Bill Cosby blasts Black Community

[Paelos]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/01/cosby.comments.ap/index.html

I read through Cosby's comments and I must say, the things that he says are probably the most effective ways for the black community to move past the problems that they have. In Georgia, its very common to see black groups pointing the finger at discrimination and policy that keeps them down, yet they rarely turn the finger to themselves. Cosby is making the stand that needs to be made, change starts in the home. The black community has suffered for years because a culture of ignorance and machismo has become igrained in their homes. Black men love their mothers and hate their fathers, or don't even know them at all in many cases. They look for male role models in places that lead them into gangs, drugs, and ultimately poverty. No emphasis is placed on getting through school when the guy on the corner slinging dope is making the big bucks.

All these behaviors started with parenting, or the lack thereof. Strong fathers breed stronger men, and caring mothers instill their values into better daughters. One parent can't fill those shoes. Also, education is the key to success, but parents have to be the ones helping their kids succeed. No child can realize their potential without a personal drive, but it takes a good family to develop that drive. All in all, I think Cosby is on the right track, but it is a hard track. Ultimately, it will be ignored in the short run for the easy way out, but I hope as time goes on, more and more people will begin to take similar stands for change.

[Big Gulp]

All in all, I think Cosby is on the right track, but it is a hard track. Ultimately, it will be ignored in the short run for the easy way out, but I hope as time goes on, more and more people will begin to take similar stands for change.

There's a really good book about this issue that came out a couple of years ago called Betraying the Race, by James McWorton (sp?) if I remember correctly.

He's a linguistics professor that sort of got into black issues during the ebonics faze.  He was really the only black professor of linguistics around, so the media were hounding him about this topic.  He's a conservative, but a fairly lowkey one, not of the raving right loony variety.  Anyhow, he expounds on this kind of thing really well.

[Mesozoic]

Seeking academic success is considered, at best, "white."  And as we know from pop culture, thats worse than death.  At worst, its a complete betrayal of the African American culture.  

Once you start applying severe peer pressure on a teenager to blow off school, you're doomed.  Kids that age can't fight that kind of persistent pressure off, and the result is that he / she ends up being a 20-something with no options.

[schild]

What can the black people of America do to rise up and overcome?

"Stop killing eachother"
Correct!

"Go to school!"
Correct!

"Vote!"
Wrong.

I probably messed that up horribly. I'll fix it when I see the "I KNOW BLACK PEOPLE" episode again.

[Paelos]

Seeking academic success is considered, at best, "white."  And as we know from pop culture, thats worse than death.  At worst, its a complete betrayal of the African American culture.  

Agreed, its cooler to be an ebonic speaking banger than a first class student. That is until the bangers are dead or in jail and the students are making the big bucks or working for social change. The problem isn't as much peer pressure, as I consider that only a symptom of the larger issue. Peer pressure to blow off school starts because kids don't have parents that care, or even have time to care. The black community role models are not rocket scientists, they are pro athletes and music stars. Most of them only perpetuate this thug life culture by being complete jackasses in real life.

It's all about starting with your role models at home.

[Sky]

The silly part is that white kid are trying to emulate the thug lifestyle and be all cool, as if it's cool to be ignorant and speak pidgen english. But hey, it sure pisses the parents off, if you don't mind throwing your life down the toilet.

[schild]

I fucking hate people who butcher English. They should be tied up and shot, am i rite? fo'rizzle my nizzles - fo'shizzle.

FUCK.

[Mi_Tes]

The silly part is that white kid are trying to emulate the thug lifestyle and be all cool, as if it's cool to be ignorant and speak pidgen english. But hey, it sure pisses the parents off, if you don't mind throwing your life down the toilet.

The problem isn't for those who can turn it off and on to be cool because they realize what they are doing and can change it.  The problem is with those who don't realize what they are doing and won't ever have the skills to speak or write correctly.  Sad to see, but a very common issue in the South where many people are limited in the job market by their inadequate language skills.

