Cosby Has More Harsh Words for Black Community

[AKA]

Cosby Has Harsh Words for Black Community

By Don Babwin
The Associated Press

CHICAGO - Bill Cosby went off on another tirade against the black community Thursday, telling a room full of activists that black children are running around not knowing how to read or write and "going nowhere."

He also had harsh words for struggling black men, telling them: "Stop beating up your women because you can't find a job."

Cosby made headlines in May when he upbraided some poor blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them. He shot back Thursday, saying his detractors were trying in vain to hide the black community's "dirty laundry."

"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other n-----s as they're walking up and down the street," Cosby said during an appearance at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference.

"They think they're hip," the entertainer said. "They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."

In his remarks in May at a commemoration of the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, Cosby denounced some blacks' grammar and said those who commit crimes and wind up behind bars "are not political prisoners."

"I can't even talk the way these people talk, 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk," Cosby said then. "And then I heard the father talk ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."

Cosby elaborated Thursday on his previous comments in a talk interrupted several times by applause. He castigated some blacks, saying that they cannot simply blame whites for problems such as teen pregnancy and high school dropout rates.

"For me there is a time ... when we have to turn the mirror around," he said. "Because for me it is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us. And it keeps a person frozen in their seat, it keeps you frozen in your hole you're sitting in."

Cosby lamented that the racial slurs once used by those who lynched blacks are now a favorite expression of black children. And he blamed parents.

"When you put on a record and that record is yelling `n----- this and n----- that' and you've got your little 6-year-old, 7-year-old sitting in the back seat of the car, those children hear that," he said.

He also condemned black men who missed out on opportunities and are now angry about their lives.

"You've got to stop beating up your women because you can't find a job, because you didn't want to get an education and now you're (earning) minimum wage," Cosby said. "You should have thought more of yourself when you were in high school, when you had an opportunity."

Cosby appeared Thursday with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the education fund, who defended the entertainer's statements.

"Bill is saying let's fight the right fight, let's level the playing field," Jackson said. "Drunk people can't do that. Illiterate people can't do that."

Cosby also said many young people are failing to honor the sacrifices made by those who struggled and died during the civil rights movement.

"Dogs, water hoses that tear the bark off trees, Emmett Till," he said, naming the black youth who was tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for whistling at a white woman. "And you're going to tell me you're going to drop out of school? You're going to tell me you're going to steal from a store?"

Cosby also said he wasn't concerned that some whites took his comments and turned them "against our people."

"Let them talk," he said.

[Janet McFarland]

[felicitylen]

I agree 100% to what Cosby is saying.

"When you put on a record and that record is yelling `n----- this and n----- that' and you've got your little 6-year-old, 7-year-old sitting in the back seat of the car, those children hear that," he said.

That is so true!

[Chambers]

"For me there is a time ... when we have to turn the mirror around," he said. "Because for me it is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us. And it keeps a person frozen in their seat, it keeps you frozen in your hole you're sitting in."

That's a universal truth: blaming other people for your problems gets you nowhere - you end up losing sight of yourself and of what you can do about it.

[isiahthomas]

Preach on Bill, preach on. He's definitely tellin it like it is & blacks are ashamed to hear the truth. It's a shame he's wasting his breath though cause nothin is gonna change with young blacks. The problem with blacks is that we are followers & we don't have minds of our own. It's been that way since day one. Instead of not doing what everybody else is doing, we tend to do what everybody else is doing so we won't get laughed at.

[ConservativeBalla]

Isn't it funny how it says "Went off on another tirade against the black community"? These news articles are so biased and word-twisting. The man has a beef with people who blame other people for their troubles, and he's saying it, but it gets called a "Tirade", as if he hates all these people or something, lol. What I want to know is, what was Jesse Jackson talking about when he said "Fight the right fight"? Jesse Jackson is one of the dumbest human beings on this planet; people like him are living in the past. Also, I wanna know why it is when I make a comment similar to Mr. Cosby's, I get berated for "Stereotyping all blacks", but when he says it, people applaud. I'm certainly glad Mr. Cosby is saying what he's saying, though. Maybe it will sink in to some people's heads.

