Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? by Michael Eric Dyson

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At a gala marking the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling, comedian Bill Cosby astonished the audience with an impromptu diatribe against the lack of parenting, poor academic performance, sexual promiscuity, and criminal behavior among those he called the "knuckleheads" of the black community. Some members of the predominantly African-American audience gasped, but many applauded or laughed at Cosby's apparently spontaneous remarks. "Hip hop intellectual" Michael Eric Dyson uses this controversial incident to illuminate the widening divide between the successful black "Afristocracy" and the "Ghettocracy" underclass. Dyson asserts that the black middle class has now joined mainstream America in blaming the poor for their troubles rather than tackling the systemic injustices that damage their lives. A controversial critique from an influential social commentator.

From the Publisher

The acclaimed "hip-hop intellectual" exposes the raw nerve of class and generational warfare in black America with this provocative defense of impoverished African Americans

Nothing exposed the class and generational divide in black America more starkly than Bill Cosby's now-infamous assault on the black poor when he received an NAACP award in the spring of 2004. The comedian-cum-social critic lamented the lack of parenting, poor academic performance, sexual promiscuity, and criminal behavior among what he called the "knuckleheads" of the African-American community. Even more surprising than his comments, however, was the fact that his audience laughed and applauded.

Best-selling writer, preacher, and scholar Michael Eric Dyson uses the Cosby brouhaha as a window on a growing cultural divide within the African-American community. According to Dyson, the "Afristocracy" -lawyers, physicians, intellectuals, bankers, civil rights leaders, entertainers, and other professionals-looks with disdain upon the black poor who make up the "Ghettocracy" -single mothers on welfare, the married, single, and working poor, the incarcerated, and a battalion of impoverished children. Dyson explains why the black middle class has joined mainstream America to blame the poor for their troubles, rather than tackling the systemic injustices that shape their lives. He exposes the flawed logic of Cosby's diatribe and offers a principled defense of the wrongly maligned black citizens at the bottom of the social totem pole. Displaying the critical prowess that has made him the nation's preeminent spokesman for the hip-hop generation, Dyson challenges us all-black and white-to confront the social problems that the civil rights movement failed to solve.

Publishers Weekly

Last May, iconic comedian Cosby raised a storm with a dyspeptic rant about the self-destructive failures of the black underclass: "knuckleheads" without parents who "put their clothes on backward," speak bad English and go to jail. To pop culture intellectual Dyson-author of books on Marvin Gaye, Tupac Shakur and Martin Luther King Jr.-this was the most blatant manifestation of an attitude shared by the "Afristocracy." With empathy and energy, Dyson takes Cosby at his word and dissects his arguments-as well as the comedian's own conduct-in order to combat Afristocratic dogma. While Dyson is merciless in assessing both, he takes the opportunity to explore a host of hot-button issues in black culture, from illegitimacy to faux African names, citing data and making his own case for black culture as adapted to a dominant white society that systematically puts up barriers to opportunity. The prolific Dyson has already generated controversy with what finally amounts to an evisceration of a major black figure, but that seems to be precisely the point. Despite the specificity and ferocity of Dyson's critique (which draws on allegations that Cosby sexually abused a woman and fathered an illegitimate child, and understates the race politics of The Cosby Show), Cosby ends up more of a straw man than take-down victim, as Dyson celebrates the "persistent freedom of black folk." 12-city author tour; 40-city radio satellite tour. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In a 1968 television special, a 1969 Playboy interview, and a 1976 doctoral dissertation, Bill Cosby laid the responsibility for the constricted life opportunities of low-income blacks on the shoulders of privileged white society. Flash to May 2004, when Cosby gave a well-publicized speech in which he tore into those he referred to as African American "knuckleheads," calling them irresponsible and uneducated and charging them with failing in their parental duties. A best-selling author (Holler If You Hear Me), Baptist minister, and ex-welfare teenage father, Dyson (humanities, Univ. of Pennsylvania) firmly castigates Cosby for ignoring gross inequities in educational opportunities, criminal justice treatment, living conditions, and respect. Cosby, argues Dyson, should use his station in life to help. Highly recommended for those interested in exploring relations among the different U.S. classes and what the disparity means to the country's overall future.-Suzanne W. Wood, emerita, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0465017207
  
• ISBN-13: 9780465017201
• Format: Paperback, 304pp
• Publisher: Perseus Publishing
• Pub. Date: January 2006
• Sales Rank: 82,292