A Letter to Bill Cosby: That's Dr. Knucklehead to You

[durutti]

http://www.counterpunch.org/martinez07072004.html

'These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around,'' he said. 'The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids -- $500 sneakers for what? I can't even talk the way these people talk: `Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!'

Bill Cosby, speaking at the NAACP in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education

Dear Mr. Cosby,

I wish you had been at dinner last night.

[fdr_hst_fan]

1. I've heard over the years

that Bill Cosby doesn't really like white people, and that's OK with me; I hadn't heard until recently that he'd turned on his OWN people.

[Warpy]

3. Well, he hasn't, not really

He just wants to force the rest of them to follow his lead into academia and the abandonment of neighborhood and family culture.

What he doesn't realize is that the people he levels his criticism at usually have jobs where they have to speak standard English, and they are perfectly capable of switching from the dialect of their neighborhoods to schoolroom English at work, and that puts them ahead of him.

His model isn't appropriate for everyone, but it's the successful old man's failing (all of them, not just Cosby) to think that since his methods worked for him, they should apply to all.

[rpannier]

2. The Problem with the Article

is that it does not address his point. Cosby's point was directed at people who blame others for their failures, rather than look in the mirror and ask themselves what "They personally did to create their problem."
The people mentioned are great people to be admired.

[Loonman]

4. Bill Cosby is saying what needed to be said

Cosby cares about the future, and he's passionate enough to talk about what nobody wants to hear. Nobody else could say what Bill said because we live in Politically-Correct Brady-Bunch Land and prefer to pull the wool over our eyes at the expense of real positive change. I have enormous respect for Dr. Cosby, even though he made "Ghost Dad".

[bread_and_roses]

5. Let's talk personal responsibility AFTER

we address our social responsibility to address the third-world conditions many of these young people grow up in - hunger, crumbling schools with insufficient books, desks, PAPER; with mold and holes in the floor. Let's talk personal responsibility when we address the lack of jobs, recreation, public transportation, housing, drug treatment, police brutality. And especially let's address the underlying racism that allows us as a society to ingore these conditions because so many of the people living in them are minorities.

Along the way we could address rural poverty, which interestingly enough seems to have the same effects on many of the non-minority kids who grow up in it.

Humans are largely creatures of their environment. Blaming individuals before addressing underlying structural and systemic problems is not only a waste of time, it's reactionary.

Let's talk bootstraps when the boots have some straps.