Barack Obama says America needs to have a conversation about race. In fact, one is already in full swing—and it is happening among African-Americans. Its spark was a speech that television star Bill Cosby gave 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 discussion is the most hopeful development in race relations in years.
With a 50 per cent high school dropout rate and a 70 per cent illegitimacy rate, with African-Americans convicted for half the nation's murders though making up only 13 per cent of the population, black America—despite the rise of a large middle class—is in trouble. "We can't blame white people," Cosby said in his contentious speech, which marked the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board school desegregation ruling, "it's not what they're doing to us. It's what we're not doing." Cosby went on to quote Jesse Jackson's words, "No one can save us from us but us."
Sure, racism hasn't vanished, as 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… 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." When people tell you, "'You can't get up, you're a victim,'" Cosby warns, "that's when you know it's the devil you're hearing."
Why, ask Cosby and Poussaint, do so many blacks, especially men, find it so hard to grasp the opportunity that is theirs for the taking? Their answer is that the social structure and culture of poor black neighbourhoods distort the psychology of children who grow up there (the image, below right, shows a scene from "The Wire": the television drama that tackles drugs and crime in black Baltimore). The authors zero in on the destructive effects of fractured families and slapdash child rearing. "In the neighbourhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on," Cosby said in his speech. "You have this pile-up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature—raised by no one."
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 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. 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 a 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.
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," a portion of their book is a child-raising handbook. Like an inner-city Dr Spock, their sound advice makes clear what they think is going wrong in numerous ghetto families.
Above all, Cosby and Poussaint 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 "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; parents (or caregivers, especially the mother's boyfriend) "beat their kids, not to discipline them, but to exorcise their own demons…" 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. Single mothers angry with men regularly transfer their rage to their sons. When such abuse takes the form of "'Nigger, I'll kick your f———black a—,'" the child can even end up ashamed of being black—a danger anyway in a society where rumours 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 towards parents, women towards men, men towards 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 hurt by putting on a cool detachment." The 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. African-Americans account for 44 per cent of US prisoners; six out of ten black high school dropouts have been in prison before the age of 40. What Cosby calls "a culture of imprisonment" devastates black families and communities.
Relative educational failure is also partly 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 helps lay down the physical structures in the brain to develop skills in language," the authors point out.
But many ghetto parents aren't imparting the language and cognitive skills without which children can't succeed once they get to school. "Teachers report that in poor neighbourhoods children often begin school not knowing their colours or the letters of the alphabet," Cosby and Poussaint write.
Black conservatives have said such things for years, only to be ostracised as race traitors. But the lovable Cosby is harder to dismiss: African-Americans are proud of his success and admire his munificence to black charities. What's more, as Princeton professor and sometime rapper Cornel West put it, Cosby "is not in the right wing. He's not Clarence Thomas." Nor was it easy to dismiss Juan Williams when he 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.
Of course, says Williams, today's African-Americans have full civil rights and ample opportunity—look at how immigrants from Ethiopia and Nigeria succeed in their new land of opportunity. Moreover, he notes, Cosby's views mirror those of the civil rights greats of old. Booker T Washington urged education and self-reliance and cautioned that "we should not permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities." Martin Luther King "said he wanted above all else to get black people to shed the idea that they did not control their destiny."
But 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—many of whom remain stuck in that era to this day. (Married couples still headed 78 per cent of black families in 1950.) "Very few new ideas are allowed into this stifling echo chamber," Williams reports. Despite some startling African-American progress in the past 50 years, "the official message from civil rights leaders remains… black people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase social spending… even the most dysfunctional and criminal behaviour among black people is not to be criticised by black leaders."
When black politicians have won power, their politics of victimhood has often proved a rationale for not even trying to help the black masses. Former 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 programmes." The money flowed in, mayoral aides stole it and went to jail, the schools got worse, crime festered, and finally prosecutors nailed James for rigging the sale of city property to enrich his mistress.
But there are many encouraging signs of change. Cory Booker, James's successor and (so to speak) the Bill Cosby of urban governance, has a different attitude. He, along with a new generation of African American politicians including Massachussetts Governor Deval Patrick, Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, and most obviously Obama himself, preach the language of responsibility. The education debate is shifting too. If black leaders really want to help the black poor they need to do more to 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. And 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, "it will inevitably be viewed as having missed the most important civil rights battle of the last half-century."
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Even as old-style racism fades, Williams says, the black crime epidemic is incubating a new racism. 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."
