This
article originally appeared in Africana.com.
The old
maxim warns us to beware of priests who lose their faith but keep
their jobs. By that logic, a whole lot of alleged spokespersons
for black people should've been unemployed a long time ago. In
the wake of Bill Cosby's now-famous Pound Cake Speech at the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund's dinner commemorating the Brown v. Board
of Education case, the comedian has been praised by white
conservatives and black folk at large for essentially keeping
it real. For airing dirty laundry. For saying in public what your
uncle Bobby has been saying behind closed doors for years.
But hold on. Before you fix your mouth
to sing Cosby's praises, consider this: the fact that some black
people make similar comments in private does not make them any
more accurate when they are spoken in public.
When it all gets down to the get-down,
black people are no more immune to believing stereotypes about
African Americans than anyone else – and Cosby's podium-pounding
was full of the grossest stereotypes of poor black people. Even
if you agreed with his hyperbolic claims of $500 sneakers taking
precedence over Hooked on Phonics in the hood, even if
you signed on to his 21st Century bootstrap prescriptions ("You
can't blame white people for this"), it's impossible to ignore
the classist, bigoted and reactionary underpinnings of his disdain
for giving black children names like Shaniqua or Ali, or his justification
of police shooting people in the back of the head for "stealing
pound cake." (I have to wonder what Cosby would say to me,
a black man with a Ph.D. and no criminal record, who has, nonetheless,
had police pull guns on him three times in his life – once by
an officer demanding that I walk on the sidewalk and not the street.)
In the wake of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, in the wake of
literally dozens of black people being arrested and imprisoned
on false evidence in Tulia, Texas, two years ago, these comments
are not only ignorant, but also extremely dangerous.
Amid all the national clatter that
Cosby's comments have generated, it would be easy to miss the
fact that there is nothing particularly new about his indictments
– his prescriptions fit into a century-old program of bourgeois
behavior modification directed at poor black people from their
purportedly better-off kinfolk. The historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
has come up with a name for this phenomenon, referring to the
idea that personal etiquette is a form of racial uplift as "the
politics of respectability." Since at least as far back as
the days when Du Bois announced his Talented Tenth program, the
afrostocracy has felt it necessary to clean up, dust off and lead
their less fortunate cousins into the promised land of social
acceptance. Call this Negro Noblesse Oblige. This concern
wasn't totally altruistic: black elites recognized that,
in the reductive racial reasoning of the United States, the embarrassing
behavior of poor black people would always compromise their own
bourgeois standing. (This class tension led Tennessee to experiment
with first-class and second-class sections within its segregated
railroad cars.)
And though the two clashed bitterly
on matters of personality and policy, both Booker T. Washington
and Du Bois found common ground in advocating moral uplift among
the Negro masses. Du Bois lamented in the pages of his masterful
Philadelphia Negro that moral corruption and vice were
the major afflictions among the newly arrived Southern migrants.
Booker T. Washington famously urged his followers to become models
of thriftiness, cleanliness and religious adherence, believing
this would clear the way to racial uplift. During the same era,
Elijah Montgomery, the founder of the all-black town of Mound
Bayou, Mississippi, banned the sale of liquor in the area and
conducted house-to-house investigations of the domestic arrangements
of residents, ordering all couples who were not legally married
to leave the district.
In the early 20th century, organizations
like the National Association of Colored Women and the Women's
Convention of the National Baptist Convention, keenly aware of
the prevailing stereotypes of black female sexuality, advocated
a program of abstinence and "virtue" as a means of defending
their own collective honor. A nearly obsessive concern with personal
behavior ties together movements as diverse as Garveyism, the
Montgomery Bus Boycott (whose leadership quietly jettisoned the case of a black teen who had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat months before Rosa Parks when the young woman later became pregnant while unmarried), the Nation of Islam and
the activities of the National Urban League. (Urban Leaguers met
newly arrived migrants with care packages that included soap,
toothbrushes and lists of life "instructions" — which
included warnings not to come outside with rollers in their hair
or keep livestock in their yards.)
Taken on its face, a "morality"
agenda – however that is defined – may have been useful; unplanned
pregnancy and crime did negatively impact black people's
lives. The problem, however, lies in the theory that this "morality"
would somehow vanquish racism – which has as its underlying premise
the inability to recognize any black person as moral in the first
place. And "morality" has frequently been conflated
with a simple, assimilationist ideal of white behavior – which
is why Cosby could so easily lump naming a child "LaQuita"
or speaking non-standard English into the same category as theft
and disdain for education. When you get down to it, how decent
can you be when you saddle your kids with names like that? What
kind of person – besides a whole lot of those who were fighting
off police dogs in Birmingham – doesn't bother to conjugate correctly?
The question is not whether or not we've overcome, but whether
some of us are too ghetto to even deserve to.
This respectability politic also ties
together Cosby's entire career, from his days playing a Rhodes
Scholar on I-Spy to his role as the successful obstetrician
Heathcliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show and his noted criticism
of Eddie Murphy for his use of profanity and sexual subject matter.
In a society built upon one-dimensional, pathological views of
black life Cosby's body of work – and his support for historically
black colleges – is commendable. But positive imagery and philanthropic
good deeds don't justify what is essentially hate speech.
Truth told, reactionary, elitist, stereotypical
and inappropriate as they were, there was really nothing black-specific
in Cosby's comments. Every ethnic group in this country has experienced
this dynamic of intra-group embarrassment. (I have long believed
that the NAACP should give Jerry Springer an image award for pulling
back the sheets on white American dysfunctionality.) And rich
people have been declaring poor people immoral since the days
of feudalism; the irony is that we've only recently generated
black people who were rich enough to be taken seriously.
Ultimately, Cosby was right: we can't
solely blame white people for this contempt for the black poor.
There are plenty of black people who are responsible too. But
most of them are not named Shaniqua.
William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman
College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse. He
can be reached at [email protected].
Visit his website at
www.jelanicobb.com