Right!!! It's always nice to have a clue when learning.
Quitting teaching phonics ranks right up there with starting teaching "NEW MATH"!!!
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.
Only when cousins and honkys use it.
Since all famous "Mintrel Shows" were done by whites in blackface,yes,it is a slur on Bill.
ahhhhh. So ol' Cos is an Oreo, eh, Mizz Brown?
bump for later
Did you know that when blacks were in Minstrel shows,even all black ones,they too wore blackface?
Right!!! It's always nice to have a clue when learning.
Quitting teaching phonics ranks right up there with starting teaching "NEW MATH"!!!
As Johnny Carson would say, I did not know that.
____________________________________________
Ok, Ennis Cosby was a doctorate candidate in Special Ed when he was murdered, we all know about the seedy characters running that racket. The "VERY" expensive car was bought by his "very" wealthy dad. The russian who killed him for his car was no mobster, just a thug.
Got any habits aside from character assassination, of a murder victim yet. Pitiful.
Who was enthralled with the 'gansta' style that Cosby is criticizing. After he committed the crime, he bragged about it to all his friends. Then, after they arrested him, he was so stupid that he continued to brag about his exploits while still in jail! Needless to say, his parents are deeply ashamed - all they wanted to do was get ahead in the USA.
They were NOT an insult to blacks at all and many blacks were FAMOUS interlocutors and cakewalk dancers and the like,in the late 1800s-early 1900s. And yes,I have done research on this matter.
The same race hustlers were around back then,and their descendants are with us today."AMOS AND ANDY" was a GREAT show and did NOT denigrate blacks at all,but the NAACP got them off the air.That show and Minstrel Shows were better than the appalling garbage in rap videos,and black movies,that are hailed today.:-P
Knights of the Mystic Sea placemarker.
Amos 'n Andy was my favorite show when I was a little kid!
The Kingfish ... ah, those were the days. ;^)
My husband has the tapes of the show (yes,you can buy them,our daughter gave them to him for a Christmas present a few years ago)and they're still hysterically funny.
As a pre-schooler, back in the day before TV, I used to lay on the floor in front of the radio listening to programs like A&A imagining that their kitchen was like our kitchen and their house was like our house - they were real people to me.
Radio was far better for developing the imagination than TV, imho. ;^)
Listen to you two talk about the good ole days before the wheel- I mean television was invented :ducking and running:
The question is why did they wear blackface? I watched a show about Bojangles and the things black people had to go through back then were unreal (in Hollyweird no less). I do think that most the gangsta rappers are as bad even worse now, and pretty much spit in the face of the old people gone by.
Did you listen to THE LONE RANGER,BIG JOHN AND SPARKY,THE JACK BENNY SHOW,and INNER SANCTUM too?
We had T.V. when I wsas bitty,too,but I still listened to the radio and it WAS better.:-)
To this day, I cannot do books on tape because the voice distracts me......I like to READ it myself.
I like radio better. It's always entertaining to imagine Mike Savage foaming at the mouth about Dubya ;-) There's no way someone can pull off HG Wells War of the Worlds today. Everyone is darned skeptical!
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