You know those topics you really don't want to get into, but so many people have so many ideas that are so wrong that if you don't speak up you feel guilty about not challenging the error? Well, Dr. Cosby's speech falls right in the middle of that pile for me.
Black folks' reactions seem to be along the lines of
- Ho Hum, my daddy said that
- He's right, we need to do something
- What a traitor for insulting the culture from which I draw elements to construct my self-image
- Stunned silence
The reaction of mainstream types (among whom I include, with their approval, Black Conservatives®), has been either stunned silence from the left or from the right something that sounds disturbingly like
though without the admirable brevity Brainy Smurf usually displays,
Of course there were some specific things that put me over the limit today. Fooling around on Technorati I stumbled on a post at Stop the Bleating that was just wrong on several levels.
Which levels?
Mr. Shaw, like any good lawyer, tries a little misdirection and equivocation to avoid having to admit the uncomfortable truth. Of course most people on welfare are not African-American; blacks are still a relatively small minority in this country, so it'd be really surprising if they made up the majority of welfare recipients. But it seems to me that the proportions of blacks and whites on welfare is a much more meaningful piece of information, if one's honestly attempting to refute Cosby's statement.
Although persons of color, particularly African Americans, have historically comprised a disproportionately high percentage of the AFDC/TANF population, this difference has become even more pronounced since the mid-1990s. National statistics reveal that the proportion of white recipients dropped from 37.4% in 1994 to 30.5% in 1999, while, during the same period, African Americans went from 36.4% to 38% of the welfare population and the proportion of Latinos increased from 19.9% to 24.5%.*
Now, according to my calculations (based on this 2002 Census Bureau estimate), blacks and part-black Americans make up about 13% of the population. But they account for 38% of the "welfare population." Draw your own conclusions.
Now, a comparison of the fractions of the Black and white populations on welfare would be meaningful if groups had the same starting conditions or if an adjustment factor can be calculated that would offset the difference in starting conditions. Neither condition obtains.
Then there's this:
Total means-tested welfare expenditures by federal and state governments amounted to roughly $384 billion in 1998. Of that sum, $212 billion--55 percent--went to white recipients. Some $105 billion--28 percent--went to black recipients, and $69 billion--17 percent--went to Hispanic recipients.
Aid to black and Hispanic welfare recipients is greater in proportion to the size of their populations than is aid to white recipients. This can be seen by determining the average welfare expenditure per person for each ethnic group.
As a group, the 207 million white residents in the U.S. population receive $212 billion in benefits. As a group, then, they receive some $1,022 per person in welfare aid.
There are some 30 million Hispanic residents in the U.S., and Hispanics as a group receive $69 billion in welfare, or roughly $2,210 per person. As a group, the 33 million black residents in the U.S. receive $105 billion in welfare aid, or roughly $3,230 per person. *
…which demonstrates such a lack of mathematical understanding as to render anything else unnecessary to consider. [LATER: Just in case: since not all 207 million white people are on welfare, and average across the entire population has no analytical value. Lather, rinse, repeat with the Black and Latino figures.] But he links to Clayton Cramer who says:
See if you can find re-runs of the mid-1960s television series I Spy. It starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, as two American spies running around the world undercover as professional tennis players. Ask yourself how far blacks would have advanced in America if the hip-hop black man had been the image that white Americans saw every week.
My immediate reaction was, oh no, he did not just suggest the civil rights movement hinged on I Spy. A couple of minutes later I ran through the Black images from the mid-60s that white Americans saw every week. Lou Rawls. Black children attacked by dogs. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X. Rochester. Black folks getting firehosed. The Temptations.
It was a couple of hours before I had the frightening thought that I Spy could conceivably have had more impact on white folks than Bull Connor.