Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. When I saw the show, I thought there was something profoundly appealing about seeing two different generations of black entertainers performing together in a classic play. Cosby, in his speech, declared that blacks should hold each other to a higher standard. Working together, and not just getting each other worked up, may be a good start.

But much of black America, especially its middle class, is ready to have that conversation. In that sense, Cosby’s speech was a watershed event — a sign that black America is now comfortable enough with its accomplishments to discuss its shortcomings. “Perhaps Bill did us a favor,” says NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, who attended the ceremony, “and more people will now be prepared to step forward. It’ll be a tough-love conversation, whether or not people want to have it. And it will take opinion leaders to say those things that should be said.”

Not all black Americans agree with the remarks Cosby made at a May 17 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Indeed, his criticism of everything from speech patterns to spending habits among the black poor was pointedly politically incorrect.

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It is more important that black Americans have a spirited debate about the challenges of the post-civil rights era: How do we raise the academic achievement of black students? How do we curb black-on-black crime? How do we attack the AIDS epidemic spreading like wildfire in black America?

In a way, Cosby’s speech was an eloquent reminder of the stunning success of the civil rights movement that followed the Brown decision: Black America is strong enough and successful enough to admit its shortcomings and gird itself for the work ahead.

Click for story. It’s very interesting.