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Bill Cosby, Back by Popular Demand

• In fiery remarks last week in Washington, Bill Cosby took the black community to task for parental failures that he says have led to high dropout rates, crime and other social ills. After we published brief excerpts of his cultural critique -- delivered at a gala marking the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling -- several readers called for more. Conservative broadcasters seized upon Cosby's remarks, but he was unrepentant in an interview yesterday with The Post's Hamil Harris: "Do I not make a move to speak to the people that I love?" he said.

He plans to continue preaching his tough gospel, which was motivated, he said, by District Police Chief Charles Ramsey, who earlier this year called on the community to do a better job of parenting.

NAACP Executive Director Kweisi Mfume said he agreed with "most of what Cosby said" and hugged him after the speech. "He said what needed to be said," Mfume said.

"I was talking to the movers and shakers," Cosby emphasized yesterday. Here's more Cos, as tape-recorded by Harris Monday night:

"I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol? And where is the father? . . .

"The church is only open on Sunday and you can't keep asking Jesus to do things for you. You can't keep saying that God will find a way. God is tired of you," Cosby declared to loud applause.

"I wasn't there when God was saying it, I am making this up, but it sounds like what God would say. In all of this work we can not blame white people. White people don't live over there; they close up the shop early. The Korean ones don't know us well enough, so they stay open 24 hours."

On fashion: "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.

"With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail. 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 sports heroes: "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 teenage sex: "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. . . .

"What is it -- young girls getting after a girl who wants to remain a virgin? Who are these sick black people and where do they come from and why haven't they been parented to shut up? This is a sickness, ladies and gentlemen."

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Following a recent conversation, Cosby and I agreed on this much: To the extent that he is frustrated and angry about the failure of people to be responsible parents, and about senseless crime and violence, I stand with him; to the extent that we continue to be challenged by the systemic issues of race and racism that the Legal Defense Fund has confronted since the days of my predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Cosby stands with me.

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Whether Cosby should have used Monday night's upscale D.C. event to share his observations about the state of black America may be open to question. That what he said needed saying, however, is not at issue.

If not there, where? And if not 50 years after "the pivotal and defining moment of the civil rights movement in America," as Howard University President H. Patrick Swygert described the Brown decision, when? Brown cut the legal legs out from under segregation. Doors have been opened as never before. Faces in boardrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, dayrooms, labs and locker rooms have changed, and for the better. But not all the change in the five decades since May 17, 1954, has been good.

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Mr. Cosby's view, by contrast, offers a side of black life that seldom is seen on the news -- a self-reliance liberalism. Right-wing ideologues pretend that self-reliance liberalism does not exist. But most successful blacks are intimately familiar with it. The message, as Mr. Cosby might say, is simple: Those of us who have made it need to help those who have not, but poor black folks need to "hold up their end in this deal," too.

Mr. Cosby was saying the same thing backstage when I interviewed him during my college days. It was 1968, but he didn't want to talk about black power, Black Panthers or cultural revolutions. He wanted to complain about why so many young blacks of my generation were wasting the great opportunities that hard-won civil rights victories had brought us.

In those politically polarized times, I was disappointed by his traditionalist attitude. But I appreciate its wisdom today with new eyes, the eyes of a parent.

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I was a little put off by refrences to "the white man" since I haven't heard that outseide of movies/documentries about the60s or earlier, but there wasn't anything wrong with it really I guess, I was just surprised.

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Initially I was aswell. I am a white man, and I don't think that the situation of people being trapped by their ignorance (be they black, white, or other) is funny at all. It saddens me. But then I remembered the context in which he was speaking. I am taking that to mean "racist white men that said desegregation was never going to work back in the day".

Again, though I think that many of his issues with poor black culture applies to all of our society, it was refreshing to hear someone speak candidly about these problems and not shift responcability to other segments of society. Bill is the man. Now I think I will go and eat a Jello pudding-pop.

Pal

[ May 28, 2004, 04:23 PM: Message edited by: PaladinVirtue ]

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I bet he would get lynched...

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