In my latest reading of Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?,
Michael Eric Dyson cited studies that contradict Bill Cosby’s
assertions in his controversial 2004 speech before the NAACP. Bill
Cosby chided the poor African-American parents who bought their kids
expensive sneakers rather than Hooked-on-Phonics; Dyson referred to a
study indicating that gross materialism was not a significant problem
among poor African-American young people, many of whom were spending a lot of their money on necessities. Bill Cosby lambasted
anti-intellectualism within African-American communities; Dyson
responded that the African-American drop-out rate is dramatically lower
than Cosby said, and that there are studies indicating that
African-Americans are as (in some cases more) committed to
intellectualism on average as whites. Cosby criticized crime within
African-American communities; Dyson cited a study indicating that there
was a higher incidence of illegal drug use among white twelfth-graders
in 2003 than among African-American twelfth-graders.
In some cases, I was wondering how some of what Dyson was saying
could co-exist. For example, Dyson referred to a study indicating that
African-American parents, on average, are more involved in their
children’s education than white parents. Earlier in the book, in
responding to Cosby’s attack on negligent African-American parents,
Dyson asks how poor African-American parents can be attentive to their
children, when the parents are working long hours just barely to make
ends meet. Both, I am sure, are aspects of reality, in some way, shape,
or form.
Incidentally, Dyson does quote John WcWhorter, whose book, Losing the Race,
challenges the sorts of narratives that Dyson holds. Cosby in his
speech was criticizing the linguistic tendencies within poor
African-American communities, and Dyson quoted a statement by McWhorter,
a linguist, that Cosby himself “speaks more ebonics than he knows”
(McWhorter’s words).
All of this is interesting, but what I find most fascinating is when
Dyson quotes things that Cosby has said that contradict or undermine
Cosby’s remarks in his 2004 speech. Cosby disregarded inequalities in
education in his speech; in his dissertation about two decades before,
however, he acknowledged them, and made arguments on the basis of them.
In his 2004 speech, Cosby was critical of the way many poor
African-Americans talk; his show, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,
however, featured African-American dialect, and Dyson on pages 78-79
quotes a beautiful passage in which Cosby acknowledged (maybe even
appreciated) the distinct black southern dialect of his 85-year old
grandfather. Cosby in his 2004 speech bemoaned crime among
African-Americans, but Dyson quotes a statement Cosby made years earlier
that criticized the unfairness and inequality of the American criminal
justice system.
At times, in my reading thus far, Dyson appears to criticize Cosby
for hypocrisy. Cosby is critical of African-Americans who drop out of
school or do not do well in school, when Cosby himself was not a good
student and dropped out of high school; Cosby’s road to his doctorate
was rather roundabout. Cosby was bemoaning alleged materialism within
poor African-American communities, when Cosby himself has catered to
materialism by appearing in numerous commercials.
I’ll stop here. So far, I’m finding this book to be much better than many of the Amazon reviews said it was.