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Gospel
for the Poor by Bill Cosby
Sponsored by Wal-Mart & Tavis
Smiley
By Rudolph Lewis
We’d like always to think well of people
and expect the best. Practically, I am told, fifty per cent of
the time I will be wrong. In the climate of our times, as we
ascend the financial ladder of success, I’m afraid our
expectations of the best will decline radically.
For three or four years, I have concluded
that Bill Cosby should retire from the public eye like Sidney
Poiter. But every time the tv is turned on there’s Bill,
acting the clown, an old gray haired clown on the Tonight Show.
A man way beyond his prime propped up because he knows how to
make some people comfortable. More often with these people he is more an object of humor
than not.
What Bill has going for him is that he is
rich, super-rich. And as the wise street corner wizards used to
say, “Money talks and bullshit walks.” They may have a
point.
I saw Bill Wednesday night on Tavis (PBS).
Expecting the worse, I turned the channel, for I saw Tavis on his
knees oiling Bill up with both hands. Tavis sure would
like to have what Bill’s got. I didn’t turn away today when
it came on at noon and so I got a full ear of Bill’s comic
bullshit. He in the twilight zone of comedy and education
philosophy. He stumbled
on his face several times, and Tavis kept helping him up, for
Bill is the man, the dean of comics, a financial supporter of black
aristocratic schools.
So, it seems, Bill was on Tavis defending
some ill-thought-out comments Bill had made publicly at
some gathering, reported by the Washington Post. People
left that meeting “stunned” (stone-faced) by Bill’s
demeaning remarks about the black poor and oppressed. So it
seems now Bill has joined the team of Tavis, Skip Gates, and
Cornell West in their making humor about the black urban poor.
Bluntly, their view is that too many of the black poor are
immoral:
They don’t want to work hard. They
don’t know how to delay pleasures of the body. And, worst,
they think education means “white.”
Bill thinks that blacks can “take back
their communities,” even when in some tracks of our fair cities
40% of black working age males are unemployed, and between
the ages of
25-64, over two thirds are unemployed. How can one facing such
economic horrors be the representative dad or that wonderful
husband?
But the poor have always been the subject
of humor, since Jesus’ ministry to the dispossessed, even
though many of his disciples today despise the poor like lepers,
an intrusion on their well-being. And when these good rich men act
well on behalf of the poor, at best, their kindness is
patronizing, reducing the poor farther to the state of penury or
begging. We will take out of our pockets for the poor in
Bangladesh or Central America or Africa, but will not encourage
their state legislators to provide more funding for urban
schools.
But I have thought for some time now that
Bill Cosby has moved closer to the orbit of senility than many
have been able to perceive. Maybe he can be dismissed as a
cranky old man, he in danger of becoming the poster boy for the
black neocons (as in confidence men).
Ironically, Bill Cosby humorous spiel on the
black poor and their immorality was brought to us by Wal-Mart, a
regular sponsor of the Tavis Show. Wal-Mart is a notorious union
buster. It lowers wages wherever it goes. It shuts down smaller
enterprises that just cannot compete. Usually, family
businesses.
Bill, Tavis, Skip Gates, Cornell West, our
black intellectual think tank, the best they can come up
with is nigger jokes. These wise guys have little or nothing to say about
the black urban economic disaster. And how policy and the push
for certain policies can help
relieve these repressive economic times for the black poor.
These prominent confidence men, however, have encouraged a
callous behavior toward the poor by local black elected officials.
For instance Maryland attempted to and
passed a “living wage bill” ($10 an hour) for all state
contracts. The passage of this boon for poor workers was voted
against by some black legislators, who
were more concerned about the interests of black businesses men,
the more well-off or the more aspiring elements who want to make
their fortunes on the backs of their poor black brothers.
These well-suited cats
don't think the Many first, but rather the Few, first and
always.
Tony Fulton and other Baltimore and black
representatives voted against this living wage. The measure added
a 1% increase to the contractual budgets of the state. That 1%
might make the difference between a school-aged child spending
more time with her mother. The child’s mother might not now
have to work two and three jobs to feed and clothe her
child.
