Some brave voices are shifting the conversation from victimhood to
responsibility.
From emancipation to Brown v. Board, African-Americans saw education
as a radical tool of liberation.
LEWIS W. HINE/GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE/GETTY IMAGES.
The conversation about race that Barack Obama says America needs is
already in full swing—and it is a conversation among blacks. Its spark
was a speech that TV star Bill Cosby gave at the NAACP in 2004. In
books and articles, on talk shows and in town meetings, at barbecues
and barber shops, African-Americans have been arguing over his words
ever since. Their impassioned discussion is the most hopeful
development in race relations in years.
With a 50 percent high school dropout rate and a 70 percent
illegitimacy rate, with African-Americans committing half the nation's
murders though only 13 percent of the population, black America—
especially the poorer part of it—is in trouble. "We cannot blame white
people," Cosby asserted in his incendiary speech commemorating the
50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board school desegregation decision.
"It's not what they're doing to us. It's what we're not doing." As
Jesse Jackson used to say, Cosby recalls, "No one can save us from us
but us."
Sure, racism hasn't vanished, Cosby acknowledges in his 2007 book Come
On People, a follow-up to his speech written with Harvard psychiatrist
Alvin Poussaint. "But for all the talk of systemic racism and
governmental screw-ups, we must look at ourselves and understand our
own responsibility." Even with lingering discrimination, "there are
more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before
in the history of America," and "these doors are tall enough and wide
enough" for just about all black people "to walk through with their
heads held high." So while "there are forces that make the effort to
escape poverty difficult," African-Americans are by no means merely
the playthings of vast forces and helpless victims of racism. "When
people tell you, 'You can't get up, you're a victim,' " Cosby warns,
"that's when you know it is the devil you're hearing."
Why do so many blacks, especially men, find it so hard to grasp the
opportunity that is theirs for the taking? Why are "so many of our
black youth squandering their freedom?" Cosby and Poussaint's answer
is that the social structure and culture of poor black neighborhoods
distort the psychology of the children who grow up there, often
shackling them in "psychological slavery." The authors zero in on the
permanently destructive effects of fractured families and slapdash
child rearing—much more slapdash than middle-class parents, with their
years spent nurturing, encouraging, and cajoling their children, could
easily imagine. "In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in,
parenting is not going on," Cosby told the NAACP. "You have the pile-
up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature—raised by no one."
Certainly their fathers aren't raising them. That 70 percent
illegitimacy rate, troubling in itself, isn't evenly distributed but
is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where it soars above 85 percent
and can approach 100 percent. "A house without a father is a
challenge," Cosby and Poussaint write. "A neighborhood without fathers
is a catastrophe." That's because mothers "have difficulty showing a
son how to be a man," a truly toxic problem when there are no father
figures around to show boys how to channel their natural
aggressiveness in constructive ways. Worse still, the authors muse,
"We wonder if much of these kids' rage was born when their fathers
abandoned them."
To come into the world already abandoned by your father is damaging
enough, but Come On People teems with children abandoned by their
mothers as well. Many end up among America's half-million foster
children, two-thirds of whom—more than 300,000 abused or cast-off souls
—are black. We meet a Kentuckian born in a housing project and taken
away from her jailed, drug-addicted mother at the age of six. After a
string of foster homes and group facilities, she began doing "drugs,
alcohol, shoplifting, gangbanging, hustling. I was in and out of
jail," she says. "I was angry. I would fight at the drop of a dime."
We hear of an eight-year-old smash-and-grab burglar abandoned even
more abruptly. A cop tells the authors about catching him. The boy
wouldn't say one word, beyond the address of his housing-project home.
The officer drove the boy there, followed him into his apartment, and
saw his mother on the sofa. The boy finally spoke. "She's dead, ain't
she?" And she was, with the needle that killed her lying on the floor.
The boy calmly ate a bowl of cereal as he watched the cop deal with
the body.
