Bill Cosby blames parents for US society’s ills

By Lawrence Porter

14 July 2004

A major controversy has arisen over public comments made by the well-known
African-American comedian Bill Cosby, whose remarks over the past several
weeks have elicited commentaries in virtually every major newspaper in the
US.

Cosby has declared that the principal responsibility for the high
incarceration rate of black youth, as well as the problems of illiteracy
and the 50 percent dropout rate of black high school students, lies
primarily with the parents.

On May 17, Cosby was one of the principal speakers at a gala at
Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., held to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling banning segregation in the public
schools, Brown vs. Board of Education. In his speech, Cosby denounced low-
income black parents, stating, “People marched and were hit in the face
with rocks to get an education, and now you have these knuckleheads
walking around.... The lower economic people are not holding up their end
of the deal. These people are not parenting.”

Cosby continued: “I am talking about these people who cry when their son
is standing there in an orange suit [i.e., prison garb]. Where were you
when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he
was eighteen, and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol? And where
is his father?”

Both in his speech and in a subsequent column, published in the Detroit
News on June 13, Cosby placed the responsibility for the worsening and
increasingly desperate conditions caused by poverty on parents who have
allegedly failed to pay sufficient attention to their children.

While he correctly pointed out that many of the ills facing poor black
families stem from a lack of education, and noted the correlation between
inadequate education and early death, substance abuse and violence, he
prescribed an individual, rather than a social, solution to these problems.

What was needed, said Cosby, was “parent power!” He elaborated: “Proper
education has to begin at home.... We don’t need another federal
commission to study the problem. Scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois and John
Hope Franklin and activists such as Dorothy I. Height have already written
eloquently on the subject. What we need now is parents sitting down with
children, overseeing homework, sending children off to school in the
morning well fed, rested, and ready to learn.”

There was a time, some 50 years ago, when Mr. Cosby began his career, when
the now highly successful and wealthy comedian was keenly aware—as a
result of personal experience, acquaintance with prominent figures in
civil rights movement, and the prevailing atmosphere of social activism
and political debate—of the social and economic roots of illiteracy,
violence, petty crime, substance abuse and the other ills that inevitably
accompany poverty and the cultural backwardness and despair that poverty
breeds.

After all, Cosby grew up in a working class district of Philadelphia. He
played in the projects with his friends Fat Albert and Dumb Donald,
figures who became celebrated characters in his early comedy skits. He
has, however, become a rich man since then, and apparently has forgotten
that the conditions facing the working class have little in common with
the comfortable life of Dr. Huxtable, the character he portrayed on his
long-running television series, “The Cosby Show.”

The vast majority of black people he is addressing do not lead lives of
upper-middle-class privilege and economic security. They are working
people, many of whom face substandard conditions, often struggling to
raise a family on less than poverty wages. Their children generally attend
schools that are underfunded and understaffed. In predominantly black
communities in cities across the US, the public schools are in a state of
desperate disrepair.

Cosby cites W.E.B. DuBois to support his argument that the problem lies
with African-American parents, but DuBois, a sociologist who studied the
conditions of American blacks in the late 19th century, concluded that the
roots of the problems facing African-Americans were social, not
individual. DuBois eventually became a socialist, and argued that racial
oppression was bound up with class exploitation and could be overcome only
through the development of a movement for fundamental social change
directed against the capitalist system itself.

Whether Mr. Cosby likes it or not, he himself is the beneficiary of
political decisions made by the ruling class in America to create a black
upper-middle-class elite. Cosby is not a politician or political
scientist. However, he doesn’t need a profound knowledge of history to
recognize that he enjoys a level of wealth of which a black comedian would
never have dreamed 50 years ago.

Like a considerable section of the leadership of the civil rights movement
of the 1950s and the protest generation of the 1960s, Cosby has been won
to capitalism. In the intervening years, an entire generation of upwardly
mobile blacks has sought consciously to separate itself from the broad
mass of oppressed and working class poor, and turn its back on the social
devastation they confront.

In 1964, in his State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson
stated, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional
war on poverty in America.” Today, capitalism no longer even acknowledges
the vast social problems facing the majority of the population, especially
the poorest layers.

Today, liberals and Democratic leaders echo the views of the right wing by
preaching the gospel of “individual responsibility,” or remain silent
while both parties destroy what remains of the tenuous social safety net
established in previous decades.

What has happened in the 50 years since the Brown ruling? The US Census
confirms that for tens of millions of people in the US, conditions today
are worse than they were in 1950.

