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In honor of African-American History Month, chew on this essay I posted on July 2, 2004. Back with new stuff tomorrow...peace:

Cosby: Whitey Isn't the Problem

There are certain truths about American life and culture that are unassailable, even if they don't necessarily make any sense: a blowjob in a movie will get an "NC-17" rating, but you can literally blow somebody's head off and get an R, as long as there's not too much blood...pro wrestling is fake and people love it for that reason, but pro boxing is often rigged and people call it a travesty...and you can be as white as Donny Osmond but talk like Snoop Dogg and be cool, but be black and have a vocabulary like William F. Buckley and you're a "sellout". Try and figure that shit out. (Now if you're Black and have a political outlook like William F. Buckley, then you might very well be a "sellout".)

When legendary comic/actor/civil rights leader/philanderer (oops, how did that get in there?) Bill Cosby first spoke out about his take on some of the problems in the black community at an NAACP forum a month or so ago, he got a flak from Black leaders and many in the community for appearing to be "classist" and overly derogatory towards the members of America's black underclass. He reiterated many of those same statements at a meeting of civil rights leader/philanderer Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition in Chicago. Although his tone and manner may be condescending and imperious, I have to admit that a lot of what Cosby has to say about Black folk these days is true. We don't place a high enough value on education. We do belittle people in our own race for sounding and dressing "too White" (even though almost every facet of American speech and style can trace some of its roots to American black culture). We do have too many incidents of spousal abuse, too much drug abuse, not enough of our kids in college, too many of them in jail. In almost every Black ghetto in America you find somebody driving an Escalade or a even a cheaper car with nice rims or a tricked out stereo--but no one owns a house or runs their own business. Cosby wants to know what happened to us and he lays the blame squarely on our own attitudes, our own laziness, our own inability to get out of our own way. He says it's become "analgesic" for us to blame the White man when we should look in the mirror and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

Bravo, I say. Is Cosby being too simplistic? Of course. Is there an element of being holier-than-thou in what Cosby says? Sure, but frankly he's been that way for forty years. He is consistent and he makes strong points. What are Black people doing to promote the value of education in our communties? Why do we think it's cool to refer to ourselves as niggas, bitches and ho's? And how many CEO's talk like that? America was built on the back of slave labor and the blood of the Native Americans, but we can't keep looking backwards and playing the victim. Of course there is discrimination, a biased criminal justice system, a government that clandestinely funnels drugs into our communities, racial bias, racial profiling and stereotyping. But this could be overcome if we as Black people banded together and used all of this as a motivator and a means of saying "fuck you" to the Establishment. Imagine the what we could do

If we invested more and spent less.
If we appreciated the value of tomorrow, more than the happiness of today.

You'll hear a lot of "hip" black folks who are "keepin' it real", by trashing what Cosby has to say and calling him a sellout. They will, through their ignorance however, go a long way toward proving his point as the most "real" thing will be that nothing positive has changed for Black people.