
By jimi izrael
Africana.com
Dr. Bill Cosby has caught a lot of ink over comments he made during a May 17 dinner at Constitution Hall in Washington commemorating the Brown vs. Board of Education decision desegregating the nation's public educational system. Coz used the podium to lambaste black youth and the underclass. Nobody is as entitled to read the people of America like America's Favorite Father. But I gotta tell you, Cosby was out of pocket. I wasn't there, but according to the Washington Post's transcript, he sounded like one of those drunken dinner guests who, apropos of nothing, gets up and starts telling tales out of school, as everyone sits around bemused and mortified. Bill Cosby talked down his nose at people who love and revere him, having obviously forgotten the trials and tribulations attached to poverty.
Tenderness and compassion can go a long way.
In his comments, Coz went on about the poor English many poor blacks use: "They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English," he said, according to the Washington Post. "I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you aint,' 'Where you is' . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"
Somehow, Dr. Cosby, you managed.
Clearly, the man has forgotten his comedy records from the '70s and the three movies he did with Sidney Poitier — not to mention Mother, Juggs and Speed — all of which included often blue-ish dialogue liberally seasoned in the vernacular and jive-talk of the day. Cosby went on in his speech talking about all the fatherless children and irresponsible black men, but let's not forget that he, like so many of the poor people he's calling to task, has had some baby-mama drama of his own. I've had mine too, Jesse's had his — in this day and age, that isn't uncommon. But I take umbrage at cats like Coz, who get it in their minds to lay down black agendas from a position of moral authority, as if they do no wrong. The best role models are flawed role models — people just like you and me who rise above their own human frailty — and Cosby would do good to remember that. Like so many of his generation, he wags his finger at the young'uns, ostensibly in the name of love, while failing to see the broken legacy he and his have left behind.
He also went on to talk about the culture of conspicuous consumption so many of us — poor and middle-class — fall into:
"Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," he declared. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids — $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics'..."
Poor people want things just like rich people do, and we could argue that the middle class fuels the cult of conspicuous consumption as some realization of the American Dream. Cosby also used his speech to talk about young people wearing their clothes backwards(?) and the crazy names they sometimes have. But he wasn't done.
"There are no 'political prisoners' ...These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"
Okay
I'm all for keeping it gulley. But, while I don't believe in "political prisoners" post-1960s either, Cosby is a fool for suggesting that getting shot in the head for stealing pound cake had it coming. That comment is outrageously irresponsible — it's like saying Timothy Thomas deserved to be shot for having too many traffic warrants. Cosby is clearly disconnected, walking around his brownstone in $500 sweaters ranting incredulously about young folk and poor blacks to no one in particular.
To read the rest of this article, please click here
Click here to listen to audio excerpts of Cosby's May 17th invictive.
Remembering Vernon Jarrett
By George E. Curry
NNPA Editor-in-Chief
BlackPressUSA.com
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Initially, I began this article with the ordinary things people write about when someone dies. But I hadn’t gotten to the end of the first paragraph before I realized that I couldn’t write anything ordinary about Vernon Jarrett, the pioneering journalist who was extraordinary in so many ways.
Vernon died Sunday night at the University of Chicago Hospitals at the age of 84 after a long bout with cancer of the esophagus.
This story is not about how Vernon died – it’s about how he lived.
Vernon has always been a larger-than-life icon in journalism. He entered the field in 1946, the year before I was born, but we have always shared a special bond. We are both Southerners; he grew up in Paris, Tenn. and I spent all of my childhood in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Both of us were history majors and editor of The Aurora, the school newspaper, at Knoxville College. We both maintained a passion for our alma mater and had been serving together on its Board of Trustees. Beyond that, Vernon Jarrett has set a high standard that I can only aspire to reach.
Most important, he was talented. Not only was he talented, he was in the never-ending quest to become the perfect writer.
Whenever you saw the Vernon Jarrett by-line on a story, it was solid assurance that everything that followed was well-researched and well-written. You could take it to the bank. Vernon was a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, served as its second president from 1977-1979, and prided himself on having never missed a convention in more than 25 years.
At each annual convention, you were as likely to find Vernon in the hotel lobby advising some newcomer in the business about his or her career as attending a workshop or speech.
Vernon Jarrett was a “race man” in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter and Paul Robeson, towering historical figures that he could – and did – lecture about without prompting. He praised and challenged African-Americans and went to his death befuddled that any Black person working in journalism today could part his or her lips to ask whether he was a Black journalist or a journalist who happened to be Black.
Vernon and Les Payne, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of Newsday, would direct young journalists to read the birth announcements in newspapers and see if they could ever find a single instance of a mother giving birth a to a 7-pound, 8 ounce “journalist.”
Vernon’s position was that we’re born Black, we live as Blacks, we die Black, and we should feel some obligation to help people who are Black. It is only fitting that Vernon ended his professional career at the same place he started it six decades earlier – working for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper.
To read the rest of this column, please click here.
Afro-Netizen on Thursday, May 27, 2004 at 11:10 AM in Commentary/Opinion | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)
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