is Bill Cosby Blaming the Victim ?
Now Playing: is Bill Cosby Blaming the Victim ?
Topic: Essay
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University of Massachussets/Boston
Colleges of Liberal Arts, Science and Math, and Nursing and Health Sciences
Writing Proficiency Portfolios are due in the Writing Proficiency Office,
Campus Center 2/2100 on January 4, 2010 no later than 4:00 P.M.
Portfolio Reading Set: Is Bill Cosby Blaming the Victim?
Question:
Recently Bill Cosby, who is an actor and comedian, got serious at a gala commemorating the
50th anniversary of Brown v. Board in Washington, DC. Cosby, who holds a doctorate, revealed his
serious side as a social activist in his speech. Cosby made a series of critical comments about some of
the poor in African†American communities. Cosby’s speech created a controversy; in your essay,
briefly summarize the controversy and take a position on the debate: is Bill Cosby’s criticism justified
or, as William Ryan might ask, is he blaming the victim? Support your position by analyzing the
arguments in the reading set.
Readings: Is Bill Cosby Blaming the Victim?
1. Cosby, Bill. “50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education
Supreme Court Decision. http://www.eightcitiesmap.com/transcriptjx.htm 3/20/2006
2. West, Cornel. Interview with Tavis Smiley. Tavis Smiley. NPR. Los Angeles. 26 May 2004.
3. Cosby, Bill. Interview with Lynn Neary. Talk of the Nation. NPR. Washington. 7 July 2004.
4. Dyson, Michael Eric. Interview with Neal Conan. Talk of the Nation. NPR. Washington. 3 May 2005.
5. Ryan, William. “Blaming the Victim.” Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated
Study. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. 519†529.
6. McGruder, Aaron. Public Enemy #2: An All†New Boondocks Collection. Boondocks: Three Rivers
Press, 2005.
All articles are reprinted by permission of the rights holder; no further copy may be made without their permission.
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• “50th Anniversary commemoration of the Brown vs. Topeka Board of
Education Supreme Court Decision,” by Bill Cosby
[Transcript kindly provided by Dr. Bill Cosby’s public relations representatives. (Editor’s note: Please understand that
there may be some minor typographical inaccuracies resulting from audio to text software resolution issues.)]
Ladies and gentlemen, I really have to ask you to seriously consider what you’ve heard, and now this is
the end of the evening so to speak. I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was losing badly,
“David, listen to me. It’s not what’s he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing.” (laughter)
Ladies and gentlemen, these people set, they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today,
ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have fifty percent drop out. In our own
neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a
husband. (clapping) No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the
father of the unmarried child. (clapping)
Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are [not*] holding their
end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. (clapping) In the old
days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye (laughing). And before your mother
got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and
where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.
I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were
you when he was two? (clapping) Where were you when he was twelve? (clapping) Where were you when he
was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? (clapping) And where is his father, and why
don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?
The church is only open on Sunday. And you can’t keep asking Jesus to ask doing things for you
(clapping). You can’t keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you (clapping and laughing). God was
there when they won all those cases. 50 in a row. That’s where God was because these people were doing
something. And God said, “I’m going to find a way.” I wasn’t there when God said it†I’m making this up
(laughter). But it sounds like what God would do. (laughter)
We cannot blame white people. White people, (clapping) white people don’t live over there. They
close up the shop early. The Korean ones still don’t know us as well ... they stay open 24 hours. (laughter)
I’m looking and I see a man named Kenneth dark. He and his wife Mamie.. .Kenneth’s still alive. I have
to apologize to him for these people because Kenneth said it straight. He said you have to strengthen
yourselves... and we’ve got to have that black doll. And everybody said it. Julian Bond said it. Dick Gregory said
it. All these lawyers said it. And you wouldn’t know that anybody had done a damned thing.
50 percent drop†out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six
different men. Under what excuse, I want somebody to love me, and as soon as you have it, you forget to
parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows
nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. (clapping) All this child knows is “gimme,
gimme, gimme.” These people want to buy the friendship of a child†and the child couldn’t care less. Those of
us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents.
(clapping and laughter) And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers,
for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics. (clapping)
Kenneth Dark, somewhere in his home in upstate New York ... just looking ahead. Thank God, he
doesn’t know what’s going on, thank God. But these people, the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard.
Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca
Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are
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outraged, “The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?
(laughter and clapping) I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. (laughter) And I looked at it
and I had no money. And something called parenting said if get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your
mother. Not you’re going to get your butt kicked. No. You’re going to embarrass your mother. You’re going to
embarrass your family.
If knock that girl up, you’re going to have to run away because it’s going to be too embarrassing for
your family. In the old days, a girl getting pregnant had to go down South, and then her mother would go down
to get her. But the mother had the baby. I said the mother had the baby. The girl didn’t have a baby. The
mother had the baby in two weeks. (laughter) We are not parenting. Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these
people, they are showing you what’s wrong. People putting their clothes on backwards, †isn’t that a sign of
something going on wrong? (laughter)
Are you not paying attention, people with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t
that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up (laughter and clapping). Isn’t it a sign
of something when she’s got her dress all the way up to the crack ... and got all kinds of needles and things
going through her body. What part of Africa did this come from? (laughter) We are not Africans. Those people
are not Africans, they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua,
Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail. (When we give these kinds names to our children, we
give them the strength and inspiration in the meaning of those names. What’s the point of giving them strong
names if there is not parenting and values backing it up.)
Brown vs. the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We’ve got to take the
neighborhood back (clapping). We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps.
It’s right around the comer. (laughter) It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to
speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. “Why you ain’t, where you is, go, ra. I don’t know
who these people are. And, I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. (laughter) Then I heard the father
talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the comer and you got into the house and
switched to English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t
land a plane with “why you ain’t ...” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.
There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving
ahead on this. Well, they know they’re not, they’re just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations
sitting in the projects when you’re just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.
Now look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop
out. Look, we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There’s no
English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry. Oh God, they’re angry and they have pistols and
they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder
somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza? And then run to the poor cousin’s house. They sit there and the cousin
says “what are you doing here?” “I just killed somebody, man.” “What?” “I just killed somebody, I’ve got to
stay here.” “No, you don’t.” “Well, give me some money, I’ll go ...” “Where are you going?” “North Carolina.”
Everybody wanted to go to North Carolina. But the police know where you’re going because your cousin has a
record.
Five or six different children, same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever, pretty soon
you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who this is.
It might be your grandmother, (laughter) I’m telling you, they’re young enough. Hey, you have a baby when
you’re twelve. Your baby turns thirteen and has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother. By the time
you’re twelve, you could have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I’m just
predicting.
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I’m saying Brown vs. Board of Education. We’ve got to hit the streets, ladies and gentlemen. I’m
winding up, now, no more applause. I’m saying, look at the Black Muslims. There are Black Muslims standing
on the street comers and they say so forth and so on, and we’re laughing at them because they have bean†pies
[hats] and all that, but you don’t read “Black Muslim gunned down while chastising drug dealer.” You don’t
read that. They don’t shoot down Black Muslims. You understand me. Muslims tell you to get out of the
neighborhood. When you want to clear your neighborhood out, first thing you do is go get the Black Muslims,
bean pies and all. (laughter) And your neighborhood is then clear. The police can’t do it.
I’m telling you Christians, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you hit the streets? Why can’t you clean it
out yourselves? It’s our time now, ladies and gentlemen. It is our time. (clapping) And I’ve got good news for
you.
It’s not about money. It’s about you doing something ordinarily that we do—get in somebody else’s
business. It’s time for you to not accept the language that these people are speaking, which will take them
nowhere. What the hell good is Brown V. Board of Education if nobody wants it?
What is it with young girls getting after some girl who wants to still remain a virgin. Who are these sick
black people and where did they come from and why haven’t they been parented to shut up? To go up to girls
and try to get a club where “you are nobody.” This is a sickness ladies and gentlemen and we are not paying
attention to these children. These are children. They don’t know anything. They don’t have anything. They’re
homeless people. All they know how to do is beg. And you give it to them, trying to win their friendship. And
what are they good for? And then they stand there in an orange suit and you drop to your knees, “(crying
sound) He didn’t do anything, he didn’t do anything.” Yes, he did do it. And, you need to have an orange suit
on too (laughter, clapping).
So, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for the award (big laughter) and giving me an
opportunity to speak because, I mean, this is the future, and all of these people who lined up and done,
they’ve got to be wondering what the hell happened. Brown V. Board of Education, these people who marched
and were hit in the face with rocks and punched in the face to get an education and we got these
knuckleheads walking around who don’t want to learn English (clapping) I know that you all know it. I just want
to get you as angry that you ought to be. When you walk around the neighborhood and you see this stuff, that
stuffs not funny. These people are not funny anymore. And that’s not brother. And that’s not my sister.
They’re faking and they’re dragging me way down because the state, the city and all these people have to pick
up the tab on them because they don’t want to accept that they have to study to get an education.
We have to begin to build in the neighborhood, have restaurants, have cleaners, have pharmacies,
have real estate, have medical buildings instead of trying to rob them all. And so, ladies and gentlemen, please,
Dorothy Height, where ever she’s sitting, she didn’t do all that stuff so that she could hear somebody say “I
can’t stand algebra, I can’t stand, and “what you is.” It’s horrible.
Basketball players, multimillionaires can’t write a paragraph. Football players, multimillionaires, can’t
read. Yes. Multimillionaires. Well, Brown vs. Board of Education, where are we today? It’s there. They paved
the way. What did we do with it. The white man, he’s laughing, got to be laughing. 50 percent drop out, rest of
them in prison.
You got to tell me that if there was parenting, help me, if there was parenting, he wouldn’t have
picked up the Coca Cola bottle and walked out with it to get shot in the back of the head. He wouldn’t have.
Not if he loved his parents. And not if they were parenting! Not if the father would come home. Not if the boy
hadn’t dropped the sperm cell inside of the girl and the girl had said, “No, you have to come back here and be
the father of this child.” Not, “I don’t have to.”
Therefore, you have the pile up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature raised by no one. Give
them presents. You’re raising pimps. That’s what a pimp is. A pimp will act nasty to you so you have to go out
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and get them something. And then you bring it back and maybe he or she hugs you. And that’s why pimp is so
famous. They’ve got a drink called the “Pimp†something.” You all wonder what that’s about, don’t you? Well,
you’re probably going to let Jesus figure it out for you (laughter). Well, I’ve got something to tell you about
Jesus. When you go to the church, look at the stained glass things of Jesus. Look at them. Is Jesus smiling? Not
in one picture. So, tell your friends. Let’s try to do something. Let’s try to make Jesus smile. Let’s start
parenting. Thank you, thank you (clapping, cheers)
• Cornel West comments on Bill Cosby controversy on National Public Radio:
Tavis Smiley (May 26, 2004)
TAVIS SMILEY, (host): From NPR in Los Angeles, I’m Tavis Smiley.
Every now and again, a major celebrity speaks frankly enough on some aspect of American society to
kick up a firestorm of criticism and heated discussion. Well, it’s happened again. Recently, comedian Bill Cosby
got serious at a gala commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board in Washington, DC. Dr. Cosby
made a series of critical comments about some of the poor in African†American communities. He cited the
epidemic of out†of†wedlock births and said people used to be ashamed. Nowadays a woman has eight children
with eight different husbands or men, or whatever you call them now. He also commented on Africanâ€
American literacy and prison rates. Our regular commentator Cornel West joins us now to comment on Mr.
Cosby’s comments.
Cornel West, how you doing, man?
CORNEL WEST (NPR Commentator): Always a blessing, my brother.
SMILEY: This story has been fascinating to follow, because it’s one of those stories, as we say in the
media, that has legs. This story has not died. It happened over a week ago and it’s still being talked about. In
fact, Bill Cosby is on our PBS TV show tonight to address this for the first time on television. What do you
make, though, of what Dr. Cosby had to say?
WEST: Now I think it’s very important, though, Tavis, that we put it into context of who Bill Cosby is,
what he’s done. He’s got a track record of over 45 years supporting black people, black dignity. He gives money
behind the scenes and I actually have been in contexts in which he’s done free shows for community centers
and working with individual families. And so it’s very important to keep in mind the ways in which he
contributes in both telling the truth as a spokesperson and artist and also contributes money, resources, and
so when I heard this, I said what he’s doing is acknowledging the humanity of black people.
Each one of us as human beings have the freedom to make certain kind of choices. There might be
limited options, but we’re free not to hate, we’re free to be decent, and this is true across the board. Now of
course it’s true we want to talk about personal responsibility in regard to George Bush, in regard to corporate
elites, but we also want to talk about personal responsibility in regard to our cousins.
SMILEY: Why do you think his comments struck such a nerve? Why such a stir in black America?
WEST: Well, I think because, one, there is a reluctance that, you know, black people don’t want to air
dirty laundry. We don’t want to speak certain painful truths to each other. As long as we do it out of love, we
need to do it, and there’s no doubt in my mind when you look at who Cosby is, where he comes from in
Philadelphia, that he’s speaking out of great compassion and trying to get folk to get on the right track. He’s
trying to speak honestly and freely and lovingly, and I think that’s a very positive thing.
SMILEY: Back to the notion that you raised, Dr. West, of people being concerned inside of black
America that this is an airing publicly of dirty laundry, what about the notion that Mr. Cosby’s comments have
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been used and will, in fact, be used for some time to come now, by the right as ammunition against the black
poor?
WEST: We must be able to speak truths to ourselves lovingly, freely, critically, and recognize it right
when we use it. We know Bill Cosby is not on the right wing, he’s not Clarence Thomas. We know him to be
someone who over 50 years and 40 years in his artistic career to be in deep solidarity with the black people’s
struggle and people’s struggle as a whole, so that this issue of how things are used is always something that I
think we have to bear some suspicions of, because I think the right wing can use anything. They use Jesus, they
use anybody, anything.
SMILEY: You think that Mr. Cosby’s comments, for some, come across as††as a matter of fact, let me
just quote one of our commentators. I saw a piece in The New York Times about this story, and one of our
regular commentators you and I know both well, Michael Eric Dyson, referred to Dr. Cosby’s comments as
“classist, elitist and rooted in generational warfare.”
WEST: Yeah. Well, you know, I love Brother Dyson very deeply. Dyson is usually correct about 95
percent of the time, but I’d have to look at what the context was of what he said, but if that’s all he said, then I
don’t think he’s right.
SMILEY: Right.
WEST: I disagree with my dear brother, lovingly. I think that it is true that those of us of the older
generation do recognize that there has been a shift on the younger generation because they’re up against so
much. They have fewer relations with fathers, with loving significant others and so forth, and so that
generational shift is a real one. It’s the distance between Curtis Mayfield and whoever they got to offer. Ain’t
no Curtis Mayfield among the younger generation, you know what I mean? So that we recognize that a shift is
taking place, but we also recognize the heroic action of the younger generation. I think Bill Cosby would be the
first one to say that.
But I think the important thing is, it’s not simply defending Bill Cosby, it’s defending the truth and the
way in which he has been willing to speak the truth for a long time, and when he speaks the truth, it’s the truth
about poor black people, about the black middle class, it’s the truth about American elite, it’s the truth about
American imperialism. The truth is bigger than all of us.
SMILEY: Of course, Mike Dyson will have his say tomorrow on this program in his commentary about
what he meant by what he said in The New York Times with regard to Dr. Cosby’s comments. Let me close our
conversation, Cornel West, by asking you whether or not it is just difficult, if not impossible, for anyone of the
stature in black America of Bill Cosby to say anything critical about African†American people in a public space?
WEST: If you love black people, you’re going to tell black people the truth, and the truth sometimes is
going to be critical.
SMILEY: I close our conversation, Dr. West, quoting a great philosopher who once said to me, “Tavis,
you can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people, and you can’t save the people if you won’t serve the
people.” That said to me by one Cornel West. You might have heard of it.
WEST: Whether or not††I think that’s both biblical as well as just truth. You know, if you love and serve,
you [sic] bearing witness. That’s all you can do in space and time before you meet your maker, brother.