[jamesanthony]

The nice thing about being a senior citizen with money is you can open up your mouth and say what's really on your mind without having to sugarcoat everything.

[AKA]

America's granddad gets ornery.

By Debra Dickerson
Slate

Lately, Bill Cosby has been making a comeback—as Shelby Steele. The 67-year-old comedian—who became America's Dad in the 1980s and America's Granddad more recently—has launched a series of surprising assaults on the pathologies of low-income blacks. "They think they're hip. They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere," he said in Chicago at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference on July 1.

This followed an attack launched at the NAACP's Brown v. Board of Education 50th anniversary gala at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in May. No laugh tracks there. The Cos has chastised young black men for "beating up your women because you can't find a job," blasted poor parenting in the ghettoes, heaped scorn on Ebonics, and lambasted aimless blacks for squandering the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement. Symbolically, he made his comments in high-profile "public" (read: where whites could hear) venues.

Many critics expressed shock that the beloved figure of Americana—the genial observational humorist; the wise paterfamilias of the beloved The Cosby Show (1984-1992); the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002—should offer such a pointed, and conservative, political message. Yet those who were fooled by Cosby's silliness into surprise at his newfound ferocity were just that—fooled. Cosby has long been a good "race" man on an all-too-serious mission. There was always darkness in the Cos' light.

From humble beginnings in the projects of Philadelphia, raised by a domestic and a laborer, Cosby parlayed his impish nature and keen insights into the transcendent in daily life into a successful comedy career during the early 1960s heyday of stand-up. In 1963, he was chosen as the first black guest host of The Tonight Show and in 1965 as the first black star on a white drama. On I Spy, he and Robert Culp played intelligence agents gone undercover as an international tennis player and coach. Overnight Cosby became the "Jackie Robinson of television," a crucial figure in bringing unapologetic but unconfrontational blackness into the mainstream.

It is almost impossible now to convey the watershed I Spy represented in American life. Those were the days when blacks called each other in wonderment to make sure that no one missed seeing one of their own in America's public square. That Cosby's "Scotty" was an abstemious, multilingual Rhodes Scholar and devoted family man while Culp's "Kelly" was a womanizing boozehound from the wrong side of the tracks was no accident. Cosby himself lobbied to make Scotty the brains of the outfit, the one who traveled the world and tended to national security matters.

Nonradical elements of the black community always embraced strategic racial inroads like this as exactly the type of gains they were trying to make—securing a place at the table instead of dismantling the table. Radicals like the Black Panthers, socialists, and Amiri Baraka, of course, considered Cosby a sell-out—a judgment for which his recent comments merely provide them the final proof.

Once Cosby found the upward path, he worked hard to stay there and to help bring the race along with him. His philosophy was always to play by the rules so as to beat the master at his own game—to be clearly black-identified, but not, you know, militant about it. Like that of Nat King Cole, Flip Wilson, and Diahann Carroll, television's other black pioneers, Cosby's appeal lay in presenting the universality of black life "apolitically," on its own terms (or, if you're Amiri Baraka, in the least discomforting way possible for whites). Their sudden presence in public life was all the rebuke that pre-Civil Rights Act America could face.

But Cosby's critics are wrong to say Cosby is either "incognegro" or an appeaser. The man always had a plan. While his humor is nonconfrontational, his attitude has been anything but; like Oprah Winfrey and Magic Johnson's inner-city focused business empire, Cosby sees the acquisition of power as a civil rights strategy. He's worked to be in the meetings where decisions are made rather than outside picketing them, though he was an ardent supporter of the civil rights movement and used his shows to pay homage to it.

And he succeeded. Once his star took off, Cosby was rarely without either a sitcom, a game show, an animated series, best selling non-fiction, or a comedy album riding the top of the charts. His power allowed him, among many other good deeds, to support black higher education by donating millions to schools, sending deserving, hardscrabble youngsters he'd read about in the newspaper to college, and challenging universities to ambitious fundraising goals by offering generous matching funds of his own—facts he's been advertising in a PR counteroffensive after the harsh reaction his recent comments provoked.

