Scholar critiques Bill Cosby on causes of black urban plight

Eric Dyson calls the entertainer "sincere" but "sincerely wrong"

By: David Campbell
   Scholar and cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson took comedian Bill Cosby to task in a talk Tuesday at Princeton University on the plight of black urban poor in America.
   "I think he’s sincere — but I think he’s sincerely wrong," said Professor Dyson of Mr. Cosby while fielding questions from Princeton Associate Professor of Religion Eddie S. Glaude, who is acting director of the Program in African American Studies at Princeton.
   "It’s not that Cosby is not genuine, it’s that he’s adhering to a certain notion of respectability, but also a certain notion of poor people that does not yield what he desires," Professor Dyson said during the talk.
   "My problem with Cosby is ‘these people,’" he continued. "It’s constantly ‘these people.’"
   Professor Dyson’s most recent book is titled "Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind."
   In it, he criticizes statements the comedian and actor made in a 2004 speech in which he contended that the social and economic ills of blacks were the result of their own failure to take responsibility for their families and communities.
   In the book, Professor Dyson argues that Mr. Cosby’s criticism amounts to an attack by the "Afrostocracy" — well-to-do blacks higher up the social ladder — on the "Ghettocracy" — poor urban blacks.
   During the discussion Tuesday, which was held at the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Professor Dyson talked about his own upbringing in Detroit, describing the people who inspired him as a youth, and his own friends, neighbors and family who fell victim to the undertow of poverty and despair.
   Professor Dyson, an ordained Baptist minister and the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, himself was a teen father and briefly lived on welfare. He has a brother serving life in prison for second-degree murder, though he said Tuesday he believes he is innocent.
   "I lived in a neighborhood which, in many ways, was quite characteristic of black people striving for something better," he said. "They never gave in to the pulverizing forces against them."
   He described people he grew up with who were murdered or were themselves murderers, saying, "That’s one side. That’s the kind of vicious assault, the incredible hurt that people in hurt live with."
   But in that same community, Professor Dyson continued, there lived "hard-working extraordinary people. That’s the power of the juxtaposition, never denying the incredible futility people are facing.
   "I never saw these people as incapable of hope or of rising above their circumstances, because I was one of them," he said.
   While offering a critique of Mr. Cosby’s perspective, Professor Dyson expressed great respect for the comedian. He said Mr. Cosby called him at home after The New York Times printed quotes of his in which he was critical Mr. Cosby’s 2004 speech.
   He said the reporter had only read him portions of the speech. During his call, Mr. Cosby urged him to watch a tape of the whole thing — he said he did, and it was this that prompted him to "get my grits together" and deliver a proper response in the form of the book.
   Describing the call from the reporter, Professor Dyson said, "The New York Times called me up, read the quote over the phone, I did respond.
   "I said to the reporter, ‘Cosby is a great man, a smart man,’ but to me, these comments were a departure from that," Professor Dyson said. "They were elitist in the extreme. They reinforced prevailing stereotypes of blacks."
   But he said of his conversation with Mr. Cosby himself, "He’s a larger-than-life figure. I was like, wow, this is Cosby, man, regardless of my particular perspective."
   Professor Dyson earned a doctorate in religion from Princeton University. The Woodrow Wilson School and the African American studies program at Princeton sponsored Tuesday’s event.