SMILEY: Cornel West, professor of religion at Princeton and the author of the forthcoming Democracy
Matters, a follow†up to the best†selling Race Matters.
As always, Cornel West, a delight to talk to you, sir.
WEST: Always a pleasure. Stay strong, now, man.
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• Bill Cosby on his controversial comments to the African†American community
on National Public Radio: Talk of the Nation (July 7, 2004)
LYNN NEARY, (host): This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Lynn Neary in Washington, sitting in for Neal
Conan.
Bill Cosby is among that rarified group of artists and entertainers who transcends celebrity to become
national icons. And from that lofty pinnacle of success, Cosby has always preached about the importance of
education and the need for strong parenting. And that, says Cosby, is what he was continuing to do during two
recent appearances when remarks he made set off a firestorm of debate. In May, during a speech marking the
50th anniversary of Brown vs. The Board of Education, Cosby had harsh words for kids and parents in some of
the nation’s poorer neighborhoods.
NEARY: Though he’s been castigated in the media for his remarks, Bill Cosby hasn’t backed down and
even repeated some of his criticisms during a more recent appearance at a Rainbow/PUSH conference in
Chicago. Later in the show, we will meet some teachers who are dealing with the problems Mr. Cosby has
brought up. But first, Bill Cosby himself. Mr. Cosby, thanks so much for being with us today.
Mr. COSBY: Good afternoon.
NEARY: I wanted to ask you first, what motivated those remarks? What is it that you are seeing that
you feel has to be faced, needs to be confronted?
Mr. COSBY: We had a great evening, Brown vs. The Board of Education and I was there to accept the
award on behalf of Mrs. Cosby, and I looked up in the balcony and I saw the elders who were responsible for
the work done against the lawyers who wanted to win the case for the board. And I started to think that this
was a time when it wasn’t about jumping over a bar or running faster than someone or knocking someone out
or stealing bases or playing football. This was about historically black college†educated lawyers, along with
others, going after racism in the United States and knocking it over with their brains.
And so we’re talking about educated people going up against educated people on the Board of Ed.,
Topeka, Kansas, winning with their brains. And then 50 years later in Washington, DC, I’m looking at, in the
lower economic area, a 50 percent drop out of the African†American male from high school. I’m looking at 65
percent of the incarcerated African†American male illiterate. I’m looking at 70 percent of the teen†age
pregnancy is the African†American female. And I’m realizing that there’s a great deal of racism. We take that†â€
we all know that. But then again, there’s a time when we have to turn around the mirror and look at ourselves
because self†empowerment has to do with education, it has to do with knowing English, your sciences, your
math and also history, which is something that’s very, very important and should be given in the home as well
as the classroom.
NEARY: I want to ask you about that in one second. […] Here’s what I’m†the question I have, and that
is if the kids, the children you’re talking about don’t speak proper English, if they’ve forgotten the legacy of the
civil rights movement, the importance of Brown vs. The Board of Education, and if they don’t care about school
or their own education, who is to blame for that? Who do you place the blame on?
Mr. COSBY: As African†Americans, we, way, way back, which a lot of the young people like to call “back
in the day,” if we look at shotgun houses in Mississippi and mothers with candlelight getting a child to read
while ducking when they hear the sound of hoof beats, if we look at Frederick Douglass, who bartered to learn
English from the white kids who were going to school, we have always been in this underclass, underdog role,
a group of people who’ve overachieved many, many, many of us.
And certainly, one would look at the playing field, at least in a city, to understand that what is not
given to us we have to take. And the behavior that I see in many, many people, you must understand, I don’t
know how long ago it was that somewhere the idea I think started in Oakland, California, that our children, our
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children†I don’t remember white children saying it†our children said they wouldn’t live past the age of 25. This
is not a good idea.
NEARY: Now I know you’ve been very critical of the way many kids now are being parented. You’re
very critical of the parents and the role they’re playing in this. One thing I was wondering is, it seems to me
that if some of these parents may themselves have been failed by school or failed by their own parents. I
mean, how do you break the cycle when there’s a terrible cycle of ...
Mr. COSBY: OK. I believe that this is epidemic. If 55 percent of the people in your apartment building
have smallpox, well, what are you going to do? If 70 percent of the people in your building have tuberculosis,
what are you going to do? Somewhere you have to say, ‘Stop.’ Somewhere you have to say, ‘We want this
building to be cleaned out.’
NEARY: Who says stop? Who’s responsible for saying ...
Mr. COSBY: Every person there because you have people†parents who are very, very successful. I
mean, we take it for granted, I do anyway, that what I’m talking about is not all of them. If I say 55 percent or
50 percent, then it means that. It doesn’t mean every one. Therefore, in the neighborhood, there are things
that we hear. We hear that our children, the ones that study, are told that they’re acting white.
NEARY: Hmm.
Mr. COSBY: And therefore †I mean, so you say to a kid like this, ‘Have you ever bothered to ask them,
“What is acting black? What is their plan?”‘ To me, many of these people happen to be enemies of themselves
and we must stop this because the children should be guided. Now if the parents happen to be children also,
then they, too, have to be guided. But I think a great deal of it is we have to say stop somewhere. Rallies have
to be held within the neighborhood. Our people can do this but they have to start. […]
• Michael Eric Dyson discusses his new book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black
Middle Class Lost Its Mind? On National Public Radio: Talk of the Nation
(May 3, 2005)
NEAL CONAN, (host): This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan in Washington. Last May, Bill Cosby
hurled an explosive idea into the African†American community. Whether it was a lightning bolt or a hand
grenade depends on who you ask. The scene was a Washington, DC, gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of
the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education. Before an audience of accomplished civil
rights leaders, Cosby delivered a scathing attack on the subculture of black poverty, in which he blamed black
parents for the poor performance of their children.
A year later, people are still talking, still debating who bears responsibility for problems in black
communities. Many applaud Cosby for having the courage to tell it like it is. He’s also been derided as a traitor
to his own people. Last July, Bill Cosby appeared on this program and explained what was going through his
head on that evening, when the focus was on the fight to end desegregation.
(Soundbite of previous program): Dr. WILLIAM H. COSBY: And so we’re talking about educated people
going up against educated people on the Board of Ed, Topeka, Kansas, winning with their brains. And then, 50
years later, in Washington, DC, I’m looking at, in the lower economic area, a 50 percent dropout of the Africanâ€
American male from high school. I’m looking at 65 percent of the incarcerated African†American male
illiterate. I’m looking at 70 percent of teen†age pregnancy†the African†American female. And I’m realizing that
there’s a great deal of racism. We take that†we all know that. But then again, there’s a time when we have to
turn around the mirror and look at ourselves.
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CONAN: Now a new book challenges Cosby’s conclusions. It’s called Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the
Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Michael Eric Dyson is the author, […] professor of humanities at the
University of Pennsylvania. He joins us from our bureau in New York City. Nice to have you back on the
program.
Professor MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: Always good to be here, Brother Neal.
CONAN: Let’s start with the title of your book, which†you really see this as evidence of a class divide in
the black community: Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
Prof. DYSON: Absolutely. I think that Bill Cosby is a lens unto a larger landscape of social and political
struggle and arguments in black communities that have been taking place for more than a century. I see his
divisive comments as a reflection of the bitter, seething politics of disdain for poor people among the more
monied and the more privileged of black people. And so the poor folk are subject to vicious forms of assault by
people with power, with money, with visibility and the like. It is not to suggest that poor people cannot be
criticized. I have no romantic investment in black poor people, having been one myself. The point is, to what
degree do we use our bully pulpits to assault the vicious contexts of white supremacy, economic inequality,
social injustice, black bourgeois capitulation and seduction by their own privilege, their own material wealth,
vs. the best of our black leaders and intellectuals who have always remembered it’s a ‘both†and’?
Even as you speak about personal responsibility, you link that personal responsibility to its possibility
of realization in a culture that either enables you to do better or puts its foot on your neck and keeps you from
rising.
CONAN: Now this divide, you point out, is nothing new. It goes back to, well, the days right after
slavery, for one thing.
