Michael Eric Dyson by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Read Free Book Online Page B

measure—for their failure to master literacy. He said—referring to black children as inanimate objects—that “[i]t’s standing on da corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. ‘Why you ain’t, where you is go. . . .’ I don’t know who these people are.”
    The entertainer also assailed poor black mothers and fathers for their horrible parenting skills, saying they buy their kids “$500 sneakers” but refuse to “spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.” Cosby claimed that most black inmates are not “political criminals” but folk who go “around stealing Coca Cola” and who get “shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and we’re outraged,
‘Ah, the cops shouldn’ta shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?” Cosby pounded the black poor for their abysmal educational track record, citing their “50 percent drop out [rate]” from high school and charging that black folk are “raising our own ingrown immigrants.” On and on Cosby went, berating black parents and youth for their numerous faults, his ramblings united by one theme: the miserable condition of the black poor brought on by their own self-destructive behavior. More recently, Cosby appeared at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Citizenship Fund’s annual conference and widened his attack on the black poor, saying that the charge of airing dirty laundry leveled against him paled in comparison to the bleak reality of blasphemous black children. “Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s cursing and calling each other nigga as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they’re hip. They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.” 1
    Cosby’s remarks are not the isolated ranting of a solo rhetorical gun slinger, but simply the most recent, and the most visible, shot taken at poor blacks in a more-than-century-old class war in black America. His views are widely held among a number of black constituencies—it is not unusual to hear some black poor and working-class members themselves joining Cosby’s ranks in barbershops and beauty salons across America. But Cosby’s beliefs are most notably espoused by the Afristocracy: upper-middle-class blacks and the black elite who rain down fire and brimstone upon poor blacks for their deviance and pathology, and for their lack of couth and culture.
The Afristrocracy—composed of lawyers, physicians, intellectuals, civil rights leaders, entertainers, athletes, bankers and the like—rail in private (which includes, ironically enough, spaces in the “black public,” including churches, schools, conventions and social gatherings, that are usually beyond the reach, or the interest, of the masses of whites, especially the white media) about the pernicious habits of the black poor but rarely make the sort of news Cosby did by letting their bilious beliefs slip into wide public view.
    The black poor—the Ghettocracy —consists of the desperately unemployed and underemployed, those trapped in underground economies, and those working poor folk who slave in menial jobs at the edge of the economy. The Ghettocracy is composed of single mothers on welfare, single working mothers and fathers, poor fathers, married poor and working folk, the incarcerated, and a battalion of impoverished children. Ironically enough, the Ghettocracy extends into the ranks of athletes and entertainers—especially basketball and football players, but, above all, hip-hop stars—whose values and habits are alleged to be negatively influenced by their poor origins. Thus, the conflict between the Afristocracy and the Ghettocracy takes on generational overtones, since the values and behaviors that are detested by Afristocrats are largely—though by no means