African-American pundits are weighing in on Bill Cosby's "rant-sermon" at a recent event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Clarence Page says Cosby violated "BPC," black political correctness, but also says that isn't the entire issue.
No, it is not news when blacks admonish other blacks to work harder. But when anybody from one race accuses or offends somebody of another race, stop the presses!Cosby's view, by contrast, offers a side of black life that seldom is seen on the news, a self-reliance liberalism. Right-wing ideologues pretend that self-reliance liberalism does not exist. But most successful African-Americans are intimately familiar with it. The message, as Cosby might say, is simple: Those of us who have made it need to help those who have not, but poor black folks need to "hold up their end in this deal," too.
Cosby was saying the same thing backstage when I interviewed him during my college days. 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.
In those politically polarized times, I was disappointed by his traditionalist attitude. But I appreciate its wisdom today with new eyes, the eyes of a parent.
Leonard Pitts, Jr. seems to be on a similar wavelength:
Blacks and whites have a way of talking past each other.Posted by Alan at May 25, 2004 12:17 PMThe fact is, Cosby said nothing about black underachievement that black people have not said before. His mistake, if you want to call it that, was in speaking publicly. Because publicly, we — black and white — prefer to stick to the script that makes it easiest on us, demands the least from us.
So let me say something for the record. Much as some white folk pretend otherwise, racism didn't vanish one fine day long ago. It lives, here, now, still. And it isn't something black people can cure through self-improvement. Racism doesn't care how educated, wealthy or decent you are. It will still call you ignorant, deny you a loan and throw you in jail. It will still give white people unearned advantages on the basis of their whiteness.
And yet this also is true: For all the woe it brings, racism is not the proximate source of all the ills that beset the black underclass. We do not need white people's approval or even their involvement to correct much of what ails us — to require that our children spend less time with BET and more with BOOK, to reconnect our fathers with their families, to abandon the misbegotten mind-set that equates ignorance and thuggery with authentic blackness.
Poverty and miseducation are a petri dish for dysfunction, no matter what color you are. If you don't believe that, go hang around a neighborhood of poor and miseducated white people sometime.
So we ought to be able to raise these issues without it being seen as a sop to bigotry. In pitting racism against self-inflicted dysfunction, we embrace a false dichotomy. These are not contradictory truths but the indispensable halves of a complex whole.