Prof. DYSON: No doubt. Absolutely. You had a notion of racial uplift, where the privileged, elite, what I
call the Afristocracy, were being, you know, surveilled by the white people of the time. And the white folk of
the time were putting pressure on the black elite, both directly and indirectly. The direct pressure was: ‘Prove
to us that you are a people worthy of freedom.’ How hypocritical that was, since they had been enslaved for
no other reason than their color. The more implicit one and explicit one, however, was about the relationship
to poor people. The poor among you are somehow bringing the race down. The black middle class felt that ‘If
we could just bring better behavior patterns to these poor black folk, the white folk would treat us better and
we could prove to them that we were worthy of receiving the freedom that every other white person expects
at birth.’
So there’s a tremendous tension politically going on there that leads the black people who are in upper
echelons and elite of African†American culture to somehow point out the faults and failures of the poor. And
what I think Cosby did was nothing more than the 21st update of that ancient tradition.
CONAN: And some of the issues, you point out, are exactly the same: how people dress, how people
talk, how people behave.
Prof. DYSON: Exactly. How people dress†black people walking down the street shooting the agate, as
they said†a black style of promenading down the avenue†the more black people dress well, the more white
people resented them. The flashy styles of the working class and the working poor were an especial offense to
the more elite and elegant styles that black people favored among their own echelons. So the point is that the
way they dress was problematic, and then the way they spoke. Did they speak the king’s English to the queen’s
taste, or are they speaking some kind of black linguistic derivation, some kind of, you know, terrible form of
black discourse that does not comport well in the broader, whiter society?
And finally, you know, how they talk and how they speak to one another and how they name their
own children, I think, was a big problem a hundred years ago, certainly 75 years ago, and it’s a huge problem
now.
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CONAN: Yeah. Well, that’s what Cosby said in part of his remarks†the names: Shaniqua, Taniqua,
Mohammed, he said.
Prof. DYSON: Well, yes. And he said, ‘Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all that crap, and they’re
all in jail.’ Lest you believe that Mr. Cosby was engaging in etymological derivation of Annichi (ph) and Kai (ph),
he was trying to, as the young people say, hate. He was assaulting people for how they named their children,
what names they gave them. And I think that’s none of my business. If your mother wants to name you
Shaniqua, Taliqua or Mohammed, that’s her business. The question is, do we perpetuate a legacy of bigotry
that disallows us to appreciate the people behind the names? Nobody’s going to ask Oprah Winfrey†and trust
me, Oprah ain’t no regular name. Nobody’s going to ask Shaquille O’Neal; Shaquille ain’t no regular name.
Nobody’s going to demand Condoleezza†’Excuse me, I ain’t met another person named Condoleezza.’ It’s a
distinct and unique name. Where is it derived from? Her mother took it from her love of music. It was a
musical signature. That’s like naming your kid Basso Profundo. I ain’t mad at what you name your kid; it’s what
you answer to and how you treat people.
So we learn to love Condoleezza and Oprah and Shaquille, and as a result of that, we begin to accept
the people behind the names. The bigotry of assuming that poor people should change their names, as
opposed to challenging the society that assigns bigotry to them, is, I think, misled and ill†informed.
CONAN: Well, one of the things Mr. Cosby was arguing, though, is if you are going to challenge that
society, it’s fine to speak the language that you do among your group, but if you’re going to challenge the
dominant society, you’d better be able to speak its language.
Prof. DYSON: Well, I have no problem with that, but let me complexify it, to create a word. The reality
is that I saw, maybe within the last year, white, elderly people on TV, with a commercial: ‘Where you at?’ ‘Oh,
I’m just chillin’ here with my peeps.’ Now white commercial culture has reaped extraordinary benefit from the
reproduction of these black symptoms of language, their black style, the black vernacular. So it’s all right to be
appropriated for commercial culture for the purposes of corporate America, but the very black people who
generate the language are getting dissed.
And let me tell you something: Mr. Cosby has been an ebonicus laureate of black America: ‘I don’t
know how to talk like these people.’ Oh, I disagree. You speak Ebonics in significant fashion: ‘Da corner,’ not
‘the corner.’ Talking about ‘I don’t be no,’ ‘the Jell†O and the puddin’ pie.’ You’re speaking Ebonics. Fat Albert,
Dumb Donald, Weird Harold: ‘I’mba goin’ba beba backba’††that is linguistic creativity that derives from the
black language styles and patterns of our culture.
Now, of course, we want to be able to cold switch, as the sociologists say. When you’re among your
peeps, ‘Whassup? How ya doin’?’ When you’re in corporate America, when you want to speak the king’s
English to the queen’s taste, do so. But the point is, don’t believe that doing one makes you better than doing
the other. It means that you understand that certain standards of appropriate language are acceptable and,
therefore, desirable in one situation vs. another. But don’t get it twisted, as the young people say. Millions of
dollars†indeed, billions of dollars†have been made off of WB network, UPN and hip†hop culture, where the
black language styles that Mr. Cosby has cast aspersion against have created an industry that has been
extraordinarily successful and certainly deeply influential. […]
I think what’s interesting is that, of course, we have personal responsibility, but personal responsibility
is but one slice of the pie of responsibility. What about moral responsibility? What more about social
responsibility? Personal responsibility is key. When you go to any church on any Sunday, any temple, any
mosque, they are repeating what Cosby said, hopefully in more balanced and judicious fashion.
But I am an ordained Baptist minister myself. I know that Sunday in and Sunday out, black folk are
morally remonstrating against the terrible, diseased, pathological practices that we perpetuate. We call
ourselves to accountability for them. We say that they are wrong. We say, ‘Stop doing it.’ We speak out against
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it. But at the same time, we judge those characteristics in relationship to a larger culture, when at the same
time it’s being hypocritical, because if the culture only jumps on black people for some of the same stuff that
goes on in white culture, but they only point it out when it goes among black people†when you talk about
licentiousness, my God, Paris Hilton has a porn tape out and her ratings are shooting through the ceiling. She is
a very rich woman who comes from tremendous money, and yet she exhibits some of the same characteristics
that Mr. Cosby attaches to poor people.
Now let’s be honest. Vulnerable, poor people are more subject to their own vices; that is that they
will††their vices will count more negatively against them than rich people, because they don’t have the money
to cushion them. We can all acknowledge that. But let’s not pretend that there’s a moral superiority to rich
people vs. those who are poor.
[…] But I think that my own response has not been ‘Oh, it’s the white man, oh, it’s the white man, oh,
it’s the white man.’ Because the best of black leadership has always had a twin focus. On the one hand, from
Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey, across ideological spectra, from Dorothy Height
on one side and Mary McLeod Bethune to more conservative leaders†I’ve mentioned Mr. Booker T.
Washington and others†the reality is that African†American leadership has always understood that you must
emphasize personal behavior and responsibility while at the same time speaking about social injustice and
structural barriers.
The privilege that you have to call a radio station today in the freedom of your home in Detroit, which
is my hometown, from where I hail, and be able to engage in a conversation in a multicultural America is the
product of people who struggled against racist barriers. So the very privilege to lament the persistence of a
rhetoric against white supremacy has benefited you, has been made possible, by the very folk that you now
call into question. That’s beautiful, but understand that paradox.
Number two, I’m not trying to suggest that we got to blame the white†it’s not either blame the white
man or, on the other hand, talk about what black folk themselves ought to do. Because you said already you’re
tired of the marching, you’re tired of the suing and you’re tired of the ‘Pick yourself up by the bootstrap.’ The
reality is that, when you speak about a poor person†let’s give you one example. If a mother is working two
jobs, she doesn’t have flex time to be able to go pay attention to her kid at the PTA as much as she wants, or,
when that child is sick, to be able to address that child, because they are part of what we now know as the
working poor: people who work 40 and 50 hours a week and yet can barely, if ever, make it above the poverty
level.
So the ability to say, ‘Well, I don’t want to just either blame the white man or talk about personal
responsibility’ misses that mother. That mother is caught in a punishing network of exportation of jobs, of
downsizing, of outsourcing, of the fleeing of capital from our post†industrial urban centers, and, at the same
time, the suspicion and bigotry of those who are different. So it’s not a straw†man argument about the white
man; that’s ridiculous. That’s old school. What is new school, the newfangled racism, appears when if your
name is Shaniqua you can’t even get called in for a job interview.
