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Abstract
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Listen carefully and you can hear a new ideological assault on inner-city African American youth. Remarkably, with a few exceptions, it is not (yet) the beginnings of another neo-conservative movement. Instead, the speakers are Black public intellectuals, mainly on the left-liberal side of politics. Erin Aubry Kaplan dubs them the "new breed of black social critics" (2006).
The attack began on a Monday night in May 2004. The place was Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, and the occasion was the NAACP's 50th anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education. The speaker was comedian and civil rights activist Bill Cosby. But this was not the funny, non-threatening, postracial Dr. Huxtable of The Bill Cosby Show. This was an angry, sarcastic Cosby. Imitating Ebonics, punctuated by incendiary polemics, he mocked the poor and the young in Black America. Resurrecting a recurring theme in African American political thought, Cosby insisted that the fight against racial inequality needed to include more than civil rights legislation. It also required that the Black community accept personal responsibility for some of its problems. Castigating "the lower-economic people" for "not holding up their end in this deal," he declared that "these people are not parenting.""They are buying things for their kids--$500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'" Referring to Black children in the third person, he continued, "(I)t's standing on da corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. 'Why you ain't, where is you go … .' I don't know who these people are" (Cosby 2004). |