Is Bill Cosby Wrong?
(Declined by S.F. Chronicle 12/07)
The time is fast approaching when we will learn which American city is the nation’s “murder capital” this year. Already we have the controversial annual list of the nation’s ten most dangerous cities which shows Oakland as moving up on the list and Detroit reclaiming first place.
Is there anyone who has failed to notice that the yearly “murder capital” and list of dangerous cities invariably have large African American populations? The tragic reality of our time is that a small subset of a group comprising about 12 percent of the population is responsible for half of the nation’s homicide and other violent crimes.
The conventional explanation for this disparity--and others which break along a racial divide— is that the behavior is a response to racism, discrimination, inferior schools, police profiling and lack of employment opportunities, all of which create an environment in which anger boils over into murderous violence. What social scientists call a structural explanation.
There is much to that argument, of course, but others contend that the violence is also the product of a “subculture of violence” which has embedded itself in the community—however it came to be there—resulting in young men acting violently because they have not been taught by their own in any meaningful way that such behavior is not acceptable.
In practice the theories are not mutually exclusive. The practical difference lies in how far the reasons for the violence are weighted in one direction or the other. To the extent that the structural explanation applies, conditions can best be improved by changes in the majority community. If a “subculture of violence” is more applicable, then behaviors will have to change in the affected community as well.
The latter concept is what Bill Cosby was talking about when he famously counseled underclass African Americans to start taking responsibility for their own behavior. His detractors, like Professor Michael Eric Dyson, tend to subscribe more to the structural explanation.
Dyson wrote a book titled “Is Bill Cosby Right?” in which he answered his own question with a resounding “No!” Black people were in fact taking responsibility, said Dyson, who then went on for a couple of hundred pages showing where Cosby had different ideas 30 or 40 years ago.
African American thinkers like John McWhorter with his “Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America” and Juan Williams with his “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It,” are more in synch with Cosby’s viewpoint. Williams’ efforts earned him the sobriquet “Happy Negro” from one black professor.
The belief that the explanation for any African American failure lies with the majority society is very strong. The results of a recent study issued by the California State Superintendent of Schools found that black and brown academic failure was not a product of poverty but rather the failure of the largely white teaching staff to understand the minority cultures. (A critic of the study pointed out that blacks and Latinos had 12 times the truancy rate of whites and Chinese which may have had something to do with grade discrepancies.)
Some people get it and some don’t. Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums is one of those who isn’t there yet. Addressing an affluent Oakland audience at a meeting about the spread of crime this last October, the mayor said “we have closed our eyes to the injustices and inequities, and now we are reaping the wild winds of that disregard for a whole range of people.” What’s needed, he said, are “jobs, training, better education and opportunities.” Not a word about personal responsibility.
Bill Cosby’s own book “Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” written with Harvard Professor Alvin F. Poussaint, has now been published, and again he has come under fire. Ofari Hutchison, a respected black commentator, admits Cosby is right in calling for responsibility but then criticizes him at length for dwelling on the negative. I don’t know whether Hutchison read the book because it is replete with what Cosby calls “call-outs” attesting to positive outcomes.
In another recent study, in the endless stream of such which find their way to the Associated Press-- this one by the Pew Research Group-- it was reported that while blacks remain pessimistic about their progress there has been a sharp reversal in the reasons they offer for their plight.
As recently as a decade ago blacks were more likely to think discrimination was the main reason they could not get ahead. Now, according to the report, “53 percent say they are mainly responsible for their situation compared to 30 percent who blame it on racial discrimination.” Could it be that Bill Cosby’s ideas are beginning to gain some traction?
Yet on November 17, in a CNN report about the march of young black men to the Justice Department in Washington demanding racial justice, the reporter asked a representative of the Sentencing Project, a prison research and advocacy group, what he thought about the reversal in black opinion about the causes of their situation. Ignoring her question, the man proceeded into a spiel about uneven playing fields.
And in a recent NPR roundtable comprised of young black people put together to discuss Cosby’s book, one participant asserted that Cosby was just too old to have credibility in the community. One can discern a pronounced disinclination on the part of many to engage Cosby’s ideas—to notice the elephant in the living room, as it were—or to entertain the possibility that things may be improving.
But there is hope and it is coming not from on high but from the community itself. In a recent guest piece in a local newspaper, a young African American named Michael Tubbs rejected his imprisoned father’s view that “the oppressor designs the world in a way so that prison is your destiny.” Young Tubbs seems well on his way to making a successful life for himself. More recently still, East Palo Alto native Douglas Fort, 29, has been reported as committing his energies to eliminating the “culture of violence” in his hometown.
Perhaps it’s too soon to say, but if nothing else intervenes, it well may be that we will begin to see an overall decline in African-American violence in the next several years.
If so, we can thank Bill Cosby for getting the conversation started.