We hear of children abandoned emotionally if not literally. Another
cop tells of a seven-year-old he picked up for bashing out car
windows. "I'm very good at making these kids cry," the cop said. "But
this one, I couldn't touch him." He drove the kid home to what looked
like a shack. The boy opened the door, and there was his mother on a
mattress on the floor, having sex. The boy walked past the couple "and
sealed himself off behind a curtain." The man fled; the mother signed
the form the cop held out to her, "pulled the covers over her head,
and left her son standing mutely behind the curtain."
These are the extreme cases, but even among normal poor black single-
parent families Cosby and Poussaint find child-rearing patterns that
prime kids for failure. Since the authors believe that too many black
adults "are giving up their main responsibility to look after their
children," they make a portion of their book a child-raising handbook—
an inner-city Dr. Spock—whose sound, simply stated advice makes clear
what they think is going wrong in numerous ghetto families. Their
optimistic, encouraging precepts, in spite of themselves, lift the
curtain on a world of heartrending childhood sorrow and suffering,
which ordinarily no one comes to help or comfort, and which leaves
scars that never heal.
Above all, they counsel, spare the rod. "Many black parents use
physical punishment—not just spanking, but also hitting, slapping, and
beating kids with objects," they report. Indeed, "many black parents
have told us that physical punishment is part of black culture." But,
Cosby and Poussaint warn, "when they beat their kids they are sending
a message that it is okay to use violence to resolve conflicts,"
rather than helping them develop self-control and a sense of right and
wrong. Too often, physical punishment turns into child abuse; too
often, parents (or caregivers, especially the mother's boyfriend)
"beat their kids, not to discipline them, but to exorcise their own
demons. . . . They take their anger out on the child," who "serves as
a 'whupping' object for peevish adults. . . . These beatings often
produce angry children who treat others as violently as they have been
treated." The prisons are bursting with grown-up abused children.
In addition to physical abuse, Cosby and Poussaint observe, we've all
cringed at hearing inner-city mothers abusing kids verbally as well,
making them feel worthless and unwanted. "Words like 'You're stupid,'
'You're an idiot,' 'I'm sorry you were born,' or 'You'll never amount
to anything' can stick a dagger in a child's heart." Single mothers
angry with men, whether their current boyfriends or their children's
fathers, regularly transfer their rage to their sons, since they're
afraid to take it out on the adult males. "If they hear their mom say,
'Black men ain't worth s—-,' the boys wonder whether that includes
them. When their moms yell, 'You're no good, just like your father!'
all the doubt goes away." When such racially tinged verbal abuse takes
the form of " 'Nigger, I'll kick your f——— black a—,' " the child ends
up ashamed of being black, as well—a danger anyway in a society where
rumors of black inferiority still echo, if more faintly.
One of black America's most disabling problems, Cosby and Poussaint
think, is this wounded anger—of children toward parents, women toward
men, men toward their mothers and women in general. Some try self-
sedation, whether by "wallowing in sedated victimhood," by music "loud
enough to wake the dead," by "a lover or some crack or, if nothing
else, a bag of burgers." Another way that "black men have tried to
maintain their dignity and to keep control of their anger is by being
'cool.' . . . Many who feel abandoned by a parent protect themselves
from being hurt by putting on a cool detachment." Trouble is, beyond
becoming emotionally frigid, they too easily lose their cool and
explode in violence. Still, their effort is better than the
hotheadedness of today's young black gangstas, as touchy and ready to
duel to the death as the Three Musketeers. "He dissed me so I shot
him" is now a common ghetto refrain, Cosby and Poussaint report. Hence
African-Americans account for 44 percent of U.S. prisoners; six out of
ten black high school dropouts have been in prison before they hit the
age of 40; and what Cosby and Poussaint call "a culture of
imprisonment devastates black families and communities."
We are celebrating a great civil rights victory, Cosby told the NAACP.
