Michael Eric Dyson (7 page)

If Bill Cosby’s views derive from profound debates about black identity, these debates can shed greater light on his racial philosophy and, more recently, his comments about the black poor. To be sure, Cosby’s decision to kick the habit of race in his art in the early sixties—a decision “urged on him” by white manager Roy Silver—had many advantages.
⁵⁸
First, Cosby’s strategy of accidental black identity countered the clumsy way white television writers used racial humor to get laughs. Next, Cosby’s strategy met racial stereotype at its roots and cut it off; thus he wouldn’t have to face the problem of how to explain an offensive sketch, since it would be stopped before it began. For instance, Cosby refused to become the “token” Negro on
I Spy
who drew unnecessary attention to his race. Cosby and his manager culled the scripts for potential offenses.
⁵⁹
In one script, an Asian child was supposed to rub Cosby’s face and be surprised that his color didn’t come off. Cosby was annoyed and promised that should it happen again, “I’ll rub back.”
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Third, viewing race as a crutch caused Cosby to work harder to be funny without playing his race for easy laughs. In Cosby’s view, color was the lazy comedian’s ruse, used in lieu of digging deeper into the human psyche and the world outside of race to find humor.

Cosby’s views were simple and absolute: Race-conscious comedy is less authentic, and certainly less compelling, than color-blind humor. Cosby failed to see that while the easy reliance on color
could
be a crutch, it didn’t have to be. There are many ways to probe the complex interiors of color—to hold it up in the light of comedic day and peer inside its prismatic effect. Moreover, Cosby overlooked how much work
such an enterprise might demand. Lazy comedians are lazy comedians, in whatever guise or genre they operate. Diligent artists can bring new insight by relentlessly stretching their art. Dick Gregory did it before Cosby, and Richard Pryor and Chris Rock have done it since. Despite Cosby’s brilliant work, race hasn’t disappeared; it seems he might have as usefully led us
through
the battlefields of race instead of
around
them. Or, failing that, he might have more loudly applauded comedians besides Gregory and Pryor who did. While Cosby’s comedy elegantly conjures the nonexistence of race, there is moral beauty as well in confronting the beast and slaying it with a laugh, a strategy used by black folk through the ages.
⁶¹

A convincing argument can be made for playing with stereotypes to deconstruct them; it is just as reasonable to critically engage black archetypes and experiment with antitypes. Cosby’s way of proceeding, as if stereotypes didn’t exist, or as if most antitypes were useless and self-defeating, is
one
way, a sometimes helpful way, of dismantling them. But there can be value in hammering away at stereotypes—or signifying on them, or relishing the demystification of their esoteric lunacies, and thus resisting their rule laugh by laugh. The same can be said for black comedy’s role in treating archetypes and antitypes. Keenan Ivory Wayans’s sketch variety series,
In Living Color
, often assaulted plastic archetypes of blackness and exploded—and, yes, often extended—racial stereotypes in the risky endeavor of probing rather than idolizing black culture.
In Living Color
, through its irreverent antitypes and its signifying excesses, showcased a different, complex side of the black humanity Cosby longs to affirm. If
nothing else, Wayans proved that art doesn’t exist merely to reinforce “positive” views of black life, but to invite blacks and others to confront our identities, to reflect on them, to be bothered by them and to probe, often in uncomfortable ways, the racial pieties we hold dear. In one brilliant stroke,
In Living Color
addressed the stages, status and styles of black identity. Comedy shouldn’t just soothe; it should also disturb. Color needn’t be a crutch; it can also be a catalyst—to self-reflection and greater understanding.

Cosby’s effort to bring the races together through his comedy was both courageous and flawed. The yen for truths that unite blacks and whites reflected the integrationist ethos of the civil rights movement Cosby wished neither to join nor lead. Cosby’s comedy enlivened the ideals of universality and color blindness at which branches of the movement aimed. But there was often a huge gap between what the movement meant by “universal” and “color-blind” and what the broader society understood them to be. Cosby’s frequent failure to understand that difference has made his vision of color blindness and universalism much less salient, and, quite frankly, much less useful, to black folk. The whites who came to Cosby because he failed to unnerve them, to shake them, or to challenge them at all, felt just fine. As Cosby boasted to Rex Reed, “People accept me because I’m not controversial. Most of them don’t even think of me as a Negro.”
⁶²

The civil rights movement perceived universalism in the guiding ideals of democracy and justice that should benefit all peoples. The movement also argued that the “self-evident” claims of humanity for
each
community must be respected;
one needn’t destroy one’s particular identity to fit in. As W.E.B. Du Bois argued in 1903, black folk didn’t want to lose our identity as the price of our survival. For Du Bois, the American Negro “would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
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Unlike Du Bois, Cosby didn’t see that black identities needn’t give up their particular ethnic or racial slants to be universal; that’s a false dichotomy engineered by the white merchants of a variety of universalism that seeks to project the normative as the universal. The two surely aren’t the same.

It is supremely ironic that, under the banner of universalism and “self-evident” rights, black folk fought to gain benefits of citizenship that turned out to be neither self-evident nor universal. It should give pause to folk like Cosby that the universal as it was conceived in areas of white society was a masquerade of racial privilege that only
appeared
to be welcoming and inclusive. By contrast, black folk were often viewed by their white opponents, the upholders of the universal, as shattering the political compact by asking for “special” rights—except that those “special” rights turned out to be the rights that were guaranteed to all white male citizens. Black folk made their arguments about being included in the center of political privilege while being shunted to the social periphery; they were often regarded as vulgarly particular in their claims. Paradoxically, as blacks begged to be included in
the universal from an allegedly particularistic standpoint, they were denied access by the advocates of an allegedly universal perspective.

