Regards, Ivan
Posted on 07/09/2004 4:25:02 PM PDT by MadIvan
BILL COSBY — the beloved TV dad and pitchman for everything from Coca-Cola to Jell-O — recently delivered a jaw-dropping tirade on the failings of lower-class blacks. On May 17, at an event in Washington to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision that opened the way for desegregation of schools, he attacked parents for not “holding up the end of this deal”. “I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange [prison] suit,” Cosby said. “Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18, and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol? . . . In all of this work, we cannot blame white people.”
For almost any other public figure in America, this sort of statement would have been a career killer on a par with revealing that you have a live boy or a dead woman stowed away back at your hotel room. But Cosby remains unbowed. He’s defended and amplified his comments in front of black audiences ever since. Right before the July 4 holiday, he railed against young blacks “cursing and calling each other ‘nigger’ as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they’re hip. They can’t read. They can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.”
What makes all of this even more amazing is that Cosby’s crusade seems to be working. To be sure there’s been a backlash. Elaine Brown, the former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party, spoke for the hardcore black radicals: “Bill Cosby will go down in . . . history along with the bloody activity of Colin Powell and the bootlicking of Condi Rice,” she told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. “He has nothing good to say about the black community that he has done nothing but profit from as a minstrel.”
Others are in denial: “If there were any doubts,” wrote a columnist in the Cleveland Free-Times, “about Bill Cosby’s insanity, his latest racial slur of blacks took care of them. Cosby is certifiably nuts.” And, a handful of unreconstructed white liberals is chalking Cosby’s comments up to the dementia that afflicts all men, black or white, when they join the ruling class. “[It] must be fun to beat up on people too young and too poor to fight back, or the elderly rich wouldn’t do it,” snarked Barbara Ehrenreich of The New York Times. “Cranky old rich people: now there’s a demographic group that qualifies as a genuine Menace 2 Society.”
But if you listen to black radio or notice the grudging support the civil rights community is giving Cosby — who is by no means politically conservative — it’s clear that the comedian has struck a chord among blacks.
THERE are plenty of good reasons for conservatives, white and black, to cheer Cosby’s crusade. In a sense the motive is as important as the message. The argument from non-racist conservatives was that too much help from the federal Government is counter-productive. In 1970, the late Patrick Moynihan (then a bureaucrat and later a Democratic senator from New York) suggested that what the black community could use most was a period of “benign neglect”. No one listened.
Instead welfare subsidised illegitimacy and family break-up to the point that out-of-wedlock births for blacks nearly tripled. Liberals would rightly counter that black poverty decreased dramatically over the same period, thanks to government aid. Conservatives disagree but, OK, it is a fair debate to be had.
But what is irrefutable – both to conservatives and to Cosby — is that some irreducible number of blacks were left behind and they are now immune to further government help. Cosby is right when he says: “These people are not parenting. They are buying things for their kids — $500 sneakers . . . And won’t spend $200 for Hooked On Phonics.” How would another government programme — or, for that matter, slavery reparations! — fix the problem?
The point of benign neglect was not to “punish” blacks. It was to allow the black community to generate or regenerate the sorts of habits and institutions that contribute to healthy society and healthy citizens. When told to sink or swim some people choose sink, but no community does. And one of the first requirements of a healthy community is the willingness of its leaders to shame those who opt for sinking. That’s what Cosby is doing and it takes a lot of courage to do it in today’s culture of grievance. Bill Cosby is an American hero.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Awesome. I got chills reading this!
Yes, Jonah - and Cosby - are correct. What's troubling though, is that the very people they are trying to help and encourage are not willing to listen. Not at all. The victim mentality has taken hold entirely too deeply.
Elaine Brown is a criminal and should have been jailed long ago.
You hit it on the nail.Its like pissing into the wind.The kids in"the hood"could give a flying fart about Cosby.he means absolutely nothing to them.And what a lot of folks don't understand is that daddy just ain't THERE most of the time and sometimes moms isn't doing right either so its completely ludicrous to get all excited either way about Cosby's remarks.
