You can't just say stuff like that
Even if you're anonymous, I still have to bring this one up from the comments.
There are a couple of things I want to get off my chest about this Bill Cosby stuff and I guess here is an OK place for that.
First, doing well in school is supposedly "acting white". That was not the case in any of the mostly white high school and college I went to and it was not the case in the all black elementary or junior high schools I went to.
Being a nerd is being a nerd, acting white is acting white. Two different things. It was real easy in the 80s and 90s and probably still. If you listened to hip-hop you acted black, otherwise you acted white.
More directly, if you hung out with other black kids you act black. If you hang out with white kids you act white. How complex can that be? The single smartest black person in the school in my experiences has always acted black. Maybe that's just luck.
I can imagine a circumstance where there are schools that are nearly all white in the "top classes" and nearly all black in the "bottom classes". In that situation, the smartest black kids mostly hang out with their white classmates, listen to rock and roll like their friends and are accused of "acting white". I've never seen this but I imagine that is the case in some places. In that case doing well in school happens to align well enough with acting white that there are black children complaining to adults that they are accused of "acting white" just because they do well. Those complaints seem to have reached Bill Cosby. But the fact is the kids accused of "acting white" really do "act white".
So enough of that. I think this stuff about doing well is acting white is a myth produced by distorted perceptions. Cosby and other critics of black people latched onto it just because it fits their theories that the culture of black children is to blame for everything.
The next issue is that supposedly moral standards have degraded since when Bill Cosby was a child.
How is this supposed to have happened? Did the culture fairy sprinkle dust on a whole generation of black children?
Cosby points to a school in Brooklyn with a 50% drop out rate. Seems to me that between older siblings and older friends, people who attend that school have a clear picture of what happens to the people who graduate and what happens to the people who do not graduate.
Do the 50% who graduate get better jobs than the 50% who do not graduate? It is possible that graduating is in some cases rationally not worth the aggravation.
Something has to have changed if drop out rates increased. It was not the culture fairy. Instead of blaming the children Cosby should be asking has the amount of stress involved in going to school increased for some people? Have the benefits of finishing decreased for some people? These are issues that can and should be addressed. When cultures change, they usually change for a reason.
Next. Black leaders. Bill Cosby is not one. You may not like Farrakhan or Sharpton or Jackson, but they have devoted their working lives to trying to improve the status of the Black community. Bill Cosby has spent his working life trying to make people laugh, and mostly white people at that. That does not mean its not possible that as a fluke, the comedian might have some insight that those who dedicate their lives have missed, but we don't expect that to happen. That sure hasn't happened here.
Whew. Let's get back to the work ethic for a second. My grandmother moved from Mississippi to New York City at the beginning of the 20th century to work. My grandfather moved from Barbados to New York City to work. My other grandparents moved from Georgia to Detroit to work.
Every black person in every major US city has the same story. At one point I believe the Black participation in the labor force was higher than the white participation. So what happened to the work ethic?
Its not the culture fairy. If employers are prejudiced against Black people, that lowers the expected return from a given amount of job seeking effort. The problem is not backwards pants. Any rational actor will expend less effort seeking a job if there is a lower expected reward. Instead of fixing the backwards pants, let's fix the expected reward from a given amount of effort looking for a job.
OK. I'm done. Thanks P6 for providing a forum where I can spit this out.
Does everyone know about Geoffrey Canada? I read his autobiography recently Fists Sticks Knives Guns. Its real good. Geoffrey runs a major program in Harlem to improve the outcomes of at-risk children. Bill Cosby should give him a call.
Yes, this was DEFINITELY an okay place to get that off.