Between 1950 and 1978, the final period of the post-war boom, the poorest
20 percent saw a 138 percent increase in family income, while the top 20
percent had a 99 percent increase. Income inequality actually decreased
during this period.

However, between 1978 and 1994, this trend was reversed, with the incomes
of the poorest 20 percent declining 17 percent while those of the
wealthiest 20 percent increased by 18 percent. In 2002, 1 of every 10 US
citizens—a total of 34.6 million people—lived below the official poverty
level. This figure rose by nearly 2 million between 2001 and 2002. The
number living in severe poverty increased from 13.1 million to 14.2
million (see http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2003/cb03-153.html).

The black poverty rate was 24.1 percent, affecting a staggering total of
8.6 million African-Americans.

Moreover, as is well known, the real poverty rate is at least double the
official figure, which vastly underestimates the actual level of economic
distress in order to conceal the prevalence of hunger, homelessness,
disease and other social ills, and reduce government outlays for
desperately needed benefits.

Under these conditions, a sizable section of America’s poor has become
lumpenized. But this disturbing development cannot be laid at the feet of
individual parents, no more than the prevalence of physical diseases such
as cancer can be blamed on individuals. Social backwardness is inevitable
in a society that enforces conditions of brutal oppression and poverty.

Significantly, one of Cosby’s strongest supporters is the leader of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Kweisi
Mfume. Mr. Mfume also attended the gala event, and after Cosby spoke, gave
him a hug and told him he agreed with most of what he had to say. Mfume is
a former Democratic congressman who presides over an organization that
heavily promotes the Democratic Party.

If Cosby was determined to improve the conditions facing black youth, why
didn’t he turn to Mfume and demand that he explain why he and his
organization remain tied to a party that bears direct responsibility for
the conditions facing the poor?

Unlike Dr. Martin Luther King, who opposed President Johnson on the
Vietnam war, none of the present leaders of the established civil rights
organizations are prepared to challenge the political forces that are
responsible for the social crisis, attacking instead those who are the
victims of government decisions and are least able to defend themselves.

The degeneration of the social layers represented by Cosby and Mfume is
the culmination of an entire social process—the collapse of liberalism
and, as part of this phenomenon, the repudiation of the democratic and
egalitarian positions once espoused by the civil rights movement.
Following the death of King, his erstwhile followers—Jesse Jackson, Andrew
Young and others—abandoned the struggle to unite African-Americans with
the struggles of the working class, and its implicit challenge to the
profit system. Instead, the civil rights movement turned in a legalistic,
pro-capitalist and reactionary direction.

One of the forms this took was the promotion of various strains of black
nationalist ideology, the political essence of which was the striving for
privileges for a small black elite. For this layer, the most important
demand has been affirmative action, a policy that abandons any struggle
for equality in favor of appeals to the American ruling elite for set-
asides and perks that benefit only a narrow layer of African-Americans.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, the black professor at Harvard University, has
said “it was naïve” for blacks to believe affirmative action would move
the entire black community forward. “You see,” he said, “we were all in
the same class before the law under segregation. But once the law is
lifted, class distinctions which have always [been a part of] the African-
American community, as every black person knows, came to the fore.”

The growth of income disparities among blacks has been accompanied by a
shift in social outlook. While the conditions of black workers have
deteriorated dramatically, the privileged middle class among African-
Americans, the primary beneficiary of affirmative action programs, has
prospered.

E. Franklin Frasier, the former sociology professor at Howard University,
stated in his 1950s study of the black middle class, entitled The Black
Bourgeoisie, that the black middle class has always sought to separate
itself from the poor, and has been as disdainful in its attitude toward
poor blacks as the white elite has been toward poor whites.

Cosby’s rise to success was characterized by a concern for
presenting “positive images” of blacks—such as his Huxtable character
in “The Cosby Show.” This is a fixation that Frasier has associated with
the black middle class, which he believes feels itself driven to create
certain “myths.” The myth in this case is the depiction of the average
black family as highly educated and successful, a far cry from the real-
life experience of black working-class families struggling to make ends
meet.

Cosby acknowledges that there are serious problems facing poor black
families in America. However, his disparaging attitude toward poor blacks
and his belittling of any broad social or political dimension to these
problems reflect the “problems” of an African-American elite—a social
layer that has made its peace with American capitalism in return for
money, fame and “respectability.”

See Also:
Thirty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King:
(http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/apr1998/mlk-a4.shtml)
[4 April 1998]

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