Michael Eric Dyson (9 page)

Today, the picture is dramatically different for the most well-to-do blacks. For instance, black households in the upper income bracket, those making $75,000 to $99,000, increased fourfold between 1967 and 2003, composing 7 percent of the black population.
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And while the picture got far better for the bulk of the black middle class, they had a far less sure grasp of economic security. In 1960, for instance, there were only 385,586 blacks who were professionals, semi-professionals, business owners, managers or officials, a number that swelled to 1,317,080 by 1980. By 1995, there were nearly seven million black folk employed in middle-class occupations, boosted by blacks joining the ranks of social workers, receptionists, insurance salespeople and government bureaucrats.
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But signs of trouble persist. Despite the fact that the black median household income rose by 47 percent from 1967 to $29,026 in 2003, it still lagged by $16,000 the white
median household income of $46,900.
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Plus, the median household income for blacks fell by 3 percent in 2002 and fell by more than 6 percent between 2000 and 2003.
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And the unemployment rate among blacks, at 10.1 percent, is twice the national rate of 5.6 percent. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of blacks with manufacturing jobs declined by 18 percent, forcing blacks into the service sector—including professions like data processing, advertising and housekeeping—which employs 43 percent of the black workforce, a larger percentage than for whites in the economy.
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The problem with these jobs is that they have shown weak growth and provide fewer benefits. As a result, blacks, at 52 percent, lag far behind whites, at 71 percent, in employer-sponsored health care, and less than 40 percent of blacks have private pension plans, while more than 46 percent of whites are covered.
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All in all, nearly two in five nonelderly black folk had no health insurance between 2002 and 2003. And since more than half of all black families live in major metropolitan areas, the steadily increasing cost of public transportation is a huge problem. More than 12 percent of the black population relies on public transportation to get to work—and many others must also get to school and other vital destinations—while only 3.1 percent of whites must do the same.
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Finally, the poverty rate of black households is more than 24 percent, compared to 6.1 percent for white households.
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The educational prospects of black folk have suffered as well, but one may have never picked this up by listening to Cosby’s comments. There is a direct link between the social
and economic status of the most vulnerable and the quality of education they receive. As Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond has eloquently argued, disparities in wealth and resources result in a significantly unequal education for the poorest members of society, especially minority students.

The profound gulf between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society affects a huge portion of the black population and stretches between suburban schools and urban schools, where minorities account for between 95 and
99 percent of the student body.
¹⁶
As Jonathan Kozol showed in
Savage Inequalities
, there are telling differences between how much money suburban and urban schools spend on each student: In 1989, Chicago public schools spent a little more than $5,000 per student, while Niles Township High School, in a nearby suburb, spent $9,371 per student; central city Camden, New Jersey, schools expended $3,500 per student, while each student in suburban Princeton enjoyed an expenditure of $7,725; and in 1990 New York City schools invested $7,300 in each student, while schools in suburban Manhasset and Great Neck spent over $15,000 per student, even though they didn’t have nearly as many special needs.
¹⁷

As a result of the wide disparity in wealth in school districts—since schools often get revenue from the local property tax, the wealthier the district and the higher its property values the more resources it has—and huge differences in expenditures on each student, there are corresponding differences between suburban and urban schools, especially in the quality of teachers (higher paid and more experienced in the suburbs), the courses presented (smaller class size and more offerings in the suburbs), curriculum materials (out of date in urban schools) and equipment and facilities (up to date in the suburbs). In most suburban schools, computer technology is cutting edge; in many urban schools, it is barebones. Textbooks are often in wretched condition in urban schools, offering outdated material—for example, in a Chicago elementary school, fifteen-year-old textbooks were used, which led to the impression that Richard Nixon was still in office—
and in many cases can’t be taken home by students because there are barely enough to go around. The infrastructures of urban schools are often in grave disrepair, featuring toilets that don’t work, rooms without air conditioning and poor heating, and cracked or missing ceiling tiles in recreation rooms.

In the end, the huge wealth disparity not only enables white students to enjoy superior primary and secondary education but gives them an enormous advantage in the college sweepstakes.