We who have grown callous and full of
ourselves are too cute, too ready to shat on the poor and the
defenseless. But all these disparaging words will come back to
haunt these fellows for nothing will stay in the dark. We
believe, too many of us who have made it, think now that success has little to do with chance. We have
swallowed hook line and sinker the myth of the self-made man
(e.g. Bill Cosby)--who through hard work and clean responsible
living, made good.
That attitude we express too often as if
there were not the backs, the feet, the heart, and the
vote of the poor that made the conditions possible for black
millions to be made.
Even the lethargic comfort-loving black
middle-class will come to see we are fueling some heavy things
that are going on in our country by our comedy in these tough
times. We are on the verge of a
nazi-like takeover of the country and all Bill Cosby and Tavis
Smiley and Skip Gates can talk about is how dumb Negroes are or
how irresponsible they are. I mean constitutional guarantees
like free speech and assembly are being threatened to be limited
in our “fight on terror.” Mere proximity to certain people
will become crimes. Our country is near bankruptcy for the
narrow interests of the Few, the billionaires and theirs millionaire underlings.
The rich and the greedy have always gone
along with the program for domination and the abuse of the poor
and the defenseless. That is not news. For it’s been always much easier to lay in the cut and
be amused than speak truth to power and the abuses of power.
Look, I am not sectarian in this matter. Kerry does not promise
us much. He too lauds the program of America’s world
domination, as a necessary feature for us Americans to live the
Good Life. We, he says, have to be the "paramount military power."
That sounds a bit hitlerish to me.
Who threatens us – the poor and the
powerless of the world who live on less than $2 a day? (See my
piece on the extent of global poverty-- Escaping
the Black-Bible Belt.) They
threaten us? Why, because they need more than what they now
receive from the G-8. It is we here in America and the West who
have made sumptuous use of the world’s resources at the
expense of countries who only a few years ago gained
independence and whom we still have in a headlock, us (the World
Bank and IMF) pounding away head and body.
They can say whatever they please about
Belafonte and his “house nigger” formula applied to Colin
Powell. He may be old and his metaphors may be as stale as
Malcolm X. Like the Signifying Monkey, such cultural referents
still can be expressive of truth about the sparse and oppressive
lives that are lived by the “field niggers” (the urban poor)
of today in prosperous middle-class America—in which the black
and white of wealth walk hand in hand comfortable,
Teflon-coated, in their suburban homes living Martin’s Dream.
posted January 2004 * * *
The Quotable Bill Speaks
On the Black poor
"Lower economic people are not holding
up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They
are buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won't
spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.' "
On Black youth culture
"People putting their clothes on
backwards: Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong? ... People
with their hats on backwards, pants down around the crack, isn't
that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his
pants up? Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all
the way up to the crack and got all type of needles [piercings]
going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from?
Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damn thing about
Africa."
On civil rights
"Brown versus the Board of Education is
no longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the
neighborhood back. We have to go in there – forget about telling
your child to go into the Peace Corps – it is right around the
corner. They are standing on the corner and they can't speak
English."
On literacy
"Basketball players –
multimillionaires – can't write a paragraph. Football players
– multimillionaires – can't read. Yes, multimillionaires.
Well, Brown versus Board of Education: Where are we today? They
paved the way, but what did we do with it? That white man, he's
laughing. He's got to be laughing: 50 percent drop out, the rest
of them are in prison."
On poor Black women:
"Five, six children – same woman –
eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you are
going to have DNA cards to tell who you are making love to. You
don't know who this is. It might be your grandmother. I am telling
you, they're young enough! Hey, you have a baby when you are 12;
your baby turns 13 and has a baby. How old are you? Huh?
Grandmother! By the time you are 12 you can have sex with your
grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I'm just
predicting."
Cosby on the sons and daughters of poor,
Black, unmarried mothers:
"…with names like Shaniqua, Taliqua
and Mohammed [!] and all of that crap, and all of them are in
jail.
On Blacks shot by police:
"These are not political criminals. These
are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in
the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run
out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have
shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his
hand?"
Source of Quotes:
BlackCommentator* * *
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
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