But no respected civil rights group has used its moral capital to demand school reform that could give a child the structured, rigorous teaching he needs. Almost no national black celebrity—until Cosby—has come into his neighbourhood exhorting him to stay in school and work hard, so that he can get a good, well-paid job. No reverend has come down from his pulpit to lead a march against the drug dealers who infest his neighbourhood. Instead, whenever a cop accidentally shoots an unarmed African-American, he hears Al Sharpton chanting, "No justice, no peace"—keeping distrust of the police alive in neighbourhoods that, to be livable, need policing more than most. Come election time, perhaps he hears a local politician rail against racism and demand more government money.
But most of all, he hears rap, pumped out from CDs, videos, and television (especially Black Entertainment Television). "Nihilistic glorifications of 'thug life'" and celebrations of gangbangers, drug dealers, and pimps "as black heroes" constantly wash over him, says Williams. Rap, he says, markets the idea that "violence, murder, and self-hatred" are "true blackness—authentic black identity."
We know that this message reaches its listeners, says Williams, when we see ghetto kids "dress like rappers… and act hardcore, using 'nigger,' cursing, and fighting on the way to school." And we know it as well from the crime statistics. We know that rap's message about sex hits home. It's a cartoon-simple sentiment, says Williams: "All black women are sexually crazed, lack discrimination about men, and deserve to be treated as mindless bitches—dogs."
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 Williams argues this affects the way they see black people. 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 $4bn-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?
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As well as the stuck-in-the-1960s civil rights pooh-bahs, the racketeering reverends, the corrupt politicians and the exploitative rappers, Williams's rogue gallery also includes the black studies professors. A typical specimen, Georgetown professor 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—the old victimology with a 21st-century twist—usefully underscores how specious and destructive that orthodoxy is.
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 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 behaviour of the black poor but American society's "structural barriers," including the "export of jobs and ongoing racial stigma," that prevent blacks from rising.
Moreover, the war on drugs "is a war on black and brown people… and policing measures greatly increase the odds that blacks will do serious time for nonviolent and often first-time offences." And white America has a reason for its war on minorities. "The prison-industrial complex provides white economic opportunity across classes," Dyson explains. "Big money is at stake when it comes to making a crucial choice: to support blacks in the state university or the state penitentiary." Cosby's call for responsibility is thus doubly cruel: it asks the black poor to feel undeserved blame for their own victimisation, while excusing whites from coming to their rescue.
Much better, says Dyson, for black people to "'keep it real,' which often means honouring the ghetto roots of black identity." African-Americans should value the "elements of mass black culture that enable black folk to resist their oppression, transcend their suffering and transform their pain." Hence Cosby is wrong to reject black English and to scoff at African names. And he is at his most wrong 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… and the rule of law in society."
The black middle class, or at least the 14 per cent of blacks who gain a university degree, Dyson's title proclaims, is crazy even to consider Cosby's position. But in fact the Cosby-Dyson debate rages within the hearts of many members of the black middle class. Back in 1993, journalist Ellis Cose agonised over it in his bestselling The Rage of a Privileged Class. The large cohort of upper middle-class blacks like himself, proof of a more open America, nevertheless seethes with resentment and insecurity, Cose reported. Yes, they enjoy high-paid positions in business and the professions but how much of that success could disappear if affirmative action ended? For now, "haunted by the spectre of affirmative action," they know they "will often be greeted by doubts about their competence whatever their real abilities." How can any of them rise as high as his talents deserve?
Often enough, upper middle-class blacks do find themselves "totally and capriciously stripped of status at a moment's notice." A top Washington lawyer tells Cose of his continual rage at going into a store to face "a white redneck who treats me like I make two cents and am uneducated." Alvin Poussaint tells Cose that he knows "black doctors who dress up to go shopping to avoid being taken for shoplifters." Cose recognises that these insults are not the racism of old, but they can still throw a shadow of defensiveness over even successful black careers.
Today, though, according to a younger black journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, "the rage that lives in all African Americans" has a new target. It is "a feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred." Writing in May 2007's Atlantic, Coates quotes black comedian Chris Rock: "Everything white people don't like about black people, black people really don't like about black people… It's like a civil war going on with black people, and it's two sides—there's black people and there's niggas, and niggas have got to go."
The debate raging through black America is also now 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? Or will it be the Obama—along with those other rising voices—who will truly usher in the age of post-racial 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. But not even he knows as yet how he, and so many others like him, will resolve this inner conflict.
This is an edited and amended version of an article that first appeared in the US publication City Journal. Myron Magnet is editor-at-large there and author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass.