So what I’m trying to lay out here is the way in which we need people of responsible leadership†yes,
like myself; yes, like Mr. Cosby†to come up with much more enlightened, insightful analyses of the problems
to begin with, and then hold the correct quarters of the culture responsible, both within black America, but
especially outside. I’m not yet willing to give up on making the larger society responsible.
Let me end by saying this: If Martin Luther King Jr. had approached it the way you suggest†‘Well, how
far are white folk gonna go?’ †he would have never marched in the street. You would have never had a voting
right in the South. We would have never had the Civil Rights Act passed and, subsequently, we would never
have had the Fair Housing Act passed. If Martin Luther King Jr. had surrendered his responsibility by saying,
‘White resistance is so huge that we will never be able to secure black freedom,’ we would have never had the
privileges we have now. If you want freedom, it’s going to cost you. It’s going to cost you intellectually, it’s
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going to cost you spiritually, it’s going to cost you emotionally and it’s going to cost your sideline, spectatorial
ability. […]. You can’t just indict those who lead by example and who are obviously doing so. You must take
responsibility in your community, in your church, in your neighborhood, and, daresay, in your family, and make
sure that things are different than what they have been in the past.
CONAN: You’re a preacher in your spare time? It’s hard to believe.
(Soundbite of laughter), CONAN: What about […] that what’s different now […] is that white people are
listening. You write, ‘Perhaps the most damaging consequence of Cosby’s war on the poor is that they’re left
less defended and much more vulnerable to rebuff, even by folk††policy analysts, public policy†makers,
politicians††who might be sitting on the fence wondering what to do about the poor and who now get a huge
cue from Cosby that it’s just fine to leave them to sink or swim for themselves.’
Prof. DYSON: Yes.
CONAN: Part of your concern seems to be that, yes, white people were listening.
Prof. DYSON: Exactly right. And they’re listening to a conversation that they’re not really hip to. You
know, when you look at your favorite soap†maybe you’re looking at “Desperate Housewives”; maybe you like
“24” †and you’re sitting there and your friend comes over who doesn’t†you know, is not attuned to it, and
you’re trying to explain to them what Jack did; ‘Who’s Jack?’ You’re trying to tell them what happened. You’ve
got to break down the characters. If they make a moral judgment based upon that one scene, they don’t know
the whole story. And I’m telling you, many white folk, bless their hearts, know the whole story, but many of
them don’t. They’re not familiar with the major characters. They don’t know the dramatis personae who have
populated the great drama and struggle for black justice.
So now they get in on a conversation that’s been going on for a long time among black folk, who are
speaking shorthand, and they don’t quite get it. So now public policy†makers who hear Mr. Cosby assaulting
the poor and saying that they are responsible begin to change their mind. They say, ‘Well, we thought we had
to help them because we had to indict our own social practices for their failure to be able to assist these
people. Now, as Mr. Cosby is saying, they gotta do it themselves. So maybe we shouldn’t put this extra money
into this program. Maybe we should cut Head Start. Maybe we shouldn’t support the educational institutions
and after†care programs and after†school programs.’
And I’m telling you, that’s deleterious and pernicious. And let me give you one example. I was reading
the paper down in Atlanta; the folk down there said, ‘Look, we were so inspired by Mr. Cosby, now we’re going
to have billboards in poor communities and the ZIP codes where we know criminals are coming from, not to
reach out to them to say, “Let’s have better education,” not to reach out to them to suggest that we should
intervene earlier to prevent them from going to prison, but to put up billboards to warn them: “Many criminals
come from your ZIP code, and if you’re not careful, we’re going to put you in jail, too.”‘ That’s a destructive
consequence on a public policy as a direct result of what Mr. Cosby said.
[…] Mr. Cosby was especially outraged by, let’s call him, Junior or Pooky or Taliq, you know, the guy
who’s out there who stole some pound cake, $5 or a Coca†Cola. And he said, ‘We get mad when the police
shoot him, and why was he stealing the pound cake in the first place?’
Well, let me remember, Mr. Cosby went to court with Martha Stewart. Hmm. He didn’t come out of
that courtroom and you say, ‘You know what? White billionaires are going to ruin the world because despite
their enormous wealth, their greed leads them to try to lie about a transaction over $220,000. Now that’s
irresponsible, and that’s immoral. And according to the government, it was illegal.’
Now we know Martha Stewart got railroaded because she’s a woman, ‘cause guys play the ...
(unintelligible) every day and the numbers every day, and they do this every day. But here’s my point: If you’re
mad at irresponsibility, you’ll be mad at irresponsibility wherever you see it manifest, whether it’s the rich or
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the poor. To focus on the poor is to portray a class anxiety that is historically rooted in black communities
about, ‘How will these white people look at us?’
What did Cosby say in his speech? (Imitating Cosby) ‘The white man, he’s got to be laughing. He’s
laughing at us.’ (In normal voice) Now Mr. Cosby says he doesn’t care about what white people say, but
obviously his own speech betrays the reality that he feels that white folk are looking at black people, and he is
ashamed that white people will look at us and see what they see.
Now when you talk about social morality vs. individual morality†look, you’re born in a culture that
teaches you good or bad things. Dr. Kenneth Clark died recently, and we celebrate his life because he talked
about the degree to which the larger society forced the young, black people to feel inferior about themselves.
It’s not an individual responsibility; they learned from a culture. They got a cue from a broader culture that
they were not worth anything. So their individual self†esteem was shaped in a culture that gave them cues
about how they were inferior as black people. So there’s a more dynamic relationship, and we learn to value
ourselves in a culture that teaches us to do so. But if it teaches us that we’re ugly because we have dark skin,
ugly because we have broad noses, we might treat our skin like Michael Jackson and bleach ourselves in an
ocean of whiteness seeking the approval of a dominant culture. And yet we hate ourselves.
So my point finally is that when we speak about the poor people, I’m saying, when you say they spend
a lot of money on hubcaps and bling†bling as opposed to doing the right thing, the consumer culture of black
people is much more complex than the stereotype Mr. Cosby presented. I talk about in my book a study, a
systematic, empirical, anthropological, ethnographic study, that says that young black consumers are much
more complex. First of all, they’re told from the day that they’re born that they can’t just waste their money.
So they end up spending their money not only on things they want, but on things for the family because they
realize they have to have a communal ethic at the heart of their consumption, so they must share what they
get.
Now that’s against the grain and the perception of young people. I’m suggesting to you when you
break down the numbers and you look behind the story, yes, it is necessary for us to hold each other
accountable, including the poor, but if we stigmatize the poor and isolate them as if they are somehow morally
alienated from the larger American society†rich folk got as many problems as poor folk. There are rich men
who cheat on their wives†Hello?†there are rich men who stray from their families, who mistreat their
children, who do all kinds of nefarious things. Ken Lay has got a regular name, and yet he has problems with
Enron. All of these corporate thieves who have ripped off millions and billions of dollars collectively are people
who are in the upper echelons of American culture, and yet they have reprehensible moral habits. They’re
greedy. They spend money on stuff they want. They want bling†bling, too; it’s just not as evident.
So I’m saying, when we’re willing to hold everybody accountable for their relative responsibility then
we can speak about how the poor have to be pointed out. Until such time, to jump on the poor, especially for
Mr. Cosby, is to, I think, perpetuate a stereotypical vision of poor black people that is not borne out by the
facts or empirical investigation. […]
Here’s the thing that I think is very interesting. The last point […] is an index of what people now talk
about as white privilege. To have the leisure to isolate your child and to†this is a detrimental ideal in the
culture †you can then somehow cushion the impact psychologically by removing them from that context is
something that many people of color†Latinos, Native Americans, African†Americans and Asians†can’t do
because the culture is shot through with vicious images of black people, sometimes, to be certain, emanating
from black culture itself.