People actually present in the audience "marched and were hit in the
face with rocks" so that black kids could get a decent education. But
now? "What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody
wants it?" What did those brave marchers achieve if, 50 years later,
half of African-American kids drop out of high school and can't speak
standard English—especially since all it takes to get started in
today's more open America is a high school diploma and the ability to
impress potential bosses as articulate, polite, and dependable?
This failure, too, is largely a failure of parenting. Yes, ghetto
schools are bad, Cosby and Poussaint acknowledge, and parents can't
fix them. "But you can make the best use of what you have to get the
best you can for your child," they advise. You can make sure he does
his homework and pays attention in class. And much of what a kid
learns he learns at home, after all—especially in his crucial first
five years. "Talking and reading to infants and children help lay down
the physical structures in the brain to develop skills in language,"
the authors point out.
But many ghetto moms aren't imparting the language and cognitive
skills without which children can't succeed once they get to school.
"Teachers report that in poor neighborhoods children often begin
school not knowing their colors or the letters of the alphabet," Cosby
and Poussaint write. "Some have limited vocabularies and little
knowledge of numbers. Some don't even know that sheep go 'Baaa.' "
These deficits are hard to correct later on. Indeed, "sharp-eyed
teachers can identify the children who will become high school
dropouts the day they walk in the kindergarten door." The damage is
already done.
Readers of Come On People and the thousands who waited for hours to
hear Cosby press home his message in dozens of free town meetings
nationwide will surely profit from his levelheaded advice. They, and
thousands more like them, will talk to their kids (in standard English
and in a tone that doesn't "sound like a prison guard"), listen to
them, read to them, encourage them, discipline them with gentle
firmness, limit their TV watching, and never give up on them. But
these are the caring parents. The problem is the ones who don't care—
who don't understand, as a California doctor tells Cosby, that "you
have a choice as to whether to have children or not" and to "decide
who gets to be your baby's daddy," and that once you've made that
decision, "both of you are supposed to have something to do with that
child for the rest of its life." The problem is the girls who view
sex, in Cosby's terms, as "You see me. I see you. You want it. . . .
We're both hot. Now let's do it"—the girls who have "five or six
different children—same woman, eight, ten different husbands or
whatever."
What will become of all these "kids with different fathers," who
"compete, often unequally, for whatever attention is going around," so
that (as with the offspring of polygamous sheikhs) "there is bound to
be bad blood"? What can we expect from families with "grandmother,
mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and
the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three
of them"? How much of the cultivation of civility and virtue, which
makes strong families the building blocks of a strong society, can
happen here? "When we see these boys walking around the neighborhood,"
say Cosby and Poussaint, "we imagine them thirty or forty years down
the road wandering around just as aimlessly, and we want to cry." For
they are lost.
Black conservatives have said such things for years, only to be
unthinkingly ostracized as race traitors for breaking with orthodoxy.
But no one could dismiss the lovable Cosby: African-Americans are
proud of his success and admire his munificence to black charities.
What's more, as Princeton prof and sometime rapper Cornel West put it,
the TV star "is not in the right wing. He's not Clarence Thomas. He is
not Ward Connerly." Nor could anyone dismiss National Public Radio's
respected Juan Williams when he emphatically endorsed Cosby's views in
a 2006 book, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and
Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can
Do About It. When a longtime liberal like Williams embraces these
ideas, something important is changing in the black mainstream—despite
racial arsonist Al Sharpton's effort to demonize Williams as "the
black Ann Coulter."
It requires explanation that black leaders don't mob Cosby with
support, Williams points out, because he is so obviously right. Of
course today's African-Americans have full civil rights and ample
opportunity. Look at how immigrants from far-flung Ethiopia and Nigeria
—no less black—succeed in their new land of opportunity. Moreover,
notes Williams, Cosby's views mirror those of the civil rights greats
of old. Booker T. Washington similarly urged education and self-
reliance and cautioned that "we should not permit our grievances to
overshadow our opportunities." W. E. B. Du Bois, despite differences
with Washington, shared his "goal of black self-reliance." Martin
Luther King "said he wanted above all else to get black people to shed
the idea that they did not control their destiny." And from the moment
of emancipation, "education was a radical tool of liberation for black
people so recently enslaved and purposely denied the chance to learn."
