The Messenger Didn’t Do It!
“Let me
tell you something,” comedian and educator Bill Cosby told a captive audience
at the annual Rainbow/Push Coalition Conference in Chicago, “Your dirty laundry
gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s cursing and calling each other the
N-word as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they’re hip.
They can’t read. They can’t
write. They’re laughing and giggling,
and they’re going nowhere.” And with
these words, and more, uttered in at least two previous public forums, Cosby
stirred a national debate, a debate that has become more about whether or not
he should be so public with his comments rather than what we should do about
the issues he raised.
Cosby was not referring to all Black
people, not even to most. He was
referring to the significant numbers who are poor, uneducated, unemployed,
unmotivated and trapped in a cycle of negative behavior that is threatening to
create a permanent Black underclass.
And he was appealing to those who are in positions to help reverse the
trend to be more honest about identifying and solving the problems.
A quick review of Black student
performance on standardized tests, of Black jail and prison statistics, of
neighborhood corner drug markets, of Black marriage statistics and the epidemic
of babies having babies that fathers abandon, the Black student drop-out rate,
the unemployment rate and the attitudes of so many Black youngsters who are too
proud to take entry level work, the Black on Black crime and Black kids killing
Black kids, the early death rate, all suggest that such a public expression of
alarm from a person as respected and prominent as Cosby is long overdue.
During the early days of the Civil Rights
struggle we came to understand that some powerful racist White folks did not
hesitate to use any information regarding misbehavior in the Black community as
a tool to slow civil rights progress.
We also learned that raising the racism issue with well-meaning White
people encouraged a more positive financial response. So we minimized the effectiveness of the racist and maximized the
response of other White people by adopting the strategy of blaming even much of
our own negative behavior on racism.
I am not about to let racism off the
hook. It is and always will be a
significant problem for Black Americans.
But Cosby is reminding us that we are actively perpetuating and
magnifying much of our own bad behavior and the pretense that racism is the
primary cause of it has outlived its usefulness and has had some unintentional
and damaging consequences.
One of those consequences is that after
so many years of arguing that racism is the cause of all of our problems, many
Black people, including some of the prominent leaders who vigorously promote
the idea, started acting as though they believed it and began relegating the
role of personal choice and responsibility to a back seat to racism. Cosby is simply calling them out on the
ordering of their concerns.
A more serious consequence is that many
well-meaning White liberals, who were genuinely concerned about the effects of
racism, promoted patronizing policies and programs that encouraged dependence,
destroyed families, marginalized the role of Black males and minimized the values
of individual responsibility. While the
policies were intended to help, many were not well thought out and, in a
symbolic sentence, they made the welfare check more valuable than a job.
Their programs also spawned a bureaucracy
with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. As quiet as it is kept, its members are predominantly White but
prominent among the members are vocal Black people whose livelihoods also
depend on these programs. They are
experts at provoking the emotions of other Black people, who are quick to react
to claims of racism, and they are well aware that White people will pay for
racial peace.
White liberals pay for racial peace by implication. They are always willing to support big bucks
for poverty programs whether or not they work and seem to genuinely believe
that good will result from doing even the wrong thing long enough. For others it is a matter of good
business. Racial discord is bad for the
business climate. And for others,
racial peace is simply a matter of law and order. Riots and racial discord damage people and property and tax the
resources of law enforcement agencies.
For yet others, it is simply a new way for old racists to block Black
progress. They will pay for racial
peace to avoid equality of opportunity for a people they view as inferior and
undeserving. Consequently, it has been
easy for poverty pimps to perpetuate questionable programs as vast elements of
the Black community crumble.
Bill Cosby is challenging the ancient
logic. His underlying message is that
we don’t have time for old pretensions.
Our collective silence has become as much of a problem as those problems
we work so hard as a community to be silent about. He is not saying anything that we all didn’t already know–Black
and White folks alike, well meaning and not-so-well meaning alike. His candor is a breath of fresh air to those
who understand that the Black community must quickly take responsibility for
its own destiny regardless of what White people do or think.
It is silly to focus the national debate
on whether Bill Cosby should be speaking publicly about Black folks’ dirty
laundry. Like it or not, the Black
community is in crises. It is in an
educational crisis, a crime crisis, a drug crisis, a single-parent-family crisis,
a babies-having-babies crisis, a babies-raising babies crisis, a moral crisis
and, most of all, a leadership crisis.
Old solutions are not working.
Our kids are dying. The American
economy is leaving much of this generation behind. By his words, Cosby is telling us that we don’t have the luxury
of worrying about what White folks think.
We need to put our real problems on top of the table where we can
honestly sort them out, label them and solve them as a community.
Bill Cosby doesn’t have to care. He is rich enough to disappear into the rich people’s house of plenty, but he hasn’t. He has used his position of wealth and influence to help so many people that he could have justified remaining silent and protected himself from the wrath of those who would misjudge him for his public comments, but he didn’t. He could still silence his critics if he shut up, but he won’t. Bill Cosby is sounding the alarm because he can and somebody must. He is the messenger and, like it or not, “Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s cursing and calling each other the N-word as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they’re hip. They can’t read. They can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.” n