So now when you turn on television††the study just done the other day††black people watch more
television than anybody else. So we’re getting the images that are perpetuating a negative, vicious stereotype
and a legacy of self†hatred that we cannot somehow remove ourselves from.
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So what I’m suggesting then is that the culture in which we live has to be talked about. We have to
hold ourselves accountable for what expose our children to. But at the same time, let’s not pretend that
individual autonomy and responsibility can somehow change structural features in the culture. I don’t care
how well you behave. If the company that used to employ people in your town leaves, all your good behavior
won’t stop exportation of jobs to Mexico or Indonesia to seek markets where they can pay people criminally
low wages and yet deprive you of a standard wage. I’m telling you that good behavior will not solve the
fundamental economic inequality of school systems that spend twice the money on suburban schools as they
spend on inner†city schools. Those are the kind of realities that good behavior will never solve. I’m not arguing
against good behavior; I’m suggesting let’s not exaggerate the role of good behavior in the solution of
problems that are essentially beyond individual merit or initiative. […]
I actually addressed this is my book, generically, this notion of acting white. First of all, the notion of
acting white got introduced into the culture in 1986 with a study by two anthropologists of one single school, I
believe, in Washington, DC. Since that time, it has been replicated to the point that it has become something
like the academic version of an urban legend. There have been many longitudinal studies since then, over
space and time, that have tracked students†thousands of them, tens of thousands of them†who are black, and
it has concluded that this notion of acting white is a very specific phenomenon usually shown in schools where
white students outnumber black students, where they have access to AB courses††AP courses, advanced
courses, where black students don’t. And as a result of that, the resentment of the black student of being†â€
getting closed out is that they have been assigned†that is, those white students†a kind of privilege that they
are kept from. So this acting white phenomena is judged to be something that’s terrible because white folk get
something that black folk can never get.
The point is that anti†intellectualism is an American disease. Richard Hofstadter wrote a book in 1963
that said when we made the choice of, you know, Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson, that betrayed the
essential unintelligence, or at least the anti†intellectualism, of the American populace. We look at it now.
George Bush got major kudos in the last election and the first one for being anti†intellectual, despite going to
Harvard and Yale. His elitism was muffled by and covered by this notion that he was an everyday guy with
whom you could share a beer.
So anti†intellectualism is a problem in black communities because it’s a problem in America. The antiintellectual
attitudes that I confront as a professor are deep and pervasive in every culture. To single them out
among black people I think is especially destructive, because now it signifies everybody else is smart and wants
to go to school, but black folk aren’t. I cite in the book studies that have been done both anthropologically and
ethnographically and empirically that suggest that black students are just as interested in achievement as
white students, that black parents more than white parents discuss the day’s events with their children, that
black students derive significant recognition from being called ‘smart’ and that they want to go to college in
equally impressive numbers as their white peers.
This notion of acting white has taken on a life of its own. […] that disease of not wanting to appear to
be a chump or soft because you are intelligent and smart is, trust me, not something that can be segregated
among black people. That’s an American problem that we’ve got to confront. […]
...What a profound internalization of racism to assume because you’re born black you know black. I
have to warn students all the time just ‘cause you were born with black skin doesn’t mean you know all the
achievements of black people and all the intricacies and interstitial problems we’ve had. So my point is let’s
study our culture. And I think that it’s a beautiful thing that you have that desire. I think that what you can do,
first of all, is become educated about the diversity of black people, that we’re not a monolithic community,
that we don’t have one ideal. There are many ideals, some of which we†you know, so that different axes are
important in black community: ideology, sexual orientation, geography. Those things make a big difference as
to what you believe.
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You know, I’d rather have a progressive Jewish brother and sister on the Supreme Court than a guy like
Clarence Thomas who bears no responsibility to those black people. Now that’s me, so that I have to
interrogate and ask questions about the ethical content of your identity, not the color of your skin.
Now the final thing I think that many white brothers and sisters can do is, A, be educated about the
complexity of black culture, B, learn as much as you can about the actual ordinary lives of everyday black
people and, three, know more than one black person. I hear many white people say, ‘My black friend told me.’
Don’t rely on one black person whose your friend, even if its Michael Eric Dyson or Jesse Jackson or Al
Sharpton. Have a network of relationships where you begin to understand the internal differences and the
complex variations among black people so that you can understand. And, fourthly, have what Mr. Cosby, I
think, manifestly did not have that day: a compassionate outlook... […]
CONAN: Let me just wind up. It’s been a year now since Bill Cosby first made this speech. And, as you
point out, he’s not the first to point these things out and presumably not the last.
Prof. DYSON: Right.
CONAN: They got a lot of publicity because of who he is and where he said it. Has it been a useful
conversation?
Prof. DYSON: Well, I think it’s been useful to the degree that we’ve at least had to ask sharp questions
and interesting questions about what he said, why said it, the context in which he said it. So in that sense, yes,
it’s been an interesting conversation.
But sometimes when††you started off by saying, ‘Was it a hand grenade or a lightning rod?’ You know,
Timothy McVeigh had a point. Maybe the state is overreaching and imposing limits upon autonomous
individual citizens. But dadgum, the way you made your point was destructive and altogether evil. So I’m
saying that, yes, you might be throwing a hand grenade, Mr. Cosby, but are you really serving the ultimate
end? Because the ultimate end is not to beat up on poor people; I assume the ultimate end is to love them
compassionately into their best selves.
When I was a student at Princeton University, I went there†I didn’t go to an undergraduate Ivy League
school. My professor, Jeffrey Stout, every week marked my papers. I read books. He put red marks on my
papers. I came back the next week, I tried to get better. He was a renowned ethicist, but he pointed out to me
the things I did right every week. He says, ‘This is excellent. You did this well. However, this you didn’t do as
well. What can we do to make sure that the rest of what you wrote measures up to what you wrote here?’ So
he trained me in the virtue and the habitual recognition of excellence because I desired it, and he gave me the
sense of possibility that I could achieve it.
This is what we need: the virtue of patience and the courage to reach out compassionately to the poor.
There is a culture†wide assault and attack on poor people across the board, regardless of your color, especially
vulnerable, poor women of all races, especially black and Latino women and children. And I’m saying they
don’t need to have a foot pressed down harder on their neck; they need a hand. They need a hand up. They
need a hand††not a handout, but the ability†as Dorothy Day said, ‘I want to work toward a world in which it’s
easier for people to behave decently.’ That’s what I’m trying to do.
So in that sense, the conversation’s important because it’s older than Cosby, it’s younger than today’s
news and what we have to do is to make sure that we provide insights and context that allows people who
want to help those who are more vulnerable to reach out and do it in a productive fashion. […]
CONAN: Michael Eric Dyson, thanks very much.
Prof. DYSON: Thank you so much for having me.
CONAN: Michael Eric Dyson is the author most recently of Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle
Class Lost Its Mind? He joined us from our bureau in New York. You can read an excerpt of Michael Eric Dyson’s
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book by going to our Web site, npr.org. And also there you can hear our previous interview with Bill Cosby
about his comments to the NAACP.
• “Blaming the Victim,” by William Ryan
Consider some victims. One is the miseducated child in the slum school. He is blamed for his own
miseducation. He is said to contain within himself the causes of his inability to read and write well. The
shorthand phrase is “cultural deprivation,” which, to those in the know, conveys what they allege to be inside
information: that the poor child carries a scanty pack of cultural baggage as he enters school. He doesn’t know
about books and magazines and newspapers, they say. (No books in the home; the mother fails to subscribe to
Readers’ Digest.) They say that if he talks at all—an unlikely event since slum parents don’t talk to their
children—he certainly doesn’t talk correctly. (Lower†class dialect spoken here, or even—God forbid!—
Southern Negro.) (Ici on parle nigra.) If you can manage to get him to sit in a chair, they say, he squirms and
looks out the window. (Impulse†ridden, these kids, motoric rather than verbal.) In a word he is
“disadvantaged” and “socially deprived,” they say, and this, of course, accounts for his failure (his failure, they
say) to learn much in school.
