Michael Eric Dyson (22 page)

Ever since Bill Cosby pilloried the poor, he has been praised for at long last breaking the silence about black pathology and the failure of lower-class blacks to see that their miserable lot is all their doing. Blaming white folk is a game that black folk have got to give up, and fast, before lacerating denials of our self-imposed downfall take all the wind from our cultural sails. For Cosby, self-initiative, not systemic solutions, is the way to black salvation. But taking Cosby seriously can only mean the continued frustration of all good people in the quest to figure out the causes of black suffering. It’s not that taking responsibility for oneself is in any way damaging to the poor, and, in fact, it is quite a good thing for them, and for all of us, to do. It is, rather, the heartless rider to such a belief that is the problem: the illusion that by assuming such responsibility the problems of the poor will disappear. It’s no sweat off Cosby’s back if he turns out to be wrong; but it may bring greater social stigma to the poor, and threatens to plunge those who buy Cosby’s argument deeper into regretful self-loathing because they believe they haven’t solved the riddle of their poverty. In truth, Cosby’s position vividly revives the embarrassment over the bad behavior of the poor that the black elite have felt for more than a century. Cosby says he doesn’t care what whites think, but in truth, his embarrassment suggests he cares a great deal.

Cosby’s position is dangerous because it aggressively ignores white society’s responsibility in creating the problems he wants the poor to fix on their own. His position is especially
disingenuous because he has always, with two notable exceptions, gone soft on white society for its role in black suffering. Now that he has been enshrined by conservative white critics as a courageous spokesman for the truth that most black leaders leave aside, Cosby has been wrongly saluted for positions that are well staked out in black political ideology. This false situation sets him up as a hero and a dissenter, when he is neither. Self-help philosophy is broadly embraced in black America; but black leaders and thinkers have warned against the dangers of emphasizing self-help without setting it in its proper context. It creates less controversy and resistance—and, in fact, it assures white praise—if black thinkers and leaders make whites feel better by refusing to demand of them the very thing that whites feel those leaders should demand of their followers, including the poor: responsibility. Like so many black elite before him, Cosby, as a public figure who has assumed the mantle of leadership, has failed in his responsibility to represent the interests, not simply demand the compliance, of the less fortunate.

It should surprise no one that Bill Cosby has let white folk off the hook for the problems of black America. Cosby, as we’ve seen, has never been comfortable in confronting white society over the legacy of white supremacy. His emphasis on color-blind comedy, and his retreat from social activism, were as much about avoiding the discomforts of race—including, oddly enough, the responsibility to represent as a fortunate black the interests of other blacks—as they were about overcoming racism. That’s the case because deciding to “work white” meant that the white audience, his bread and butter,
must never be toasted. “People have to like you if you’re going to be a comic,” Cosby said in 1969. “After a cat establishes the fact that he’s funny, 40 percent of the pressure is eased up on him because, when he walks out, people already like him.”
¹
Cosby’s likability extended to
The Cosby Show
in large part because he refused to put white folk on the spot by speaking about race at all. Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, in their empirical study of
The Cosby Show
, point out a disturbing consequence of the show’s success: that it made white America believe that everything was fine in black America, that racism was no longer a bother and that whites wouldn’t have to wrestle with their role in a society that was still plagued by racial inequality. As Jhally and Lewis write:

Not only did
The Cosby Show
encourage whites to be racially oblivious (
Cosby
debuted halfway through Ronald Reagan’s rule and, like the president, the comedian possessed the uncanny ability to make millions of citizens feel very good about being American, an easy enough feat since they were joined at the hip of nostalgic patriarchy, Cosby as Father, Reagan as Grandfather, a partnership fueled by racial amnesia), but it also shifted the blame for poor blacks who weren’t like the Huxtables onto the poor themselves. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues that the images on
The Cosby Show
, much like those on the controversial early ’50s series
Amos ’n’ Andy
, took on a life of their own in the culture and reinforced harmful conservative political beliefs.

That’s a point that Cosby sorely needs to remember.