The justification for keeping blacks from their universally recognized rights of citizenship was an alleged cultural and moral inferiority. Black folk fell literally and metaphorically beyond the pale of white identity, which, during the time Cosby rose to fame in the early sixties, was viewed as the divining rod for normalcy. Most whites and a large number of blacks—and who can blame them, since it was beat into their brows from the time they got here—viewed white identity as normative, and hence universal, since whites were able to impose their interpretation of its meaning on the nation. Whiteness, a particular slant on the universal, was enshrined as its very definition. In reality, in its white supremacist mode, it was a gross defection from the very spirit of the universal, though in other aspects it needn’t have been, since all universals must find local footing. This cultural situation understandably confused citizens of all colors, including gifted folk like Cosby who could expect no exemption from the seeming omnipresence of white culture.

Each time Cosby cringed at
the very thought
of color or race in comedy, he bought the logic of normative white identity hook, punch line and sinker. Cosby didn’t cringe at race or color per se; he cringed at
blackness
. He didn’t see the color of whiteness; it was the “universal” he embraced. When Cosby talked of doing comedy that both blacks and whites could enjoy, its ideals and standards were often derived from a white base. (As proof, Cosby and his early white managers ruthlessly
scrutinized his routines with the intent that Cosby should be color-blind, or, in their words, “work white.”)
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Even when Cosby turned to his family for material for one of his legendary routines, say, about his brother Russell, he undermined the universal character of the story by ignoring its racial dimensions and an important lesson of the civil rights movement: The “particular” that is not conceived as exclusively or exhaustively representative is the path to the universal.

Universalism may be composed of either vicious or virtuous specificities. The use of race didn’t have to mean that Cosby had to forsake his dream to become universal; he simply needed to avoid the illusion that any particular identity, white or black, could possibly capture
the
truth. His decision to go color-blind just as color could legitimately be explored through humor was a missed opportunity for us and Cosby, who, given his desire for uplifting art, might have taught us all a great deal about race through his stand-up routines, television shows, comedy albums and films. To do so, he didn’t have to leave comedy and become an activist like Dick Gregory, who, by 1967, viewed himself “as a social commentator who uses humor to interpret the needs and wants of Negroes to the white community, rather than as a comedian who happens to deal in topical social material.”
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Cosby might have benefited, however, from a complex view of black identity instead of the simple view of blackness that seemed to hold him back.

Cosby’s racial confusion and embrace of simple blackness didn’t end there, but flashed as well in his reluctance to speak
out on race. The comic’s stern refusal to be a leader is understandable. “I’m
tired
of those people who say, ‘You should be doing more to help your people.’ I’m a comedian,
that’s all.
”
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It is extremely difficult to balance the obligations to excel as a black entertainer, or more generally as a black professional, with the demands that one speak for one’s race. If it is true now, it was even truer when Cosby first blazed to celebrity. The sheer unavoidability of racial representation, however, looms for the gifted and blessed, for those whose talents make them, willy-nilly, role models and de facto spokespeople for a race still under siege, with one-quarter of its members mired in poverty. That there is little choice in the matter often gnaws at those whose natural inclination is to recede into the woodwork of their given profession. Cosby has insisted that he is better suited for quiet, behind-the-scenes race work, a claim that is odd to some given the public life well-known comedians lead.

We should draw a distinction, however, between a comic’s professional persona and his public position as a private citizen. A comic’s privacies—of emotion, of experience, of evolution—fuel artistic expression. But his public actions as a private citizen, as one not elected or appointed to office, appeal to a different dimension of his identity. The comic-citizen is a species of all articulations of role switching and the frequent genre blurring that occur when celebrity enters the equation. To be of use to his group, the well-known comic of color has to occasionally breach the pact he makes with himself—that he will act out on stage his encounter with personal and social issues that can be turned to creative advantage, but otherwise,
for the sake of his sanity and dignity, he will try to keep everything to himself. (Of course, comics like Richard Pryor shredded this agreement in ways that were both spectacular and utterly horrifying.) The comic-citizen affirms members of his race who identify with him even as his celebrity amplifies their influence through his identification with them. Fair or not, the comic of color, just like most black professionals, is
presumed
to have a contribution to make—a presumption fed by the desperation to be validated by the fortunate of the race—and it is the
public
character of that contribution that is critical to his constituents.

If the comic of color can’t help being representative, it is because she embodies in her art the turmoil and suffering that anonymous blacks regularly endure without the platform or public sympathy the celebrity comic may enjoy. The black comic need not surrender a complex or antitypical or independent vision of black identity to uphold her critical function; part of the appeal of black comics is their irreverent perspectives that encourage pitiless cultural inventory and relentless self-critique.
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The black comic’s artful engagement with the stages and styles of black identity only bolster her position of authority and representation, especially if she has chosen the strategy of intentional blackness and opted to publicly identify
as
a black figure
with
her black people. If, however, the comic has declined those representational duties and has instead chosen the strategy of accidental blackness, then her words may be interpreted as hostile, unloving and harsh. This is Cosby’s dilemma: Having been accidentally black for forty years, he has suddenly and violently
switched strategies of self-presentation to an intentional blackness that can be supported by neither his politics nor his past. Cosby’s choice to go public as a crusader against poor blacks—those who may have looked up to him over the years with memories of
Uptown Saturday Night
, where he appeared more intentionally “black” than in most other roles, or who may have fondly reminisced about
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
’s marvelously vernacular intonations, contrary to Cosby’s present mission to stamp out Ebonics—is remarkably troubling, for reasons I explore throughout this book. For now, two problems are most pressing.