[…] What is the culturally deprived child doing in the school? What is wrong with the victim? In
pursuing this logic, no one remembers to ask questions about the collapsing buildings and torn textbooks, the
frightened, insensitive teachers, the six additional desks in the room, the blustering, frightened principals, the
relentless segregation, the callous administrator, the irrelevant curriculum, the bigoted or cowardly members
of the school board, the insulting history book, the stingy taxpayers, the fairytale readers, or the self†serving
faculty of the local teachers’ college. We are encouraged to confine our attention to the child and to dwell on
all his alleged defects. Cultural deprivation becomes an omnibus explanation for the educational disaster area
known as the inner†city school. This is Blaming the Victim.
Pointing to the supposedly deviant Negro family as the “fundamental weakness of the Negro
community” is another way to blame the victim. Like “cultural deprivation,” “Negro family” has become a
shorthand phrase with stereotyped connotations of matriarchy, fatherlessness, and pervasive illegitimacy.
Growing up in the “crumbling” Negro family is supposed to account for most of the racial evils in America.
Insiders have the word, of course, and know that this phrase is supposed to evoke images of growing up with a
long†absent or never†present father (replaced from †time to time perhaps by a series of transient lovers) and
with bossy women ruling the roost, so that the children are irreparably damaged. This refers particularly to the
poor, bewildered male children, whose psyches are fatally wounded and who are never, alas, to learn the trick
of becoming upright, downright, forthright all†American boys. Is it any wonder the Negroes cannot achieve
equality? From such families! And, again, by focusing our attention on the Negro family as the apparent cause
of racial inequality, our eye is diverted. Racism, discrimination, segregation, and the powerlessness of the
ghetto are subtly, but thoroughly, downgraded in importance.
The generic process of Blaming the Victim is applied to almost every American problem. The miserable
health care of the poor is explained away on the grounds that the victim has poor motivation and lacks health
information. The problems of slum housing are traced to the characteristics of tenants who are labeled as
“Southern rural migrants” not yet “acculturated” to life in the big city. The “multiproblem” poor, it is claimed,
suffer the psychological effects of impoverishment, the “culture of poverty,” and the deviant value system of
the lower classes; consequently, though unwittingly, they cause their own troubles. From such a viewpoint, the
obvious fact that poverty is primarily an absence of money is easily overlooked or set aside.
The growing number of families receiving welfare are [sic] fallaciously linked together with the
increased number of illegitimate children as twin results of promiscuity and sexual abandon among members
of the lower orders. Every important social problem—crime, mental illness, civil disorder, unemployment—
has been analyzed within the framework of the victim†blaming ideology. ...
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I have been listening to the victim†blamers and pondering their thought processes for a number of
years. That process is often very subtle. Victim†blaming is cloaked in kindness and concern, and bears all the
trappings and statistical furbelows of scientism; it is obscured by a perfumed haze of humanitarianism. In
observing the process of Blaming the Victim, one tends to be confused and disoriented because those who
practice this art display a deep concern for the victims that is quite genuine. In this way, the new ideology is
very different from the open prejudice and reactionary tactics of the old days. Its adherents include
sympathetic social scientists with social consciences in good working order, and liberal politicians with a
genuine commitment to reform. They are very careful to dissociate themselves from vulgar Calvinism or crude
racism; they indignantly condemn any notions of innate wickedness or genetic defect. “The Negro is not born
inferior,” they shout apoplectically. “Force of circumstance,” they explain in reasonable tones, “has made him
inferior.” And they dismiss with self†righteous contempt any claims that the poor man in America is plainly
unworthy or shiftless or enamored of idleness. No, they say, he is “caught in the cycle of poverty.” He is
trained to be poor by his culture and his family life, endowed by his environment (perhaps by his ignorant
mother’s outdated style of toilet training) with those unfortunately unpleasant characteristics that make him
ineligible for a passport into the affluent society.
Blaming the Victim is, of course, quite different from old†fashioned conservative ideologies. The latter
simply dismissed victims as inferior, genetically defective, or morally unfit; the emphasis is on the intrinsic,
even hereditary, defect. The former shifts its emphasis to the environmental causation. The old†fashioned
conservative could hold firmly to the belief that the oppressed and the victimized were born that way—”that
way” being defective or inadequate in character or ability. The new ideology attributes defect and inadequacy
to the malignant nature of poverty, injustice, slum life, and racial difficulties. The stigma that marks the victim
and accounts for his victimization is an acquired stigma, a stigma of social, rather than genetic, origin. But the
stigma, the defect, the fatal difference—though derived in the past from environmental forces—is still located
within the victim, inside his skin. With such an elegant formulation, the humanitarian can have it both ways. He
can, all at the same time, concentrate his charitable interest on the defects of the victim, condemn the vague
social and environmental stresses that produced the defect (some time ago), and ignore the continuing effect
of victimizing social forces (right now). It is a brilliant ideology for justifying a perverse form of social action
designed to change, not society, as one might expect, but rather society’s victim.
As a result, there is a terrifying sameness in the programs that arise from this kind of analysis. In
education, we have programs of “compensatory education” to build up the skills and attitudes of the ghetto
child, rather than structural changes in the schools. In race relations, we have social engineers who think up
ways of “strengthening” the Negro family, rather than methods of eradicating racism. In health care, we
develop new programs to provide health information (to correct the supposed ignorance of the poor) and to
reach out and discover cases of untreated illness and disability (to compensate for their supposed
unwillingness to seek treatment). Meanwhile, the gross inequities of our medical care delivery systems are left
completely unchanged. As we might expect, the logical outcome of analyzing social problems in terms of the
deficiencies of the victim is the development of programs aimed at correcting those deficiencies. The formula
for action becomes extraordinarily simple: change the victim.
All of this happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational. First, identify a social problem.
Second, study those affected by the problem and discover in what ways they are different from the rest of us
as a consequence of deprivation and injustice. Third, define the differences as the cause of the social problem
itself. Finally, of course, assign a government bureaucrat to invent a humanitarian action program to correct
the differences.
Now no one in his right mind would quarrel with the assertion that social problems are present in
abundance and are readily identifiable. God knows it is true that when hundreds of thousands of poor children
drop out of school—or even graduate from school—they are barely literate. After spending some ten thousand
hours in the company of professional educators, these children appear to have learned very little. The fact of
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failure in their education is undisputed. And the racial situation in America is usually acknowledged to be a
number one item on the nation’s agenda. Despite years of marches, commissions, judicial decisions, and
endless legislative remedies, we are confronted with unchanging or even widening racial differences in
achievement. In addition, despite our assertions that Americans get the best health care in the world, the poor
stubbornly remain unhealthy. They lose more work because of illness, have more carious teeth, lose more
babies as a result of both miscarriage and infant death, and die considerably younger than the well†to†do.
The problems are there, and there in great quantities. They make us uneasy. Added together, these
disturbing signs reflect inequality and a puzzlingly high level of unalleviated distress in America totally
inconsistent with our proclaimed ideals and our enormous wealth. This thread—this rope—of inconsistency
stands out so visibly in the fabric of American life, that it is jarring to the eye. And this must be explained, to
the satisfaction of our conscience as well as our patriotism. Blaming the Victim is an ideal, almost painless,
evasion.
The second step in applying this explanation is to look sympathetically at those who “have” the
problem in question, to separate them out and define them in some way as a special group, a group that is
different from the population in general. This is a crucial and essential step in the process, for that difference is
in itself hampering and maladaptive. The Different Ones are seen as less competent, less skilled, less
knowing—in short, less human. The ancient Greeks deduced from a single characteristic, a difference in
language, that the barbarians—that is, the “babblers” who spoke a strange tongue—were wild, uncivilized,
dangerous, rapacious, uneducated, lawless, and, indeed, scarcely more than animals. Automatically labeling
strangers as savages, weird and inhuman creatures (thus explaining difference by exaggerating difference) not
infrequently justifies mistreatment, enslavement, or even extermination of the Different Ones.