From the founding of the Tuskegee Institute to Thurgood Marshall's
Brown v. Board victory to James Meredith bravely entering Ole Miss in
1962, the right to education was central to the civil rights movement.
As for out-of-wedlock childbearing, married couples headed 78 percent
of black families in 1950, compared with 34 percent today.
In the 1960s, this can-do worldview changed. A vast transformation of
American culture combined with the black-power movement and the War on
Poverty to brew a toxic new orthodoxy among black leaders, who remain
stuck in that era to this day. "Very few new ideas are allowed into
this stifling echo chamber," Williams reports. Despite startling
African-American progress in the intervening half-century, "the
official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. Black
people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase
social spending. . . . Even the most dysfunctional and criminal
behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders"
but must "be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of
blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized."
Dissent, and you're an "Uncle Tom and a sellout."
That half-century of progress, though, makes it hard to profess the
orthodoxy in good faith. Some, such as Barack Obama's ex-pastor
Jeremiah Wright, whose "black liberation theology" is pure sixties
black-power political radicalism preserved in amber, still spout it
sincerely. But Williams's view of most of today's black leaders
recalls Eric Hoffer's dictum that great causes often start out as
movements but degenerate into rackets. Today's leaders have made
lucrative careers out of preaching a crippling ideology that ensures
that they will never run out of poor blacks to agitate for. As Cosby
quipped in one of his town meetings, "There are people who want you to
remain in a hole, and they rejoice in your hopelessness because they
have jobs mismanaging you."
Williams presents a rogues' gallery of African-American leaders who
harm the people they claim to serve by blinding them to the
opportunity all around them and stoking resentments that serve as
excuses for wrongdoing. Jesse Jackson, "the unofficial president of
black America," takes pride of place, with Al Sharpton as runner-up.
Williams "detects a smell of extortion" about them; their main
business, he says, is "staging phony protest marches for money." What
blacks has Jackson benefited, except for two of his sons, whom his
pressure tactics helped win a multimillion-dollar beer
distributorship? Sharpton, Williams thinks, is lower still: he took a
campaign contribution from a GOP operative who aimed to weaken the
Democrats by keeping so polarizing a figure in their 2004 presidential
primary.
When black politicians actually have won power, their politics of
victimhood has often proved a rationale for not even trying to help
the black masses but rather for decrying the white racism that
supposedly causes their plight. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, for
instance, spewed charges of racism to block officials from reforming a
dysfunctional (and now closed) Los Angeles hospital that had become a
high-paying jobs program for some blacks but whose poor care was
harming its many black patients. Mayors Sharpe James of Newark and
Marion Barry of Washington, Williams says, "saw political opportunity
in making themselves masters of large pools of black people dependent
on state and federal poverty programs." The money flowed in, mayoral
aides stole it and went to jail, the schools got worse, crime
festered, and finally prosecutors nailed James himself for rigging the
sale of city property to enrich his mistress. By contrast, Cory
Booker, James's successor, is (so to speak) the Bill Cosby of urban
governance, exemplifying the right way forward for African-American
pols.
If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, Williams
argues, they'd combat the "cultural belief that being 'authentically
black' does not allow for high quality intellectual engagement in
school," as columnist Joseph H. Brown put it. They'd demand radical
school reform, including vouchers. It's a hopeful sign, Williams
thinks, that New York Times editorialist Brent Staples, normally part
of black orthodoxy's amen choir, has declared that if the civil rights
establishment doesn't push hard for real school reform, even if it
"would discomfort the teachers among its supporters, . . . it will
inevitably be viewed as having missed the most important civil rights
battle of the last half-century."
