Friday, July 02, 2004
Bill Cosby made the headlines or at least to say the front page about his ever ongoing and ranting commments about the shortcomings of the black community and why they haven't live up to the ideals of Brown v. Board of Education world*. I am not too sure if what he says is as blunt from the source I have heard and that the sources I heard it from sensationalizes his opinions but I will go on ahead and look at what Cosby has to say face value. According to Cosby it is black's faults for why they are constantly locked up, neglecting their own communities and not working and so on. His recent tirrade was about that the fact that black father's are constantly beating up on their wives and allowing their children growing up illiterate and uneducated. He probably said more but I think this is enought to put here without getting tied down over cliched remarks like this.**
These observations rings some truth but it ignores the heavier deeper and more precise reality about what Cosby is trying to say. It is true that there are social collapse among the black community but how it comes such way is debatable but more importantly it looks at empirical and statistical evidence naively. They only show that these problems exist but they cannot for good or for bad explain the daily lives whatever groups we are approaching with with these statistics their behaviors morally and socially.
A hundred years ago, it would be unheard of to look at the poor as we do today as being living in poverty. It would be foolish back then to assess the needs and shortcomings of the poor and then try to adjust numbers and variables to make what is called ethical and normative decisions. Back then it was thought that the poor had freedom to do what they want to do. The more classic example would be the exercise of 'collective bargaining,' 'free will' or 'asserting their rights' until a more materialistic aspect came into play.
Looking at matters in terms of disparities, income distribution and having legal and social resources changed a lot. It manifested itself in several directions, among them being the fact that the US was embarking on becoming a nation-state and then later on an economic powerhouse and national superpower. Yet there was always one idiosyncracy that was at large with about how the US came to be. Among them as what Cosby has a tendency to overlook is that regardless of race the US always have pressing social inequalities. As the US despite what you read in the history books became bigger the social inequalities became stronger and greater. A lot has to do with another characteristic of the US and that is its ability to overcome the industrial odds. I think, now this from my research that I do, has to do with the US work intensive labor policy. I cannot verify how and where I came about this but it has to come back from reading on an authors comments on the Scottish Enlightment thinkers of either Malthus Smith or Ricardo. Supposedly these thinkers are often times misread and viewed extremely anachronistically but accoringly so it was believed that work makes people have a tendency to forget and for people to explain why they have forget or account for all the things that they have forgotten they developed strong socials ills such as alcoholism and severe drug addiction. Of course this is greater in the black community because this group has often times recieved the lower end of the stick as far as that stuff goes
So to put everything in perspective for Bill Cosby is that there are truth to what Cosby has to say but at the same time those truths are merely also exaggerations. It is so for two reasons like Malthus you have to look at population from an absolute perspective there are more African Americans in the United States compare to thirty years ago much less a hundred years ago. The population among blacks is equal to that of Canada, half of Great Britain and about a third of Germany. In essence we are looking at things the wrong way by ignoring the element of time. The poverty among blacks and African American might believe it or not be relatively as bad as it was thirty or forty years ago(note there are sources that I have read dismisses much of breaking down families and that crap) but the sheer numbers are bigger by volume and perhaps place a wear and tear on our social, political and material resources. I don't think the Founding Fathers ideas and ideals were made for the world we are going to live in the 21st Century.
Then there are other minorities,namely Latinos, who have surpassed blacks and African Americans as being the largest populated minorites and there disparities are similar but is mixed with harsh anti-immigration attitudes. So the world we live in today compare to the 1960s is fundemantally different. We must prepare ourselves to realize that world in the 2030s and 2040s will also be radically different from today.
What also makes Cosby truths seems to an exageration is that he overlooks the shift in debates as far as what constitutes civil rights, social responsibility, and community building. For instance he doesn't mention anything about a white 'underclass' or increase poverty among whites or the fact that social behavior in the form of social responsibility has been dominated by the post-WTC attacks on the intrusions of the Patriot Acts which not only is seen as a setback for protection of civil liberties(which is nothing more than a pessimistic way of looking at things) but also places a limit on how much critics can object on government intervention in terms of welfare policy and the like. Here Cosby statement reflects that we are looking at things from the wrong perspective.
In fact those statements by Cosby are nothing more than propaganda that caters to making further racial exclusions as the future rolls alongs. I guess some white person on Simple Life 2 would be more than ever inclined to take what Cosby as saying as some unwarranted truth and their cult followers as well. I am not saying that there are strange and problematic concerns about the black community but a lotof it has been blown out of proportion and take out of certain social context so that the if a white person who sees a black person who come out of nowhere will believe that he is a wife beater or that she is dope addict and both don't know how to read. These are nothing more than complex social ills that has to looked at from complex eyes as well.
*Of course no one should take into considerations if there is a an ideal of any movement worth be living up to without first ecompassing the world or worlds they will have to thrive and fight for years to come especially if they span the decades and centuries or in this case a half century.. The world and worlds of the Brown v. Board of Education we live in today isn't one that most poeple who were living at that time no matter how extreme their views were can ever imagine such as we see today given the recent terrorist attacks at home.
**His opinion matters more because he actually lived during an age where African Americans were chiefly and perhaps still discriminated in education and entertainment prior to the Brown decision. A change of law doesn't mean a change of heart, neither it should be something anyone should be so concerned about. Here is a site that tells about the career of Cosby himself at africana.com.
