Monday, November 19, 2007
What is debatable about cherishing your kids?
Cosby's kickin' it. Again. Three years ago, Bill Cosby ignited brush fires across black America when he excoriated low-income African-American families for tolerating violence, miseducation and failure at a black tie NAACP dinner in Washington, D.C. "The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting," he ranted at the stone-faced crowd of America's black elite. "They are buying things for their kids -- $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics!
This was no Mr. Huxtable of "The Cosby Show" fame. The iconic entertainer once known as the jolly Jell-O man was hanging our dirty laundry out to dry.
His critics crucified him for what they said was an elitist, misplaced attack on the black poor, who are, after all, just victims of white supremacy and institutional racism. Don't pick on them, they argued. It's "whitey's" fault.
Still, Cosby was just warming up. He took his tough-love act on tour. Since 2004, Cosby and his longtime collaborator, Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint, have been hosting "Call Outs with Bill Cosby," a series of town hall meetings around the nation, from Panama City, Fla., to Baltimore, Md.
They culminated in the new book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, co-authored by Cosby and Poussaint. It is an old-fashioned, eat-your-vegetables, teach-your-children, pull-your-pants-up polemic. The book posits two central questions: Should African Americans talk out of school about the pathologies that are consuming us? Are there any solutions?
Yes, and yes.
Come on People has replaced Cosby's vitriolic speechifying with commonsense essays that reject victimization, violence and despair. If you read this book, you will realize that there is nothing controversial about "what Cosby said."
What is debatable about cherishing your children? What is the argument against going back to school, listening to the elders, abhoring gun violence?
And the old red herring of blaming "whitey" can't hack it anymore. "Blaming only the system keeps certain black people in the limelight, but it also keeps the black poor wallowing in victimhood," the authors write.
Cosby's detractors drone on about the "victims," but they never get around to asking the folks who are toiling, suffering and, yes, striving. We need to find more ways to include them in the conversation, as equal partners, rather than grist for the despair mill.
In the book, black parents, professionals and activists offer up passionate, nuts-and-bolts advice to salve the community's myriad ills. It quotes a Nation of Islam Minister Tony Muhammad at a "call out" in Compton, a black city in South Los Angeles. "What we have got to stop doing is looking outside of our community and look within our community . . . All I want to know is, do you have a program that's saving our children?
"I went to Koreatown today, and I met with Korean merchants. I love them. You know why? They got a place called what? Koreatown. When I left them I went to Chinatown. They got a place called what? Chinatown.
"Where is your town?"
Muhammad urges his "brothers and sisters" to take back their communities. "I'm getting with every pastor because the religious men and women, it's our fault that the streets have gone wild. You hear what I said? It's our fault."
Back in the day, the happy Mr. Huxtable probably didn't play well in Compton, and Cosby's new shtick is a little bourgeois. But like Cosby says, no more excuses.
Cosby's detractors drone on about the 'victims,' but they never get around to asking the folks who are toiling, suffering and, yes, striving. SOURCE
This was no Mr. Huxtable of "The Cosby Show" fame. The iconic entertainer once known as the jolly Jell-O man was hanging our dirty laundry out to dry.
His critics crucified him for what they said was an elitist, misplaced attack on the black poor, who are, after all, just victims of white supremacy and institutional racism. Don't pick on them, they argued. It's "whitey's" fault.
Still, Cosby was just warming up. He took his tough-love act on tour. Since 2004, Cosby and his longtime collaborator, Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint, have been hosting "Call Outs with Bill Cosby," a series of town hall meetings around the nation, from Panama City, Fla., to Baltimore, Md.
They culminated in the new book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, co-authored by Cosby and Poussaint. It is an old-fashioned, eat-your-vegetables, teach-your-children, pull-your-pants-up polemic. The book posits two central questions: Should African Americans talk out of school about the pathologies that are consuming us? Are there any solutions?
Yes, and yes.
Come on People has replaced Cosby's vitriolic speechifying with commonsense essays that reject victimization, violence and despair. If you read this book, you will realize that there is nothing controversial about "what Cosby said."
What is debatable about cherishing your children? What is the argument against going back to school, listening to the elders, abhoring gun violence?
And the old red herring of blaming "whitey" can't hack it anymore. "Blaming only the system keeps certain black people in the limelight, but it also keeps the black poor wallowing in victimhood," the authors write.
Cosby's detractors drone on about the "victims," but they never get around to asking the folks who are toiling, suffering and, yes, striving. We need to find more ways to include them in the conversation, as equal partners, rather than grist for the despair mill.
In the book, black parents, professionals and activists offer up passionate, nuts-and-bolts advice to salve the community's myriad ills. It quotes a Nation of Islam Minister Tony Muhammad at a "call out" in Compton, a black city in South Los Angeles. "What we have got to stop doing is looking outside of our community and look within our community . . . All I want to know is, do you have a program that's saving our children?
"I went to Koreatown today, and I met with Korean merchants. I love them. You know why? They got a place called what? Koreatown. When I left them I went to Chinatown. They got a place called what? Chinatown.
"Where is your town?"
Muhammad urges his "brothers and sisters" to take back their communities. "I'm getting with every pastor because the religious men and women, it's our fault that the streets have gone wild. You hear what I said? It's our fault."
Back in the day, the happy Mr. Huxtable probably didn't play well in Compton, and Cosby's new shtick is a little bourgeois. But like Cosby says, no more excuses.
Cosby's detractors drone on about the 'victims,' but they never get around to asking the folks who are toiling, suffering and, yes, striving. SOURCE
# posted by ADMIN : Monday, November 19, 2007
