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 comic and Ed.D. 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.

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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:

Source of Quotes: BlackCommentator.com