[Paelos]

Sad to see, but a very common issue in the South where many people are limited in the job market by their inadequate language skills.

I ain'ts got no idea what yall be talking about. Youghto know that we here in the deep south know how to talk right.

[HaemishM]

The problem in Mississippi is much the same as in Georgia.

I applaud Bill Cosby for speaking this way. All too often, the "black community leaders" I hear talking do nothing but infantilize the black community, treating them as perpetual victims of the "white man's oppression." Al Fucking Sharpton is the most high-profile (Tawana Brawley anyone?). Worthless piece of shit that he is.

Yes, there is racism, and discrimination and oppression. But discrimination is illegal, and is becoming less systemic with every generation. You CAN succeed in life, whether white, black, Puerto Rican or Martian, but you have to try, and you have to work for it. It isn't going to be handed to you. Some have to try harder; for blacks, that's overcoming peer pressure to be a little gangsta, and not letting it get you down when some dumbass cracker won't hire you because you're black. It may HURT, but don't let the pain hold you down.

However, as a white middle-class surburban kid, to say that kind of thing to a group of black people would get me labeled a fucking racist bigot.

[Snowspinner]

I think Cosby is solidly half right.

I think Dave Chapelle, in general, is a good 90% right.

For a host of reasons, black culture has a shitload of negative influences within it. Some of these are holdovers of necessary responses to explicit white racism. Others are elements of various vicious cycles.

Buti t's not so easy to simply renounce culture. The real challenge is finding a healthy relationship to a culture with destructive elements. And that's a challenge that faces a lot more ethnic minorities than just blacks.

[schild]

Personally, I blame rap music and the extremists (Farrakhan, Sharpton, etc) for perpetuating the hate. While many of you may not agree with the rap music part. I truly believe it influences young black men (and women) to be fucking idiots.

Edit: Before I get pinned as a racist, you should listen to some of the ass-nasty shit that gets labeled as music. And you tell me if you don't stupider by the minute. "Rubberband Man, Wild as the Taliban."

[HaemishM]

Rap music, or at least gangsta rap music, needs to share part of the blame. In the beginning, it wasn't about aggrandizing the thug lifestyle so much as it was about writing about the lives of the rappers involved. Their lives just happened to be filled with violence and drugs and poverty.

Once it got popular, once there was shittons of money to be made, the image was all that was important. Hell, Snoop Dogg still raps about bitches and hos and the gangsta life, but that isn't his life. He's a father, a husband (soon to be divorced), and isn't "rolling down the streets" looking to flap-blast somebody. The newer artists just take the image and run with it, and as long as they "get theirs" it don't matter what effect it has.

That said, an individual can choose to ignore the stereotypes and raise themselves beyond it. But as I said above, IT TAKES HARD WORK. And since the shining prize for the impoverished is becoming the rich people they see on TV, it's easier to imagine oneself a famous rapper than a doctor.

[Snowspinner]

What's ironic about gangsta rap and it's role in all of this is that the shitton of money to be made wasn't within the black community. It's in marketing the black community to suburban white boys. This entire self-destructive culture solidified, roughly, when "The Chronic" was a breakthrough success.

[schild]

You can blame Chronic. I NWA. But anyway, black media has been exploiting black teenagers and young adults for as long as I've been alive. From stupid ass looking giant sweaters with Looney Tunes on them, to asinine multicolored stone washed jeans. It's all about creating the new fad, and charging a shitton of money so black kids spend all their cash on it. The number of white kids who indulge in black music and don't indulge in the purchasing side of clothing/music/etc far outweigh the number of white kids buying FUBU, or whatever the latest shizzle is - which I believe is lil' Romeo's line of jackass-ware.

[Dark Vengeance]

Personally, I blame rap music and the extremists (Farrakhan, Sharpton, etc) for perpetuating the hate. While many of you may not agree with the rap music part. I truly believe it influences young black men (and women) to be fucking idiots.

