Michael Eric Dyson (23 page)

Linderman asked Cosby whether such a war could be averted and he bluntly replied, “That’s up to the white man. He’s at the point now where he will either have to allow the black man his civil rights or try to wipe him out.” Cosby expertly mapped the escalating methods of black dissent called into being by staunch white resistance: singing, sit-ins and marching; enduring beatings, burnings and bombings; the assassinations of black leaders; and the sparking of urban rebellions. When Linderman evoked Malcolm X’s famous application to black struggle of the adage that the squeaky hinge got the oil—that only black violence could get white America to respond—Cosby proved to be Malcolm’s metaphoric match, and perhaps even more emphatic in his blistering indictment of the genocidal intentions of the white establishment.

Cosby spoke powerfully about how racist white leaders foment tension between the races. He argued that the easy access to guns heightened racial tensions—“The way I look at it is that guns are sold to protect whites against blacks”—especially between blacks and poor whites, since the “leaders of bigotry have got to keep the poor, ignorant white cat really upset and nervous, so that their friends the gun manufacturers can sell him some guns and maybe even some bazookas as well.” Cosby wasn’t sure whether race war could be prevented, but if that prospect was to be strengthened, it rested in amassing black political power, such as had occurred in Cleveland and Gary, Indiana, with the election of the nation’s first black mayors. But Cosby admitted that these politicians would most likely be hamstrung by white boards of directors and city planners who would block the path of racial progress. Cosby also revealed that most blacks don’t trust black politicians who are beholden to white interests. He colorfully explored the “field nigger” versus “house nigger” dichotomy, perhaps most famously employed by Malcolm X as a way to distinguish between blacks on plantation fields, who had the fate of the race in mind, and those in the house with the master, who made his interests, not the well-being of blacks, the highest priority.

Cosby was equally eloquent about the misleading belief among some critics that the immigrant experience cast a chastising lens on blacks who failed to match the achievements of citizens who hailed from foreign shores. Cosby anticipated some of the arguments made by contemporary scholars about how ethnic Europeans are remade as white Americans in the crucible of race, while blacks continue to be excluded from the privileges of white skin in the mainstream.

For Cosby, the “unkept promises and half-truths” of whites to blacks have issued in a “justifiable distrust” of white America. He argued that it was just for black folk to run their own organizations, “even at the risk of alienating white friends,” since true white friends would understand the need for racial autonomy.

Although Cosby has recently urged an almost blind devotion to self-help strategies while leaving aside concern for structural factors, he encouraged a vastly different approach
years ago. When Linderman posed to Cosby the results of a poll suggesting that “most white people believe there’s no real difference in the way they grow up and the way blacks grow up—and conclude that blacks themselves are totally responsible for all their social and economic problems”—a statement that very much reflects Cosby’s current mindset, showing that he’s only now caught up to what white folk believed thirty-five years ago, the same white folk he deemed as hurtful to black interests—Cosby sang a different tune.

Not only did Cosby call out the extraordinary shortsightedness, and unfairness, of whites’ believing that black folk had caused their own problems, but he discerned as well that “most black people have finally discovered they’ve been deluding themselves.” In answer to Linderman’s terse, “About what?” Cosby brilliantly summarized the insight of many
blacks torn between fighting for justice and acknowledging the bone-deep refusal of whites to accept them. The civil rights movement under King’s leadership had forced racism “out into the open, so the world could see it.” It was then that blacks “found out that most whites just didn’t
want
them to have a growing place in America’s future.” That realization, Cosby says, was the seed of blacks’ finding salvation in their own race, and “we turned to ourselves for help, as we had to.” Building a haven to nurture a proud black identity was crucial to these self-help measures. For Cosby, many blacks had begun to go to necessary extremes to bolster their identities and to reject

Cosby’s intelligent and unsparing dissection of white supremacy, a rare public gesture by this color-blind figure, offers stirring testimony against his present refusal to hold white society responsible for its role in black suffering
at all
, or more than perfunctorily, in asides that serve as begrudging concessions and preludes to more attack. (“And please don’t give me anything about systemic racism,” Cosby said in a Detroit stop on a national Blame-the-Poor Tour billed as
A Conversation with Bill Cosby
. “Yes, it’s there, but why is your mouth not working?”)
¹⁵
Cosby’s ill-tempered insistence that the poor not blame white folk for their troubles appears to be at once a caricature of how the black poor think of their condition and a flat disavowal of the history he so eloquently covered in his
Playboy
interview.