If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, they'd stop
decrying "police brutality and the increasing number of black people
in jail" and focus instead "on having black people take personal
responsibility for the exorbitant amount of crime committed by black
people against other black people" (which accounts for the exorbitant
number of African-Americans in jail). But they don't. As Cosby pointed
out to Williams, the NAACP has its headquarters in murder-ridden
Baltimore, but "I've never once heard the NAACP say, 'Let's do
something about this.' " Indeed, Williams notes, "they never marched
or organized, or even criticized the criminals." Nor did they exhort
poor black people to stop smoking crack.
But black crime devastates African-American communities. Residents
live with "a sense of an enemy within. That enemy is a neighbor, a
friend, possibly a child, any of whom is capable of robbing or
assaulting them." In some cities, like Baltimore, drug dealers still
terrorize entire neighborhoods, which resemble Sadr City. The thugs
are as vicious as Sadr City militiamen, too. Williams tells of a
Baltimore woman who testified against drug dealers operating outside
her house in 2002. The next day, gangbangers firebombed her house,
though she managed to put out the flames. Two weeks later, they
firebombed her house again, this time kicking in the front door and
dousing the staircase with gasoline, incinerating the woman, her
husband, and their five kids. As she was dying, the woman fruitlessly
screamed, "Help me get my children out!"
Even as old-style racism fades, Williams says, the black-crime
epidemic is incubating a new racism. The crime "gives credence to the
racist stereotype of black people, especially young black men, as a
race of marauding, jobless thugs"—a stereotype that even Jesse Jackson
shares. "There is nothing so painful to me at this stage of my life,"
Jackson said in 1993, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps
and start thinking about robbery and then look around and see somebody
white and feel relieved." This grim development makes it all the more
urgent for black leaders to say that "the black criminal is no friend
of black progress."
So now imagine one of Bill Cosby's "sweet beautiful things born by
nature—raised by no one"—grown to teen-age, filled with rage and
buried sorrow at abandonment by his father and emotional abandonment,
or worse, by his mother. Imagine that his mother never nurtured his
basic language and cognitive skills, or properly disciplined and
encouraged him, in his crucial first five years, so that learning and
even sitting still in school have been hard for him. No respected
civil rights group has used its moral capital to demand school reform
that could give him the structured, rigorous teaching he especially
needs. Almost no national black celebrity—until Cosby—has come into
his neighborhood exhorting him to stay in school and work hard,
because he could become a physical therapy assistant, say, or a car
mechanic, starting at $35,000 to $50,000 a year. No reverend has come
down from his pulpit to lead a march against the drug dealers and
gangbangers who infest his neighborhood.
Instead, whenever a cop accidentally shoots an unarmed African-
American, he hears of Al Sharpton leading a rent-a-demonstration,
chanting, "No justice, no peace," a motley relic of black-power
radicalism, which keeps distrust of the police alive in neighborhoods
that, to be livable, need policing more than most. Come election time,
perhaps he hears a local pol or campaign worker rail against racism
and demand more government money. He hears his elders rage against the
stinginess of the welfare office and the injustice of the Man, a
convenient outlet for a deeper anger about more personal injustice and
deprivation.
But most of all, he hears rap. Pumped out from CDs, videos, and
television (especially Black Entertainment Television), which black
kids watch even more excessively than white kids, "nihilistic
glorifications of 'thug life' " and celebrations of gangbangers, drug
dealers, and pimps "as black heroes" constantly wash over him, says
Williams. "Black rappers, dressed for every video in convict style,
posturing with menacing faces, hands flashing gang signals, their
heads wrapped in prison-issue do-rags, pants hanging down in the
convict style, and gangland tattoos covering their bodies" do their
part "to promote black identity as the criminals' identity." Rap, says
Williams, markets the idea that "violence, murder, and self-hatred"
are "true blackness—authentic black identity." It is "an open sewer
throwing up the idea that black men are most genuine, most in touch
with their power, when they are getting vengeance with a gun in hand."