I think blaming the music itself is reactionary....it fails to address the root of the problem.

Gangsta rap is the musical equivalent to the Godfather, Scarface, or the Sopranos. It's all about the dream of wealth, respect, and power.

The problem came in when the role models stopped taking any responsibility for the example they set for others. Charles Barkley missed the point about role models entirely...you don't get to choose whether you are a role model or not. If people see you as a role model, you are one.

So now you've got these role models making ridiculous amounts of money by singing, rapping, acting, playing sports, and dealing drugs....none of which require an education. Why study when the guy on the corner is pulling down $100k a year selling meth? Or when you can impress enough basketball scouts to get a $90 million dollar shoe deal and an NBA contract before you graduate from high school?

They don't see people making it the "right way", and they see the people who made it the "wrong way" living a much better lifestyle.

Bring the noise.
Cheers...........

[SirBruce]

Bill Cosby is right, but he also misses another element of the problem: Democratic advocacy of extreme multiculturalism and diversity.

By encouraging minority groups to maintain a "seperate yet equal" identity, it inevitably leads them to value things that the mainstream culture does not, which means some of those things are actually going to be negative to the national as a whole.  Now, I'm not saying everyone should be forced into a 50s whitebread nuclear family world, but come on, we don't even expect minorities to learn ENGLISH.  We teach them in their native languages, local, state, and national government communicates with them in their languages, etc. and we are too afraid to ask for them to meet even a minimum set of standards because that would be racist.

It's sickening.

Bruce

[schild]

Why study when the guy on the corner is pulling down $100k a year selling meth? Or when you can impress enough basketball scouts to get a $90 million dollar shoe deal and an NBA contract before you graduate from high school?

Because nothing in the world is worse than a stupid old person. Nothing.

Oh and I agree with Bruce, only to a more extreme extent.

Live in America? Speak English or Die.

[daveNYC]

Because the first thing that immigrants coming to America would do is learn to speak perfect english.

It's a generational thing, the parents speak their native tongue and their kids learn english.  I'm not seeing how bilingual education and multi-language government forms are related to the black community's problems of unemployment and crime.

Harlem and Chinatown have very little in common.

[Paelos]

You are correct that their kids learn english, because they learn it at public schools that teach english. When you don't even bother to make that a requirment like some schools in California are doing, then they never bother with it at all. I can understand coming to a country and not knowing the language, but I can't understand not trying to learn it. God forbid if I moved to a European nation or something that I wouldn't try to learn German or French or Italian. I don't expect to hole myself up with other English speakers and pretend the rest of the country is nuts.

[Snowspinner]

Bah. A non-English speaking class is important to the American economy. Quite frankly, we need people to flip burgers and clean houses. Having immigrants only qualified to work those jobs is not a bad thing. It means they're not competing for real and good paying jobs.

The problem is that self-improvement isn't something that generally happens in a single generation. Immigrant life sucks dick. Second and third generation immigrant life sucks less dick. By fourth generation, you've more or less got assimilation. Give or take.

The goal shouldn't be to have everybody speak American anymore than it should be to have every poor black kid go to Harvard. Those are unmanagable goals, and were they realized, all hell would break loose. American society is such that we need the lower class to function. Without being a dramatic revolutionary, the best goals you can hope for are things like "Get the black people to graduate high school, and maybe get a degree at a community college, so that their children are in enough of a state to get a degree from a state university, and then maybe their children will get a degree from a respectable place."

But that's much less satisfying than the alternatives of revolutionary gusto or hopeless dreaming.

[schild]

Ya know, it's gotten to the point where enough people in Africa, Asia, Europe and America speak english that It should just be the world language. I'm sick of these thousands of language. It's like fricking crypto to me. Some of the Languages out there make about as much sense to me as the ballots did to the geriatrics in FL.