The black poor, like most black people, have a more sophisticated and perhaps more complex understanding than we might imagine about how they have come to be poor and what they must do about it. Few studies of the black poor portray them as endlessly griping about “the white man,” and when they do, they understand “the white man” not literally but rather in metaphoric terms, as a symbol of the myriad forces that have helped to determine their plight. Many black poor, as we have seen, share some of the same values that motivate the mainstream—hard work, when they can get it; the desire for their children to prosper; the dream of upward mobility; and the soulful embrace of decent living. If they
know, as most of them surely do, that they have kept their values and made every effort to climb out of the endless pit of poverty, they may sadly conclude that they are cursed, with social scientists and critics right there to confirm their suspicions, while no amount of corrective theology will remove its trace completely from their souls, especially in this age of the gospel of prosperity. (The gospel says, “If you’re blessed and favored, you’ll be prosperous, and showered with material goods, and if not, you’re praying and living wrong,” another way to blame the poor for their plight, except now it’s more lethal because it’s under God’s signature.) Or they may believe that they are blessed
because
they’re poor, adjusting to their inevitable plight and seeing in it, defensively, for their salvation and sanity, the design of The Spirit, which, in some cases, is nearly as bad as feeling cursed. Or they see that they are the victims of forces beyond their control but against which, with God’s help, or with the help of more secular consolations, they are pledged to fight, if not for themselves, then for their children’s sake.

Those poor who arrive at the latter conclusion (and it is the bulk of them, it miraculously seems), even if they are taunted by the lure of the first two options, have already mobilized a keen sense of self-determining action. Too often, some of them take on conservative beliefs about why they are poor as a kind of wish fulfillment: If they conform to the narrative that hard work leads to success, despite the contrary testimony of their lives and those of many of their friends, they may strike the existential lottery and get out of the ghetto. Ironically, the more desolate their condition, the
more determined some poor people are to strictly abide by such beliefs, because they are so desperate for it to be true. They are even willing at times to sacrifice their survival skepticism, the instincts that screen errors and lies, in the hope that they can trade distrust of their own instincts for rewards—of upward mobility and material security. Given the war on the poor being fiercely waged in the culture, the moral counternarratives, the ones that admit to continuing obstacles and that proclaim their worth not because they’re poor but because they have managed to remain human in inhuman circumstances, wither on the vine. Cosby’s blaming of the poor for failing to take the blame for their lives (though in truth many more poor people than should already do) and for blaming, instead, the white man, deprives the poor of a reasonable, empirical explanation for their plight and keeps them from connecting to a venerable legacy of social action, both of which were symbolized in Cosby’s
Playboy
interview.

What, then, has led Cosby to withdraw his kindly countenance from the poor and to offer them, instead, a menacing scowl, while rejecting the explanations he offered in his
Playboy
interview? As far as I can tell, there are two factors. First, he is embarrassed by how poor black folk behave. Cosby’s embarrassment is widely shared among the black elite and harkens back a century to when black aristocrats promoted a philosophy of racial uplift to prove to racist whites that blacks were human—a favorite Cosby theme. As a result, upper-class blacks became moral cops: They policed poor black communities from the pulpit, the lectern, the convention floor, and the fraternity and sorority hall, damning the
pathologies they believed were ruining the reputation of the race. Cosby’s views are little more than an update of this mode of racial reckoning. Second, Cosby seems to have departed in fatal ways from the hard-won racial wisdom about the individual traits and societal forces that influence one’s economic and social standing. There is often a critical ideological balance in black communities that colors our beliefs about poverty—about what explains why some people are born poor but escape, while others remain trapped. Cosby’s beliefs tap into complex views held by blacks about the causes of poverty that we will need to explore before situating his comments.

The philosophy of racial uplift, dating back to the nineteenth century, rests on the belief among black elites that the lower classes of black folk had to be roped in before their moral lapses gave white folk even more reason to repress black life. Indeed, the tensions between the black elite and the working classes and poor folk that I describe in Chapter 4 grow out of the philosophy of racial uplift. Black aristocrats took to chastising poor black folk in a variety of venues, including schools, churches and community and fraternal organizations, seeking to inculcate in their loose charges the Victorian values to which they subscribed and which they hoped would win them acceptance from the white majority. The ultimate goal of racial uplift philosophy was to prove to white folk that the black race had made significant progress in reaching the goal of true civilization. Ironically, many of these whites would never themselves meet the strict standards advocated by many black aristocrats, and neither would they have to prove themselves worthy of the very requirements
they imposed on black life, thanks to one of the more gleaming hypocrisies that composed the immoral backbone of white supremacy.

Racial uplift, however, wasn’t a simple affair, and had at least two prongs.
¹⁶
The first prong, a more interesting and organic vision of racial help that was obscured rather quickly by its more elitist interpretation, extended from the folk religion of slaves and touted personal, spiritual and, at points, social transcendence of earthly suffering. Education and theological resistance to white supremacy were viewed as crucial to black liberation and the social uplift of black folk from the pits of political degradation. This vision of uplift was prominent in the aftermath of slavery and during Reconstruction. The second prong protruded from the efforts of black elites to promote what historian Kevin Gaines says was “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth. . . . Amidst legal and extralegal repression, many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority; hence the phrase, so purposeful and earnest, yet so often of ambiguous significance, ‘uplifting the race.’”
¹⁷