The Cos Speaks Out

Bill Cosby was recently in the news for some of the comments he's made regarding the sorry state in much of black America. Cosby told a convention of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition (a union of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition political activist group and his nonprofit social activist group PUSH, or People United to Serve Humanity) that black people - especially black men - have to take more responsibility for themselves and stop blaming white racism for their predicament all the time.

It was a bold statement, to be sure. Cosby is challenging fellow blacks to better themselves and not cling to the pathological ghetto culture that has entrapped many black Americans for decades. Maybe it's not one's fault to be born in poverty, Cosby stated, but it's one's fault for not trying to get out of the cycle of poverty. He stressed the importance of education and a command of the English language, as well as the need for young black men to take more responsibilities for themselves and their families and to stay out of trouble - not to steal or kill.

This was clearly a statement that had to be made by someone in the black population, and Bill Cosby was the perfect man to make it. Cosby has preached the importance of education for decades, and not just to black people; as a white kid in the seventies, I grew up watching Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which pretty much taught the same lesson. It seems sad indeed that, fifty years after the Brown versus Board of Education ruling from the Supreme Court (which technically outlawed segregated schools), and forty years after the civil rights marches, in which black people were physically attacked for fighting for better education opportunities for themselves, black people in the ghettoes of America are giving up on school so quickly.

Some will inevitably point out that if a white person (William Bennett, maybe? HA!) had made such a speech, he'd be accused of racism. Frankly, I don't think it's a white person's place to make these kind of comments anyway. Bill Cosby knows about the problems of black America better than white people ever can, and he deserves credit for addressing them.