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Jewish World Review May 5, 2005 / 26 Nissan, 5765 A new century, a new ‘color line’ By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Sometimes our efforts to stand up for the less fortunate actually can grease their slide backward into even less fortune.
That's what I thought of the verbal sucker punch with which August Wilson, the distinguished black playwright, walloped Bill Cosby, the distinguished black comedian.
When Time magazine asked Wilson what he thought of Cosby's controversial criticisms of black parenting, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright was dismissive:
"A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor," he said. "Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect? I thought it was unfair of him."
I, by contrast, think Wilson is being unfair to Cosby— and to clowns.
Black comedians have a long history of sometimes getting to the heart of the matter more quickly and effectively than most scholars, politicians or movement leaders. Anyone who dismissed Dick Gregory in the 1960s, Richard Pryor in the 1970s or Chris Rock in the 1990s as mere "clowns" would have missed something very important that was happening in black America.
These days Dave Chappelle's show on Comedy Central speaks volumes with topical skits— like his fake news report on what would happen if black Americans actually received slavery reparations. (Answer: Most of the money would find its way back into the cash registers of white businesses before sundown. KFC and FUBU would merge to become the world's largest company. Etc., etc.)
Similarly, it helps to have a sense of humor and irony to hear what Cosby's saying. Cosby has not, in his various addresses and interviews, attacked poor people for being poor. He has criticized parents who neglect the work that can save their children from a lifetime of poverty. That's a message that, despite a few naysayers here and there, has been favorably received by many African-American parents and educators across the country.
Wilson, who received his Pulitzers for "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," is receiving a wave of attention these days because he is completing his two-decades-long project of producing 10 linked plays, each representing one decade of the black experience in 20th Century America.
The 10th play, "Radio Golf," opened Thursday at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn. Wilson says it is about "the failure" of the black middle class "who failed to return their expertise, participation and resources back to the community." That's ironic, too, since Cosby has given millions to black colleges and to individual black students.
Yet Cosby also expresses the frustration felt by many black Americans when they see black youths who fail to take advantage of the hard-won opportunities that the civil rights revolution opened up. Often, they are outright hostile to speaking proper English and achieving academically for fear of being perceived as "acting white."
I can understand the reflex of Wilson and others to lash out at Cosby for his candor, especially when it validates their own ghetto-centric sense of "being authentic," "keepin' it real" or "gettin' down with my peeps." But most black American parents, educators and others with whom I have talked or who have e-mailed me over the past year sound like they're on Cosby's side. After all, if you define the elements of success as "actin' white," that only makes blackness another name for failure. There's much more to black culture than that— or, at least, there should be.
"The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line," W.E.B. DuBois wrote a century ago. The problem of the 21st Century, I would submit, are the lines of difference that are only masked by color.
Last year, for example, The New York Times reported a study that found most of Harvard's entering black freshmen and alumni of Harvard were either immigrants or the children of immigrants from the West Indies or Africa. I have since found similar disproportionate enrollment by black immigrants or children of immigrants at other universities. Why have so many slavery-descended black Americans not fared as well?
Thomas Sowell, the conservative black author and columnist, argues in his provocative new book, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) that so-called "ghetto culture" actually evolved from overexposure by generations of blacks to the culture of southern whites, a group that lagged far behind northern whites for centuries in literacy and productivity.
The result, he says, is an urban black culture that is counterproductive and self-destructive, no matter how much it is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture "and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with."
I will leave Sowell's thesis about the origins of black culture for him to argue. But, there's no question that, on the threshold of a new century, we black Americans need to re-examine not only what political, social or economic forces are doing to us, but also what we are doing to ourselves.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
