Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results.
And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”įrom Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say.
ONA BROWN STAND UP FOR YOUR DREAM SERIES
He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”Ĭosby was wearing his standard uniform-dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher learning. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. “I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’ We are a bright race, who can move with the best. “Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”Ĭosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them-like so many of their peers across the country-undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. “Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father.
ONA BROWN STAND UP FOR YOUR DREAM FULL
The rest of the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man! Teach!” A row of old black men, community elders, sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. Clutching a cordless mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared remarks and comic ad-libs. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. The audience was packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to capture the overflow. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X.
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