We know that this message reaches its listeners, says Williams, when
we see ghetto kids "dress like rappers . . . and act hard-core, using
nigger, cursing, and fighting on the way to school, in school, and
after school—assuming they are still in school." And we know it as
well from the crime statistics.
We know that rap's message about sex also hits home. Its cartoon-
simple sentiment, says Williams: "All black women are sexually crazed,
lack discrimination about men, and deserve to be treated as mindless
bitches—dogs." In rap, Cosby once said, there is "nothing about I care
for you, nothing about may I go for a walk with you . . . just I'm
hot, I'm leaking, I'm dripping, come on, and I know you want it too"—
or, as the title of one rap song has it, "Face Down, Ass Up, C'mon."
There is something tragic, Williams says, about poor black girls
"trying to find a way to feel good about their identity in a culture
that gives little reinforcement to black women" being asked to dance
to music that describes them as whores and bitches. "Rap's pumped up
message to them is to get naked and shake it before giving it up to do
the wild thing," he says. And many will do just that, bearing another
generation of doomed innocents, who, despite the evil done them, grow
up to be responsible for their own acts.
Of course, white kids listen to this music and see these videos, too,
including kids who will grow up to be corporate America's bosses, and
it affects the way they see black people, Williams says. They will
come away with an image of black women as indiscriminate sluts, and
black men, as African-American journalist Stanley Crouch puts it, as
"monkey-moving, gold-chain-wearing, illiteracy-spouting, penis-
pulling, sullen, combative buffoons." "Who would hire such a person?"
Williams asks. "Who would want to live next to them?" This $4-billion-
a-year industry, in which blacks are the performers, the designers,
and many of the executives, presents African-Americans to the entire
world in terms the Ku Klux Klan would use. Where are the civil rights
leaders?
Williams's rogues' gallery includes—beside the stuck-in-the-sixties
civil rights pooh-bahs, the racketeering reverends, the corrupt pols,
and the exploitative rappers—also the nutty black-studies professors.
A typical specimen, Georgetown prof Michael Eric Dyson, leaped into
the Cosby debate in 2005 with Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black
Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Dyson's attack, just the old victimology
with a twenty-first-century twist, usefully underscores how specious
and destructive that orthodoxy is. It also calls into question
academe's push for the black "perspective" on its faculties, when that
perspective is by definition the harmful one of victimhood and
grievance.
Cosby's "blaming of the poor," Dyson says, is the traditional attitude
of an African-American elite "fatally obsessed with white approval"
and persuaded that an embrace of "Victorian values" will win
"acceptance from the white majority." But the "pathologies" of the
poor subvert their efforts, "ruining the reputation of the race." And
so, beginning long ago, the black aristocracy began "a program of
moral rebuke disguised as social uplift." Like Cosby, "they policed
poor black communities from the . . . lectern," trying to impose on
them "temperance, thrift, refined manners, and Victorian sexual
morals."
But they were wrong to think that "if only the poor were willing to
work harder, act better, get educated, stay out of jail and parent
more effectively, their problems would go away." It is not the
personal behavior of the black poor but American society's "structural
barriers," including the "export of jobs and ongoing racial stigma,"
that prevent blacks from rising. Similar "structural barriers" hold
black kids back educationally. While the suburbs boast "$60-million
schools with state-of-the-art technology, . . . inner-city schools
fight desperately for funding," ensuring that "our children will
continue to spiral down stairwells of suffering and oppression."
