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Notes On Race And Class : Cos and Effect
Bill Cosby's racial slurs are beyond mean spirited
By Roger T Jones

Originally published in the Cleveland Free Times

IF THERE WERE ANY DOUBTS about Bill Cosby's insanity, his latest racial slur of blacks took care of them. Cosby is certifiably nuts. Let's usher him off the stage and put him out to pasture--or wherever they send people who are a few cents short of a nickel-- before he can again publicly bare his ass. Last week, appearing before community activists at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Educational Fund's annual conference, Cosby called black school-aged children "dirty laundry;" accused black men of "beating up [their] women," and refused to acknowledge racism as a factor in race relations in America. These comments follow an earlier attack Cosby made on blacks.

The first response to Cosby should be to reject both him and his message. I have seen people twisting like branches in the wind as they try to keep Cosby in high esteem and, at the same time, challenge his message -- as others have tried to agree with his message while rejecting Cosby as the wrong messenger. Those are time-wasting, foolish exercises. Both positions leave the presumption that there is something seriously wrong with the behavior of black people unchallenged and intact.

Those interested in a liberal, progressive agenda must challenge any belief that black people are behaviorally or attitudinally different from the rest of Americans. We must highlight, contrary to Cosby's sophistry, the fact that black people do not have a different racial biology that makes them intellectually inferior or less morally responsive.

Blacks don't do things, therefore, any differently than other people: a certain percentage of all humans curse or degrade themselves, abuse their spouses, buy things they don't need, and don't speak their native languages correctly. The fact that these happen across racial lines means that they have no specific moorings in black life. These are not black things -- they are behaviors that all people engage in without regard to race.

What Cosby has done -- naïvely so, I think -- is to reproduce, albeit in blackface, all the hortatory prejudices that already exist about black people. How, I would challenge anyone to explain, is Cosby's whimsical social science any different from the church's evasion of the issue of American slavery by accepting the notion that blacks weren't really human, or by ordinary Americans sidestepping the same issue by declaring, as persons did under Jim Crow regimes, that blacks did not have the wherewithal to govern themselves.

Cosby's position is consistent with those. I mean, it is a short jump from saying that a people "can't parent" to saying they "don't deserve the right to vote." Even so, I am particularly offended by Cosby's reference to black children as "dirty laundry" and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge racism's particularity in American history.

Cosby's racial slur on black children was mean-spirited and uncalled for. To remark that black children are "your dirty laundry [that] gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it is cursing and calling each other n----- as they are walking up and down the street," suggests that Cosby is the most disingenuous, two-faced SOB that has ever earned a dollar off the backs of children.

Most of Cosby's career has been built on his exploitation of the wit, charm and attractiveness of children -- especially black children. From Fat Albert to The Cosby Show , children have been the central element to Cosby's money-making empire. Now, quite the reverse, he attacks arguably the most defenseless segment of America society --poor black children. It was a disgraceful display of power and arrogance.

Bill, the next time your limo is cruising by a group of these children, pull over and invite them into your world. They might be able to teach you some things about the nature of poverty and racism, a racially segmented labor force, a lack of affordable healthcare, an inadequate public school system, and insufficient reasonably priced housing. Bill, they may be able to teach you just how stupid your comments are!

Cosby's refusal to acknowledge the significance of racism in American life is just as stupid. During the talk, Cosby went out of his way to exempt whites from any responsibility for the plight of poor blacks. That's twisted. Whites and blacks have been a part of the same calculus of race relations from the start of this country. Excusing one race from conversation distorts history and is misleading.

Nevertheless, Cosby's victim-blaming rhetoric resonates well with the right-wing ideological canard about the defective nature of black people. In the face of an easily examinable historical record, many persons still believe that black people are solely responsible for their plight in this country. They glibly fire off fuzzy conjecture about how the behavior of blacks undermines their ability to progress -- never noting, of course, the ever-present specter of racism. Cosby seems to share the same objectives of these hypocrites: to evade any discourse that encourages self-examination.

My son believes that, if nothing else, Cosby has generated some buzz about his new cartoon, Fatherhood , and the motion picture, Fat Albert ,which was scheduled to begin filming last month. If that's right, Cosby has truly lost his mind -- and what a silly profligacy of our time and energies.