[Snowspinner]

Ya know, it's gotten to the point where enough people in Africa, Asia, Europe and America speak english that It should just be the world language. I'm sick of these thousands of language. It's like fricking crypto to me. Some of the Languages out there make about as much sense to me as the ballots did to the geriatrics in FL.

The problem is that you're crazy enough that it's impossible to tell when you're being sarcastic.

[SirBruce]

Because the first thing that immigrants coming to America would do is learn to speak perfect english.

It's a generational thing, the parents speak their native tongue and their kids learn english.  I'm not seeing how bilingual education and multi-language government forms are related to the black community's problems of unemployment and crime.

Harlem and Chinatown have very little in common.

Because you failed to understand the issues are linked together.  Language is NOT just a generational thing.  Yes, it is true third-generations tend to speak better English and less of their grandparent's language.  That's not the point.  The point is that regardless of generation, they are ENCOURAGED by the left to maintain their own language and culture within the USA and CODDLED by the government to facilitate that, through multilingual education and services.

This same mentality comes into play with black urban culture, only the outward manifestations are different.  The point isn't language per se; it's a mentality to values diversity to such an extent that basic pre-existing cultural norms are ignored.  In some cases, this is good for social progress; i.e. racial/religious/sexual/orientatin non-discrimination.  In other cases, it isn't, such as inhibiting language assimilation, not valuing education, blaming others for not having what you think you should have, etc.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to get serious discussion on this "culture war" issue.  The left values diversity so much that they refuse to even acknowledge that some "alternatives" should NOT be supported as valid, and the right can't talk about such issues without referencing the religious ideal of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the standard to which we should aspire.

Bruce

[Big Gulp]

Unfortunately, it's very hard to get serious discussion on this "culture war" issue.  The left values diversity so much that they refuse to even acknowledge that some "alternatives" should NOT be supported as valid, and the right can't talk about such issues without referencing the religious ideal of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the standard to which we should aspire.

That is a good point.  The left loves the notion of the "salad bowl", but in reality you cannot have a group of people voluntarily segregating themselves within a culture and not expect there to be some nasty ramifications arising from it.  People have to merge, they have to assimilate one way or another, and while remaining a distinct culture may sound good on paper, really it's just Balkanization dressed up in fruity PC-speak.

And if you want to know why Balkanization is bad, just look at the root of the word.

[daveNYC]

I think that the reason that certain cultural groups don't seem to be assimilating into American culture is due to the constant influx of new immigrants from the same ethnic group.  More new immigrants enter the community than move out of the community due to assimilation, that doesn't mean assimilation isn't happening, it just means it's harder to see.  Bilingual services allow immigrants access to the government services (like 911) that we take for granted, and bilingual education helps deal with the large percentage of immigrant children that are in some schools.

My grandmother had the Finnish beaten out of her in grade school, I don't consider trying a different teaching method to be a bad thing.

[Sky]

Ya know, it's gotten to the point where enough people in Africa, Asia, Europe and America speak english that It should just be the world language. I'm sick of these thousands of language. It's like fricking crypto to me.

This attitude, sarcastic or not, is why people bomb our buildings.

[SirBruce]

Actually, most people who bomb our buildings do so because they were taught to hate Jews, and we support Jews.

Bruce

[Snowspinner]

This is awful. I have to pick between agreeing with Sky or SirBruce. :(

/sigh

Sky is right. :(

[SirBruce]

And while we're on the subject, it completely annoys me that black people today associate Republicans with the enemy rather than Democrats.

Democrats were anti-black from 1790 - 1930.  They made a slow transition away from discrimination starting with FDR and Harry Truman, but even as late as the 1964 there were many southern democrats opposed to racial integration and equality.  Did you know that in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans?

Meanwhile, the Republicans STARTED as the anti-slavery party in 1854, and were really only see as anti-black due to their opposition to some of the integration policies from about 1930-1964.  Ever since, racism hasn't been advocated by Republicans; they just disagree on affirmative action.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, who headed the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision?  Appointed by a Republican, Eisenhower.