So why now? Why is Bill Cosby suddenly so sour, so publicly? Perhaps it was watching one of his four daughters struggle with a drug habit in the 1980s. Perhaps it was losing his only son, Ennis, to random violence in 1997. (Ghouls click here for a guide to the murder site.) Perhaps it was having to acknowledge having cheated on his wife of 40 years, Camille, who is nearly as beloved by blacks as he is. To make matters worse, the news of this infidelity broke when a young woman tried to extort hush money from him, and he helped the FBI send his (probable) love child to prison. But perhaps the final straw was watching Eddie Murphy reprise his history-making I Spy role on the big screen in 2002, not as a jet-setting, high-minded patriot but as a jive-talking, barely literate boxer who couldn't care less about national security; Cosby has long been vocal in his disgust with what he sees as the minstrelsy, vulgarity, and low artistic value of modern black comedy, film, and television. Don't even get him started on rap music.

"I'm a tired man," he said recently, but he wasn't talking about the energy required to defend himself. He was talking about still fighting battles his generation thought would have been long won by now, and he's talking about how draining it is to watch black complacency with its pockets of stagnation. But true acolytes will recognize the Cos' own personal progression through the stages of life, territory he just about owns. One of Cosby's standards bits was in ribbing his mother for coddling her grandchildren after having been so tough on her children. "That's not the same woman that raised me," he'd claim in mock confusion. Watching our beloved Cos take his people so publicly to the woodshed, it's our turn now to marvel at the evolution of the man we thought we knew so well.

[I am Roboto]

[AKA]

Cosby Defends Remarks on Parenting, Blacks

The Associated Press

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. - Bill Cosby defended his controversial comments on blacks, adding that the music industry is "glorifying the wrong things" as he spoke about parenting and children at a college conference.

Cosby, 67, made headlines in May when he criticized some blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them. Then earlier this month, Cosby said blacks should not blame whites for their problems and urged them to re-examine their own lives.

"I'm going to keep on saying what I've been saying," he said Wednesday, speaking to a group representing 118 historically black colleges and universities nationwide, the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.

On Wednesday, he said the music industry glorifies music that demeans women, praises life in jail and uses profanity.

He said college educators should prepare students to help poor blacks from backgrounds of violence and single-mother households.

Instead of joining the Peace Corps and going to Africa, "go across the street into the projects. These are people who need to see another picture, a brighter picture," he said.

[DollaBill]

To sum up Bill Cosby's "attacking", all he's saying is, instead of saying I want my 40 acres and my mule back, go out and it them.

I took nothing he said to offense, the only people offended by it, are the ones who it pertains too. Can't speak for the white half, but there are still alot of things minority races can't do that whites can, but I'll find some success somewhere.

[isiahthomas]

Bill i feel wasted his breath on speakin on young black people making a change cause young blacks aren't gonna change especially the ones living in the ghettos across america. Change has to come from within & if a person decides not to change within himself or herself, it's not gonna happen. Young blacks in the ghetto mess it up for young blacks in the suburbs who wanna have a good life & be successful. Blacks are too envious & jealous of one another & we need to stop acting like that. Blacks need to be happy for one another when somebody is successful instead of hating on that person. Blacks also make up too many excuses why they can't succeed. If u live in the ghetto, u can still have a good life. U just have to know what people not to deal with & what not to do such as sellin drugs, hangin on the block all the time, having sex with lots of women & not using protection, robbing, stealing. If other people in the ghetto are doing that, don't associate yourself with people like that & don't get caught up in none of those activities. But see we as a people act like we don't have minds of our own. We gotta do what everybody else is doing to be accepted cause nobody wants to get laughed at for being different. As long as we have that frame of mind as a people, we'll never have anything. Blacks are the only race of people who don't stick together. Other races of people stick together. How come we can't?


