Lost Coz

Bill Cosby defending his views on low-income blacks in a speech in Washington, D.C. in 2004, on what author Michael Eric Dyson calls Cosby's "Blame the Poor Tour." AP Photo/M. Spencer Green.

Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
By Michael Eric Dyson
288 pages
Basic Civitas Books
$32.50

Michael Eric Dyson’s provocative new book Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? offers an astute warning to celebrities about how not to screw up late in life.

Near the end of his 288-page rant about how Bill Cosby has gone off the rails by suddenly blaming the black, urban poor for their own problems, Dyson comes up with a winning line: “If nothing else, Cosby’s ventures into the realm of social criticism prove the non-transferability of genius.” Many black American leaders have shown far greater understanding of the problems that keep people poor, Dyson says, so “it is probably best that [Cosby] explore his gifts for comedy and leave the social analysis and race leadership to those better suited to the task.”

In accepting or at least remaining silent during Cosby’s blistering criticisms of the black poor, most of the black middle class — the “Afristocracy” as Dyson disparagingly calls it — did indeed lose its mind. How dare Cosby, a multimillionaire with his own personal problems —including an extra-marital affair, unproven allegations of sexual assault and suggestions that he emotionally neglected his own daughter — launch into an offensive about the immorality of the black poor? Cosby and the Afristocracy, Dyson charges, are attacking the black poor because of their own obsessive need to be accepted in white America. “We [in the black middle class] are loath to expose ugly dimensions of black life to a white public that is often hungry for confirmation of black pathology while failing to see the same problems in its own backyard. Black culture has, therefore, become fixed in defining black identity; only the positive, redeeming and virtuous will do.”

Cosby was born in 1937 and raised — as he used to love to say in his side-splittingly funny stand-up routines — in “the projects” by a mother who used to threaten to slap him three days into next week and by an alcoholic father who swore at him so much that “from age one to seven... I thought my name was Jesus Christ.”

Cosby, whose childhood friends in a cluster of Philadelphia tenement buildings gave rise to “Fat Albert” and other routines, dropped out of high school and joined the navy. He left that after a few years, played football and ran track at Temple University but dropped out to pursue a show business career. (Later, he received a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.) At clubs in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and elsewhere, Cosby honed his comic genius delivering monologues about black characters who never encountered racism in a hostile and race-conscious America. Indeed, at the height of the civil rights movement, Cosby was unique among black comedians in avoiding the subject of race.

The comic actor with Cosby Show co-star Phylicia Rashad. AP Photo/Tony Esparza.

The most hawkish white Republican could safely tune him in, because Cosby wasn’t interested in making white America uncomfortable, or pointing fingers or examining racism. Dyson observes that decades ago, Cosby understood how to make white America the bread and butter of his audience. “‘People have to like you if you’re going to be a comic,’” Cosby is quoted as saying. “‘After a cat establishes the fact that he’s funny, 40 per cent of the pressure is eased up on him because, when he walks out, people already like him.’”

After making North Americans laugh right out of their chairs during his comedy routines, Cosby embarked on an acting career that made him one of the most successful and influential performers in American history. Starting in 1965, he played a funny-man lead role where race wasn’t at issue in the NBC series I Spy with white co-star Robert Culp. Cosby’s first sitcom, The Bill Cosby Show debuted in 1969, but was cancelled after two seasons. His acclaimed cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids hit the airwaves in 1972. In 1984, Cosby’s second sitcom, The Cosby Show , began a successful eight-year run. The sitcom featured Cosby as an obstetrician whose wife was a lawyer; the family rarely encountered news of poverty, racism or interracial dating. Cosby has also written the bestsellers Fatherhood and Time Flies, and has released more than two dozen comedy albums.

Cosby’s monumental success has led to equally staggering philanthropy in support of black education. He has given millions of dollars to black American colleges, including $20 million to Spelman College in Atlanta and $1.3 million to Fisk University in Tennessee; he has also made donations to causes like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

After such a meteoric rise to riches and fame, what could possibly go wrong?

Author Michael Eric Dyson. Photo Matt Carr. Courtesy HarperCollins Canada.

Is Bill Cosby Right? falls apart when Dyson tries to criticize the comedian for his early avoidance of racial issues. Dyson seems to wish that Cosby had infused his comedy with social criticism. As a result of Cosby’s colour-blind approach to comedy, Dyson claims, “Black folk failed to find as clear a voice for our humanity as we might have if Cosby had been willing in his comedy to flesh out the nuances of black identity... And whites were freed from the responsibility to mend the social relations they had fractured, or in any case had benefited from, in the first place.”

Really? It’s a bit much to expect a comedian to be the saviour of humanity. And it’s unfair to ask an artist to do something that just isn’t in his nature.

Dyson allows Cosby to defend himself with extensive quotes culled from earlier interviews. Standing up for the thoroughly middle-class Huxtables portrayed in The Cosby Show, Cosby told Ebony magazine in 1985, “Why do [critics] want to deny me the pleasure of being just an American and just enjoying life? Why must I make all the black social statements?”

Indeed. Why should a black artist have to write about politics? Surely, we can encourage all artists — including blacks — to listen to their own muses. Cosby was funny — and downright funniest in his early stand-up routines — precisely because he had honed his individual comic genius. Other comedians, such as Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor, would offer penetrating social insights into matters of racial injustice. Writers of the period, such as James Baldwin and later Toni Morrison, would expose the underside of racism in America. The world didn’t need Bill Cosby to be anything except Bill Cosby.

Asking a younger Cosby to become political could have hastened the very absurdities that have now sullied his career. Dyson, coiner of the lovely phrase about the non-transferability of genius, should know that.

Lawrence Hill is a novelist and journalist who lives in Oakville, Ontario.