Meanwhile it has been the Republicans who have put forth the first black Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State (Colin Powell), National Security Advisor (Condaleeza Rice), and  Supreme Court Justice (Clarence Thomas).  Also, after the Civil War, the first black judge was a Republican, the first black full-term Senator was a Republican, etc.

The Democrats are late-comers to racial equality.  Republicans were there first, and yeah, they had a sticky patch there for about 40 years, but it was a reaction to the perception that some of the Democrats were going too far, not that there shouldn't be equality.  Meanwhile, many of the Democrat leaders of the day were also opposed to civil rights, like Al Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd.

Bruce

[schild]

Ya know, it's gotten to the point where enough people in Africa, Asia, Europe and America speak english that It should just be the world language. I'm sick of these thousands of language. It's like fricking crypto to me.

This attitude, sarcastic or not, is why people bomb our buildings.

First and last time I'll probably ever do this, based solely on principal. But -

Bruce is right.

It's not just about Jews, though. It's about everything America stands for, particularly religious freedom and our abuse of capitalism and pseudo-imperialism (i.e. Israel). It has nothing to do with the fact I fucking hate having to talk slowly to order a carnitas fajita at Chipotle. This isn't to say I don't respect people of all creeds, I do, but I also expect them to speak my native togue when in my native country. Just like the French do when I'm in Paris. It's not my fault our forefathers didn't see it fit to declare a national language. And it's the oversensitivity of people who don't want to be pinned racist that other languages are being offered in elementary schools. Immersion is how people learn languages, not being babied along because we take special care to provide education in their native tongue when they're six years old.

I do have a bottle of hate for the city of Paris, but that's an entirely different story.

[SirBruce]

I agree that there's more in their motives than JUST the Israeli issue.  But support for Israel is pretty much at the root of it... without that, a lot of the other anti-American issues could be forgiven or minimalized, and in any case, would have been far less likely to motivate them to violence.  I can certainly understand why some people who've analyzed the issue think the US should simply abandon support of Israel; I don't agree with that solution but the cost of not doing so is quite high.  Of course, now that beliefs are institutionalized, it would not solve the problem if tomorrow Israel ceased to exist.

Bruce

[Sky]

Actually, most people who bomb our buildings do so because they were taught to hate Jews, and we support Jews.

I didn't say our arrogance was the only reason some folks hate us. But it's a big one. We think we should be running the world. We think we are the best country in the world. If you aren't living here, I can see how that would get annoying.

It's more than the Jews, though. Jihad is called against infidels, which includes some mulsims, as well.

House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger is a disturbing book, but I think everyone should read it (also the Bob Woodward books). It's like the new Moore movie without the sensationalism, just the facts (Moore contributes a lot of his movie to the book).

[Big Gulp]

We think we should be running the world. We think we are the best country in the world. If you aren't living here, I can see how that would get annoying.

Well, "running the world" is basically our de facto role now.  There has to be a nation that can ensure the smooth flow of the global economy, and can put out fires around the world.  After WWII that task fell to us with the dissolution of the British Empire.  We're really only continuing their legacy (they kept the global economy moving, protected the sea lanes, etc), and particularly now that the Soviets are history, there's simply nobody left to perform that role.  Europe could theoretically do it, but frankly they're too in love with socialism and easy living to effectively exert global power.  They'd rather take the course of hectoring us every chance they get to fall in line with their way of thinking.  We've basically been keeping them on a form of national welfare by not forcing them to foot their own defense bills for the past 50 years.  

We're living in a period of Pax Americana, much like Pax Britannia and Pax Romana.  Trust me, the west would be well advised to suck it up and make the best of things, because whomever else eventually takes up the role of global guardian is going to be a hell of lot less lenient than we've been.  Even worse is a world where there is no global power to ensure the peace, that's a Hobbesian nightmare.

[Snowspinner]

I'm sorry, Big Gulp, did you just basically say we needed to http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/Kipling.html">take up the White Man's burden?