It’s a point Cosby might have easily grasped nearly thirty years ago, when he wrote his 1976 doctoral dissertation, or before that, nearly forty years ago, when he hosted a 1968 television special,
Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed?
These two documents, along with an interview Cosby did in
Playboy
magazine in 1969, are the rare exceptions when Cosby took off the gloves, and the blinders, to discuss race in public with candor and discernment.
⁴
In Cosby’s career, none of these three performances have garnered anything near the attention paid to his albums, TV series or books. They are radical departures from his color-blind catechism, which explains, perhaps, their relative obscurity in his corpus. I’ve already taken up his dissertation, which bluntly engages the obstacles to black educational achievement, earlier in the book; his provocative, race-conscious narration in
Black History
, though it packs a rhetorical wallop (when I saw this as a ten-year-old in school, it was high octane fuel to study black culture, and take pride in myself, even more), and while doubtless an expression of his views at the time, was scripted for him to read.

But Cosby is totally unfettered in his
Playboy
interview, parts of which I’ve discussed already, and it is here that one finds a reflective soul who was much more willing than he is today to hold white America accountable for its numerous sins against his brothers and sisters.
⁵
It is tempting to classify Cosby’s remarks as merely a reflection of the racial times in which they were hatched, but that is unlikely, at least not as a primary explanation for their existence, since Cosby so diligently guarded his color-blind bona fides even then. It is more likely that this was an aspect of Cosby’s identity that he routinely suppressed, both in private in mixed-racial company and in a public composed of whites of every ideological stripe, but that he chose, at this moment, to reveal to the open-minded, liberal white readers of a men’s magazine.
⁶

Cosby’s interlocutor, Lawrence Linderman, asked Cosby about his comedy routines, his role on
I Spy,
and black stereotypes. Linderman wondered whether Cosby agreed with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver’s belief that a civil war was in the offing if black demands for equality went unheeded. “A lot of black men feel that way, and I can’t say they’re wrong, because America’s resistance to giving the black man a fair shake is almost unbelievably strong,” Cosby replied. “And when black people keep butting their heads against the stone wall of racism, there are those who feel they
have
to become violent.”
⁷
Cosby suggested that there could be no denying that there should be equality in America, but that the obstacle to equality lay not in black people themselves, as Cosby now contends, but in white society. “[T]he white man doesn’t want us to have it,” Cosby said, “because then he’ll be giving
up a freedom of his—to reject us because of color. I really think that black people could march until the end of the world and the majority of whites still wouldn’t want to give up what they see as their precious right to be racists.” Of course, some may decide that Cosby felt as he did then about white resistance because the legal barriers to black equality remained, but that is inaccurate, since by the time of his
Playboy
interview, all the major civil rights legislation from the ’60s had already been passed: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination illegal in public places, such as restaurants, hotels and theaters; the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which gave black southerners the right to vote; and the 1968 Civil Rights Act (the Fair Housing Act), passed in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination, which outlawed housing discrimination.

It was King’s assassination that drove Cosby to conclude that “the nonviolent approach appear[s] irrelevant to many black people.” Cosby believed that nonviolence was “as meaningful today as when [King] was alive,” even as he understood the disavowal of the philosophy by activists like Stokely Carmichael, a complexity of thought that shows in Cosby’s mapping of the black ideological landscape. “I don’t think people can arbitrarily be put into neat categories of violent or nonviolent. I can tell you that I
don’t
believe in letting black people get pushed around when they’re in the right. If a lot of black people no longer believe in nonviolence, it’s because they’ve lost all faith and trust in white men.” That loss of faith, alas, seems to have had little to do with the black
failure to take advantage of increasing opportunities and everything to do with the persistence of structural, and, yes, systemic, barriers to progress. Cosby even believed that “[m]any intelligent and educated black people are tired, just tired, of being noble, of not striking back,” a statement that may have revealed Cosby’s own frustration with his colorblind ideals and his political noninvolvement. (In fact, earlier the same year, another reporter noted Cosby’s “remarkable self-control—at what cost in self-repression, tension and future grief, who can say?”)
⁸

Cosby made a remarkable comparison, one also made by King a year earlier in a little-known sermon, between the condition of blacks and those citizens of the world interred in concentration camps.
⁹
Cosby believed that many whites secretly hoped that blacks would renounce nonviolence so that a law could be produced to “quietly march us off into concentration camps until we learned that this is
their
country.” When Linderman countered that most whites think that the “concentration camp theory is a myth,” Cosby elaborated.