Even black crime has a structural component, since society has
consigned the black poor to "conditions that offer them limited
options, which often, yes, lead to poor choices"—so that society is
partly to blame. Moreover, the war on drugs "is a war on black and
brown people," and innovations in "policing measures (leading
eventually to racial profiling) . . . greatly increased the odds that
blacks would do serious time for nonviolent and often first-time
offenses"—assertions with an untruth in almost every word. But white
America has a reason for its war on minorities. "The prison-industrial
complex literally provides white economic opportunity across class
strata," Dyson explains. "Big money is at stake when it comes to
making a crucial choice: to support blacks at the state university or
the state penitentiary." Cosby's call for personal responsibility is
thus doubly cruel: it asks the black poor to feel undeserved blame for
their own victimization, while excusing whites from coming to their
rescue.
Dyson spruces up the old-style victimology with a dash of hip,
multiculti relativism. In thinking he has achieved a universal
humanity beyond race, because the virtues he embodies are supposedly
universal, Cosby has made an error that most whites and many blacks
(thanks to white dominance) make, says Dyson: that "white identity
[is] normative, and hence universal." But for black people to aspire
to that identity requires "unhealthy doses of self-abnegation" and
"conscious rejection of the identity they have inherited or invented."
Much better, says Dyson, for black people to " 'keep it real,' which
often means honoring the ghetto roots of black identity." African-
Americans should value the "elements of mass black culture that enable
black folk to resist oppression, transcend their suffering and
transform their pain." Hence Cosby is wrong to reject black English—
which "grows out of the fierce linguisticality of black existence, the
insistence by blacks of carving a speech of their own"—and to scoff at
supposedly African names like "Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed." Though
such names may be African "only in that they reflected flair and
creativity," Dyson says, the important thing is that they recall "the
freedom to name themselves" that blacks asserted under slavery,
"refusing to tie their identities to the names their owners gave
them."
Cosby is at his most wrong, though, Dyson says, in his hatred of rap,
which expresses the authentically black "gangsta" belief that "the
lifestyle and ideology of the outlaw, the rebel and the bandit
challenge the corrupt norms of the state, the government, and the rule
of law in society." So too with hip-hop fashion, with its "hats on
backward, pants down around the crack" that Cosby deplored in his
speech. "Fashion in black urban circles rises to performance art,"
Dyson tells us. "The more daring their fashions, the less cooperative
they are with bourgeois elegance, and the more they undermine bland
conformism, the more likely black youth are to understand their bodies
as battlefields of fierce moral contest." Do their pants hang low?
"This may be understood as sympathy dress," an "overidentification"
with relatives "who may have been caught up in a bloody urban
drama. . . . It is a way of reclaiming the body of a loved one from
its demobilized confinement and granting it, vicariously, the freedom
to walk on the streets from which it has been removed." And in truth,
"many black youth who wear baggy pants may feel that they are already
in prison, at least one of perception, built by the white mainstream
and by their dismissive, demeaning elders." Thus does the idle
sophistry of armchair elites come to ratify cultural patterns once
recognized as fatal to the poor.
The debate raging throughout black America is the more historic
because it is also raging within the soul of America's first black
presidential nominee. Which Obama will prevail? The old-orthodoxy
Obama, who sat for 20 years listening to Reverend Wright saying "God
damn America" and claiming that the government purposely infected the
ghetto with AIDS, who brought his daughters to hear him, and who named
a book after one of his sermons? The Obama whose wife, in her
grievances and resentments, her whine that America is "just downright
mean," uncannily embodies the black bourgeois attitudes that Ellis
Cose described 15 years ago as The Rage of a Privileged Class? Or will
it be the Obama who will truly usher in the age of postracial
politics, as he seemed to promise when he first emerged as so fresh
and attractive a candidate? The Obama who marked Father's Day with a
moving speech on black America's need for responsible fathers that
Bill Cosby would cheer?
At the very least, his nomination, as he himself has said, shows how
much progress black America has made. Let's hope the African-American
majority will take the lesson to heart.
Myron Magnet is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The
Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass. He is City Journal's editor-at-
large and was its editor from 1994 through 2006.
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