The wide resource gulf between suburban and urban schools is exacerbated by the profound resegregation of American schools.
¹⁹
Although
Brown
was to have destroyed the vicious segregation of American schools, patterns of disturbing neoapartheid have endured, bringing in their wake substantive inequalities. More than 70 percent of black students in the country attend schools that are composed largely of minority students. Even though the segregation of black students falls more than 25 points below its level in 1969, the existence of financially strapped, resource-starved, technologically underserved predominantly minority schools is a rebuke to the judicial mandate to integrate students, and, it was thought, resources, in schools attended by all races. But the mythology of either resource sharing or true integration lapses in the face of current trends. White students usually attend schools where less than 20 percent of the student body is drawn from races other than their own, while black and brown students attend schools composed of 53 to 55 percent of their own race. In some cases, the percentage is much higher, as more than a third of them attend schools with a 90 to 100 percent minority population.
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As black and brown students get concentrated in knots of ethnicity, and often poverty, in central city schools, their educational resources are, likewise, increasingly depleted, resulting in gross inequities between white students and their black and brown peers. If Cosby was aware of this disturbing trend, he gave little indication as he railed against the poor parents and their children who are victims of resegregation.

It wasn’t always the case that Cosby blamed poor parents and students for their plight while ignoring the structural features of educational inequality. In his doctoral thesis, entitled, in the unwieldy fashion common to most dissertations,
An Integration of the Visual Media Via
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning
, Cosby got right to the heart of the matter as he argued that two fundamental issues had to be addressed if educators were to ensure equal education for all students: the development of a curriculum that would help students reach their full potential, but before that, “the need to eliminate institutional racism.”
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Cosby lucidly characterized his view of institutional racism when he elaborated on how schools instill harmful beliefs in black children.

It is evident from his dissertation that Cosby saw schools as hotbeds of ideology and politics that are transmitted through the curriculum, and more subtly through the attitudes of teachers as they interact with black students. Cosby also insisted on the link between systemic inequities and the diminished self-esteem of the student; he refused to unfairly blame black children for lacking the desire to succeed when the classroom passed along diseased ideas about black identity. Cosby argued that the “American Dream” is a myth—a myth, however, that he eagerly embraced a decade later, especially when he defended his
Cosby Show
family against critics who claimed that the Huxtables were insufficiently black. “To say they are not black enough is a denial of the American dream and the American way of life. My point is that this is an American family—an
American
family—and if you want to live like they do, and you’re willing to work, the opportunity is there.”
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In his dissertation, however, Cosby acknowledged that such a dream was denied to black children taught to mark time by filling the jobs their parents filled before them, a way to preserve white privilege.

Cosby also spoke passionately in his dissertation about the reasons black students fail: because of the urban school’s indifference to changing learning conditions; because they have had the right to fail removed; because they are bored, due to the unimaginative methods of teachers interested in controlling the student; and because little of what goes on in class makes sense. Cosby argued that the failure black children experienced would only reinforce “the debilitating sense of worthlessness whites convey in a variety of ways,” feeding the self-hatred of the black student.
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Cosby pleaded with urban schools to give urban children a sense of competence to ward off attitudes and behaviors that would destroy their character and intelligence. Thus, the urban schools had to develop a curriculum to fight institutional racism. Cosby concluded that blacks were not “the only victims” of racism, although they “bear the deepest scars of time-worn racial and intellectual inferiority myth preaching”; in his mind, “whites suffer in a more subtle way.”
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Cosby argued that the myth of black inferiority and white superiority was equally disastrous for black and white children. He said that whites

When Cosby raged against poor black parents and children in his recent comments, he forgot the lessons he had eloquently expressed nearly thirty years before. When he demanded, “What the hell good is
Brown v. the Board of Education
if nobody wants it?” he forgot what he had understood earlier: that desire is the child of environment, that vision is the gift of context, and, as he said, black “children are taught early not to aspire to or compete with their white counterparts” for jobs, or, we might add, for education either.