May 2008 Atlantic Monthly

The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’

http://www.theatlant...

<img src="http://www.theatlantic.com/images/issues/200805/cosby.jpg">

Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ,
I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July
evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in
everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Some were
there with their sons. Some were there in wheelchairs. The audience was
packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to
capture the overflow. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals
stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where
they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. Clutching a cordless
mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared
remarks and comic ad-libs. A row of old black men, community elders,
sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. The rest of
the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s
punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man!
Teach!”

He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become
valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by
her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started
like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I
stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what
helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or
great-grandmother.”

“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist.“Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”

Audience: “Right here!”

Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by
their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of
them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated,
over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers.
No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that
their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support
payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not
to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.

“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a
pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the
best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal
ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our
neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and
said, ‘By any means necessary.’

“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued.
“I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our
children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in
Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out
the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus
is already within you.”

Cosby was wearing his standard uniform—dark sunglasses, loafers, a
sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher
learning. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d
gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. He was preaching from
the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past
four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he
bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m
tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white
people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to
me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”......

My Comments
For all those throughout the generations landing on America's shores in
pursuit of a better life, having persevered in achieving all that America has come to mean as the land of opportunity, it has never,ever
been an issue of "us versus them". It was, is, all only a matter of
doing whatever it took to reap the rewards of the American dream
through hard work, sacrifice, dedication.

African-Americans, as
they are often quoted to say, arrived here forcibly, in slave ships,
against their will, having always been, even up to this very day, it
seems, a matter of us versus them, of Black versus White.

Mr.
Cosby deserves tremendous credit in exhorting the black community to
abandon the politics of the past, to look beyond the failures of a
Jesse Jackson, an Al Sharpton, to embrace the principles of self
sufficiency, self-sacrifice, self-reliance, as the foundation for
success and reward for themselves and the black community.