Blaming the Victim depends on a very similar process of identification (carried out, to be sure, in the
most kindly, philanthropic, and intellectual manner) whereby the victim of social problems is identified as
strange, different—in other words, as a barbarian, a savage. Discovering savages, then, is an essential
component of, and prerequisite to, Blaming the Victim, and the art of Savage Discovery is a core skill that must
be acquired by all aspiring Victim Blamers. They must learn how to demonstrate that the poor, the black, the
ill, the jobless, the slum tenants, are different and strange. They must learn to conduct or interpret the
research that shows how “these people” think in different forms, act in different patterns, cling to different
values, seek different goals, and learn different truths. Which is to say that they are strangers, barbarians,
savages. This is how the distressed and disinherited are redefined in order to make it possible for us to look at
society’s problems and to attribute their causation to the individuals affected....
Blaming the Victim can take its place in a long series of American ideologies that have rationalized
cruelty and injustice. […]
In late†nineteenth†century America there flowered another ideology of injustice that seemed rational
and just to the decent, progressive person. But Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of the phenomenon of Social
Darwinism shows clearly its functional role in the preservation of the status quo. One can scarcely imagine a
better fit than the one between this ideology and the purposes and actions of the robber barons, who
descended like piranha fish on the America of this era and picked its bones clean. Their extraordinarily
unethical operations netted them not only hundreds of millions of dollars but also, perversely, the adoration of
the nation. Behavior that would be, in any more rational land (including today’s America), more than enough
to have landed them all in jail, was praised as the very model of a captain of modem industry. And the
philosophy that justified their thievery was such that John D. Rockefeller could actually stand up and preach it
in church. Listen as he speaks in, of all places, Sunday school: “The growth of a large business is merely a
survival of the fittest. ... The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring
cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in
business. It is merely the working†out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
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This was the core of the gospel, adapted analogically from Darwin’s writings on evolution. Herbert
Spencer and, later, William Graham Sumner and other beginners in the social sciences considered Darwin’s
work to be directly applicable to social processes: ultimately as a guarantee that life was progressing toward
perfection but, in the short run, as a justification for an absolutely uncontrolled laissez†faire economic system.
The central concepts of “survival of the fittest,” “natural selection,” and “gradualism” were exalted in
Rockefeller’s preaching to the status of laws of God and Nature. Not only did this ideology justify the criminal
rapacity of those who rose to the top of the industrial heap, defining them automatically as naturally superior
(this was bad enough), but at the same time it also required that those at the bottom of the heap be labeled as
patently unfit—a label based solely on their position in society. According to the law of natural selection, they
should be, in Spencer’s judgment, eliminated. “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the
world of them and make room for better.”
For a generation, Social Darwinism was the orthodox doctrine in the social sciences, such as they were
at that time. Opponents of this ideology were shut out of respectable intellectual life. The philosophy that
enabled John D. Rockefeller to justify himself self†righteously in front of a class of Sunday school children was
not the product of an academic quack or a marginal crackpot philosopher. It came directly from the lectures
and books of leading intellectual figures of the time, occupants of professorial chairs at Harvard and Yale. Such
is the power of an ideology that so neatly fits the needs of the dominant interests of society.
If one is to think about ideologies in America in 1970, one must be prepared to consider the possibility
that a body of ideas that might seem almost self†evident is, in fact, highly distorted and highly selective; one
must allow that the inclusion of a specific formulation in every freshman sociology text does not guarantee
that the particular formulation represents abstract Truth rather than group interest. It is important not to
delude ourselves into thinking that ideological monstrosities were constructed by monsters. They were not;
they are not. They are developed through a process that shows every sign of being valid scholarship, complete
with tables of numbers, copious footnotes, and scientific terminology. Ideologies are quite often academically
and socially respectable and in many instances hold positions of exclusive validity, so that disagreement is
considered unrespectable or radical and risks being labeled as irresponsible, unenlightened, or trashy.
Blaming the Victim holds such a position. It is central in the mainstream of contemporary American
social thought, and its ideas pervade our most crucial assumptions so thoroughly that they are hardly noticed.
Moreover, the fruits of this ideology appear to be fraught with altruism and humanitarianism, so it is hard to
believe that it has principally functioned to block social change. […]
We come finally to the question, Why? It is much easier to understand the process of Blaming the
Victim as a way of thinking than it is to understand the motivation for it. Why do Victim Blamers, who are.
usually good people, blame the victim? The development and application of this ideology, and of all the
mythologies associated with Savage Discovery, are readily exposed by careful analysis as hostile acts—one is
almost tempted to say acts of war—directed against the disadvantaged, the distressed, the disinherited. It is
class warfare in reverse. Yet those who are most fascinated and enchanted by this ideology tend to be
progressive, humanitarian, and, in the best sense of the word, charitable persons. They would usually define
themselves as moderates or liberals. Why do they pursue this dreadful war against the poor and the
oppressed?
Put briefly, the answer can be formulated best in psychological terms—or, at least, I, as a psychologist,
am more comfortable with such a formulation. The highly charged psychological problem confronting this
hypothetical progressive, charitable person I am talking about is that of reconciling his own self†interest with
promptings of his humanitarian impulses. This psychological process of reconciliation is not worked out in a
logical, rational, conscious way; it is a process that takes place far below the level of sharp consciousness, and
the solution—Blaming Victim—is arrived at subconsciously as a compromise that apparently satisfies his selfinterest
and his charitable concerns. Let me elaborate.
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First, the question of self†interest or, more accurately, class interest. The typical Victim Blamer is a
middle†class person who is doing reasonably well in a material way; he has a good job, a good income, a good
house, a good car. Basically, he likes the social system pretty much the way it is, at least in broad outline. He
likes the two†party political system, though he may be highly skilled in finding a thousand minor flaws in its
functioning. He heartily approves of the profit motive as the propelling engine of the economic system despite
his awareness that there are abuses of that system, negative side effects, and substantial residual inequalities.
On the other hand, he is acutely aware of poverty, racial discrimination, exploitation, and deprivation,
and, moreover, he wants to do something concrete to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the black, and the
disadvantaged. This is not an extraneous concern; it is central to his value system to insist on the worth of the
individual, the equality of men, and the importance of justice.
What is to be done, then? What intellectual position can he take, and what line of action can he follow
that will satisfy both of these important motivations? He quickly and self†consciously rejects two obvious
alternatives, which he defines “extremes.” He cannot side with an openly reactionary, repressive position that
accepts continued oppression and exploitation as the price of a privileged position for his own class. This is
incompatible with his own morality and his basic political principles. He finds the extreme conservative
position repugnant.
He is, if anything, more allergic to radicals, however, than he is to reactionaries. He rejects the
“extreme” solution of radical social change, and this makes sense since such radical social change threatens his
own well†being. A more equitable distribution of income might mean that he would have less—a smaller or
older house, with fewer yews or no rhododendrons in the yard, a less enjoyable job, or, at the least, a
somewhat smaller salary. If black children and poor children were, in fact, reasonably educated and began to
get high S.A.T. scores, they would be competing with his children for the scarce places in the entering classes
of Harvard, Columbia, Bennington, and Antioch.
So our potential Victim Blamers are in a dilemma. In the words of an old Yiddish proverb, they are
trying to dance at two weddings. They are old friends of both brides and fond of both kinds of dancing, and
they want to accept both invitations. They cannot bring themselves to attack the system that has been so good
to them, but they want so badly to be helpful to the victims of racism and economic injustice.
Their solution is a brilliant compromise. They turn their attention to the victim in his post†victimized
state. They want to bind up wounds, inject penicillin, administer morphine, and evacuate the wounded for
rehabilitation. They explain what’s wrong with the victim in terms of social experiences in the past,
experiences that have left wounds, defects, paralysis, and disability. And they take the cure of these wounds
and the reduction of these disabilities as the first order of business. They want to make the victims less
vulnerable, send them back into battle with better weapons, thicker armor, a higher level of morale.
In order to do so effectively, of course, they must analyze the victims carefully, dispassionately,
objectively, scientifically, empathetically, mathematically, and hardheadedly, to see what made them so
vulnerable in the first place. […]
That is the ideology of Blaming the Victim, the cunning Art of Savage Discovery. The tragic, frightening
truth is that it is a mythology that is winning over the best people of our time, the very people who must resist
this ideological temptation if we are to achieve nonviolent change in America.
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• Public Enemy #2, by Aaron McGruder
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