Recently I had the opportunity to discuss the Bill Cosby/Michael Eric Dyson controversy with friends on an email list. One gentleman took Prof. Dyson to task for “pimp[ing] our condition and creat[ing] an unnecessary debate just to sell some books and gain notoriety” because he agreed with Cosby’s alleged point of view and took a dim view of Dyson’s “attack.” I disagreed with him and spoke in Dyson’s defense.
… In my response, I will quote Dr. Dyson as much as possible because he is his own best defender. Where he doesn’t, I will supply my own thoughts. And note, that this is but the merest of shadows of what Dyson writes in his book. Here we go!
Title of the Book
The title of the book is partly about ensuring sales and partly quipping about the topic. Had the book been entitled Why I Disagree with Cosby and Other Thoughts, I’m not sure people would have found the book interesting enough to pick up let alone purchase. Dyson writes,
If Cosby’s implicit claim is that the black poor have lost their way, then I don’t mind suggesting, with only half my tongue in cheek, that the black middle class, of which I am a member has, in its views of the poor and its support of Cosby’s sentiments, lost its mind. I hope to lay bare the vicious assault of the Afristocracy on the Ghettocracy and offer a principled defense of poor black folk, one rooted in clear-eyed acknowledgment of deficiencies and responsibility but anchored by an abiding compassion for the most vulnerable members of our community.
The Speech
If you read Cosby’s speech, I’m willing to bet you would see vicious diatribe rather than impassioned truth telling. This kind of disrespectful behavior is not new for Mr. Cosby (see here for an example). But the nation’s love for this man lead many to give him a pass. If Rush Limbaugh had given that speech, many of us, if not most of us, would rise in righteous indignation. Truth telling does not depend on the speaker. The truth is simply that. What damns Mr. Cosby is not necessarily what he said in his speech. (Personally, I did find it sufficient to damn him, however, because as I read Dr. Dyson’s book I found Cosby to be a hypocrite, something for which I have little sympathy. Rule #1: Don’t exhibit the same behavior or pathology you insult others for, e.g. flicking the bird at Dyson in public or refusing to acknowledge that “outside” child or be a father to her. It’s bad form.) What damns him is his change of tactics. I watched an ABC News special on Mr. Cosby and I found his message had changed and changed dramatically at that. No more diatribes, only impassioned “Get up and do it” speeches. All of this was after Dyson called him to the carpet for his speech. Now if what he originally said about black men unknowingly screwing their grandmothers and naming one’s child “Shaniqua, Taliqua, and Muhammad and all that crap” was so good, so cathartic, so right, why not repeat it to the very people in the condition he lambasts?
Dyson writes,
Cosby’s position is dangerous because it aggressively ignores white society’s responsibility in creating the problems he wants the poor to fix on their own. His position is especially dangerous because he has always, with two notable exceptions, gone soft on white society for its role in black suffering. Now that he has been enshrined by the conservative white critics as a courageous spokesman for the truth that most black leaders leave aside, Cosby has been wrongly saluted for positions that are well staked out in black political ideology. This false situation sets him up as a hero and a dissenter, when he is neither. Self-help philosophy is broadly embraced in black America; but black leaders and thinkers have warned against the dangers of emphasizing self-help without setting it in its proper context. It creates less controversy and resistance–and, in fact, it assures white praise–if black thinkers and leaders make whites feel better by refusing to demand of them the very thing that whites feel those leaders should demand of their followers, including the poor: responsibility. Like so many black elite before him, Cosby, as a public figure who has assumed the mantle of leadership, has failed in his responsibility to represent the interests, not simply demand the compliance, of the less fortunate.
Continue reading “Cosby vs. Dyson”
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