A fresh look at poor black folk
By Bill Beene
Of the St. Louis American
Intellectual and culture critic Michael Eric Dyson was so opposed to Bill Cosby’s infamous tirade on the values and behavior of poor black folks that he wrote an entire book about it.
The book is titled Was Cosby Right?
The answer to that question, from Dyson’s point of view, would be no, not at all.
On tour to sign and discuss his book, Dyson read at Borders Books in Brentwood on Monday and stopped by the American before the reading for a one-on-one.
“Mr. Cosby made some comments that were deeply problematic and profoundly uninformed,” Dyson said, explaining why he wrote the book.
“So, I wanted to set the record straight about the plight and predicament of poor people and to combat some of the misinformation and stereotypes that his comments rested on.”
Cosby’s comments about poor blacks ranged from “they can’t talk” and “parents aren’t parenting” to “they aren’t political prisoners.” He referred to poor black youths as “it” and criticized the names that poor black families choose for their children.
“His assault on poor people in terms of education – without understanding the wide disparities in education – is ridiculous,” Dyson said, “especially since he was the ebonics laureate of Black America through Fat Albert.”
Dyson does a fair imitation of Mush Mouth’s mumbo-jumbo speech made famous by Cosby’s comic monologues and the cartoon series.
In his book, Dyson takes each of Cosby’s comments and responds to them. Though many people have heard arguments on the street for why some poor blacks act certain ways, Dyson revisits these analyses with intellectual depth and grounding.
Dyson’s decision to release a book that rebuts rambling comments made the the previous year may appear outdated and gratuitous to some. After all, Cosby made the controversial comments on May 17, 2004 at the NAACP’s gala commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
But the issues behind Cosby’s rant and Dyson’s response to it are alive and well.
“We’ve expanded the Afristocracy (the middle class), and they are upwardly mobile with tremendous education,” Dyson said.
“Many of the Ghettocrats (the working black poor), who are stuck at the bottom, have tremendous energy, but don’t have outlets to express their talent, intelligence and ideas and to be taken seriously as human beings.”
In this analysis, Dyson is a far cry from Cosby, who dehumanized poor black youths by referring to them collectively as “it.”
Dyson said Cosby’s comments further injured race relations and rendered poor blacks even more vulnerable to outside attack.
“He has the ability to negatively impact public policy among African-American people as directed by white folks,” Dyson said. “I think his comments were intellectually irresponsible in a major fashion.”
Still, Dyson shared a sense that Cosby’s heart was in the right place. He described the debate with Cosby occasioned by his book as “a principled disagreement between two black men of some prominence who disagree about the best route to racial redemption – both of whom love black people.”
Dyson respects his opponent but sticks to the guns of his analysis.
“I don’t have to dehumanize him to legitimize my perspective,” Dyson said.
“I do think what he did was harmful and hurtful to black America, especially poor black people.”