Cosby probably feels guilty that HE didn't do what HE should have done to stop his son from doing certain things when HE was a kid that might have saved his life.
I also think it would have been more effective if he had attacked youth culture in general since MANY young white kids are just as gutter mouthed,decadent and amoral as any I have ever encountered in the hood!
Riverman
Actually, that isn't a career killer after all...so long as you're a Democrat politician from Massachusetts.
Okay, wait just a damn second!
I agree with what Bill Cosby is saying, but it has nothing to do with hidden guilt over the murder of his son, Ennis!
Ennis Cosby was a crime victim who had done nothing wrong except pull over to the side of the road due to car trouble. His only "fault" was to do that in the state of California, which has no concealed-carry law, thus guaranteeing the thug who robbed and killed him of a defenseless victim.
I learned to read with Phonics in school back in the early 60's. When did they stop teaching it???
The place where I live is VERY polarized. I live very close to the line and have watched all sorts of things from front row seats. It ain't pretty. There are some common sense things young people could do to help themselves (save it for marriage is one) and they're just not willing to do it.
The culture, not 10 blocks from here, is a different world. If I didn't live so close, I might not believe it, but it's true. It looks, from the outside, like they don't want to do what it takes to make it. It's very sad and maddening at the same time.
At least some of the bigger names, like Cosby, are now willing to say it out loud. Backs will be turned, but at least it's on the record.
Sometime between the mid-late 70's and the early 80's. When my brothers and sister and I were in school.:(
"save it for marriage"?Now THATS a concept virtually unknown in ANY community today!
Riverman
Maybe Ennis WAS completely innocent.As I understand it,he was murdered by Russian mobsters while driving a VERY expensive car.There were rumblings at the time that Ennis may have had some seedy friends and,as someone once said,"if you want to know a person's charcter,look at their friends"
Riverman
Roger Douglas (the Labour Finance Minister from 1984 to 1988 - whose fame was the economic reforms known as "Rogernomics") has also suggested this way in a New Zealand context for the Maori poeple. I posted his speech on this topic on another thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1168564/posts
I'm sorry to hear that... that really sucks!
In Phonics class we learned what all the different prefix's and suffexes for words meant that helped you figure out what a word meant sometimes when you came across a word you didn't know while reading.
Minstrel? Is that a racial slur of some sort?
"What's troubling though, is that the very people they are trying to help and encourage are not willing to listen. Not at all. The victim mentality has taken hold entirely too deeply."
AND THE JESSE JACKSONS, AL SHARPTONS AND JULIAN BONDS OF THE WORLD WILL KEEP THEM WITH THE VICTIM MENTALITY BECAUSE THE MISERY OF BLACK FOLK GUARANTEES THEM CONTINUED FAME AND FORTUNE.
SOMEONE NEEDS TO TELL JESSE JACKSON THAT KEEPING A FAMILY ON WELFARE FOR FOUR GENERATIONS IS NO WAY TO KEEP HOPE ALIVE.
"In Phonics class we learned what all the different prefix's and suffexes for words meant that helped you figure out what a word meant sometimes when you came across a word you didn't know while reading."
I've always figured this was ridiculously obvious. Learning the different parts to make up a word is no different than learning the different words to make up a sentence.
Others are in denial: “If there were any doubts,” wrote a columnist in the Cleveland Free-Times, “about Bill Cosby’s insanity, his latest racial slur of blacks took care of them. Cosby is certifiably nuts.”The Free Times is published weekly and distributed, quite literally, for free. It's like a college newspaper (at an ultra-left college where PC reigns uber alles) funded by ads for 900 numbers, "outcall" massage, and shall-we-say "personal" ads. Even at that, it was out of business for a couple years, and came back only recently.
-Eric
If I recall correctly, the murderer was an 18-year-old Ukrainian immigrant hood acting on his own.
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