I was talkin to my mom this morning about it amazes me how Martin Luther King, black panthers, Malcolm X back in the day were fighting for civil rights for blacks so we could have the same rights as whites. Look at what happened to our leaders. They died for us & how do young blacks today show their appreciation? They don't show any appreciation cause if they did, they wouldn't be acting ignorant all the time & using slang words & doing illegal stuff like sellin drugs. Blacks stuck together back in the slavery days, 50's, 60's but we can't stick together now for nothin cause we too jealous of one another. So if blacks aren't trying to be united & come together as a people, i'm not trying to be united with blacks. We would rather stay divided than come together as a people. I see why Michael Jackson wants to be white cause he's ashamed of being black & i don't blame him. The ignorant stuff that blacks do make all blacks look bad. That's exactly why racist whites will continue to hate blacks cause we keep showing them how ignorant we are everyday. The one thing i will never understand is why do blacks kill each other & why do we sell drugs to our people? That is the most ignorant s**t i've ever encountered. I noticed when i used to go to a mixed high school that i was happier being around different races of people cause they have a different way of learning & they want to learn. It was the total opposite when i went to a all black high school during half of my 9th grade yr. I know ya'll can imagine what going to a all black school is like, nothin but ignorance all day everyday. I was so happy i graduated on time cause i wanted to get out of that school. I ain't never been around so many ignorant black kids in my life. It just seems that ignorance is just always gonna be in us. It'll never leave us. When ghetto people move to the suburbs, they're still gonna act ghetto. I'm not saying u have to act stuck up & think you're better than everybody else but u ain't gotta act ghetto. Blacks who live in the ghetto think that they have to be ghetto to be accepted by their peers & that's the worst mindset to have.

[jamesanthony]

Ignorance is a thing that people have to want to get out of. If they are content they are not going to change or look for a change outside of themselves.

[Nikki_luv]

Originally posted by jamesanthony
Ignorance is a thing that people have to want to get out of. If they are content they are not going to change or look for a change outside of themselves.

I agree! Plus alot of people commenting on the subject are ignorant, they only see things from the outside looking in, they really don't know what goes on behind the closed doors of an African American family.

I agree with Bill Cosby in so many ways, it's hard to explain, it's not always as easy as they make it seems. Some of us really are stuck in a system that we didn't create for ourselves. Although I do agree that lots of us turn down things that would help us, but some are fixed on this comfortable lifestyle.

[Nikki_luv]

Originally posted by isiahthomas
But see we as a people act like we don't have minds of our own. We gotta do what everybody else is doing to be accepted cause nobody wants to get laughed at for being different. As long as we have that frame of mind as a people, we'll never have anything. Blacks are the only race of people who don't stick together. Other races of people stick together. How come we can't?

They usually always show other races of people besides Latinos/Blacks sticking together. The media has it fixed to make the "ghetto life" look so bad, and Blacks and Latinos are always stealing or involved in a crime. Every race of people is a criminal in their own right.

That is the most ignorant s**t i've ever encountered. I noticed when i used to go to a mixed high school that i was happier being around different races of people cause they have a different way of learning & they want to learn. It was the total opposite when i went to a all black high school during half of my 9th grade yr. I know ya'll can imagine what going to a all black school is like, nothin but ignorance all day everyday. I was so happy i graduated on time cause i wanted to get out of that school. I ain't never been around so many ignorant black kids in my life. It just seems that ignorance is just always gonna be in us. It'll never leave us. When ghetto people move to the suburbs, they're still gonna act ghetto. I'm not saying u have to act stuck up & think you're better than everybody else but u ain't gotta act ghetto. Blacks who live in the ghetto think that they have to be ghetto to be accepted by their peers & that's the worst mindset to have.

I also went to a mixed high school, but the caucasian kids did all of the teasing, they kinda made it easy for the other races to get along. The black kids were always the clowns and joking type, and the asians were more friendly. They held study groups along with the black and mid-asian kids. Not to sound racist but out of a high school with over 2,000 students, I only had 2 caucasian friends...they pretty much the sneaky ones.

When I was growing up, my parents told me living a ghetto life was living a life without worry or pressure, and still taking care of buisness, doesn't sound at all bad to me. Like I said everyone has their own stereotypes to add.