Bill Cosby’s Tough Love

Bill Cosby’s Tough Love

By: James David Dickson

1/1/08

(Feature-review, Bill Cosby’s Come On, People)

Columnist Gregory Kane retells a by-now infamous Malcolm X story. The civil rights leader, standing outside of a black housing project, asks his followers how many reference books and dictionaries they’d expect to find if they searched every apartment therein.

“Enough to fill a trunk of this car? Enough to fill a suitcase?”

That that question was worth pondering betrays its answer — not many. Certainly not enough.

“Malcolm was saying,” Kane explains, “that being black and poor didn’t absolve poor black folks of their responsibility to “hold up their end of the bargain” in education. If there are no reference books, dictionaries, and other reading material in poor black homes, then who’s to blame?”

Since deciding, in 2004, to speak out on the social ills that mar the black community — violence, illegitimacy, and miseducation chief among them, Bill Cosby has been branded with the scarlet letter of elitism.

But Cosby’s latest effort, Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, a collection of testimonials from Cosby’s Call-Outs from the last several years, overlaid with Cosby’s own commentary, seeks to clear the air.

There’s a thin line between tough love and outright contempt, and Cosby’s critics, led by University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, believe he’s crossed it.

Dyson, who could not be reached in multiple attempts, is author of 2006 bestseller Is Cosby Right? and self-styled defender of black Americans “left behind” after the civil rights revolution.

Cosby’s critics claim that the entertainer’s interest in the black community is new-fangled. That Cosby, for decades, never spoke about race, preferring “universal themes.”

But the notion that Cosby’s roots with the black community are only three and a half years deep is laughable. Since co-starring in I Spy, 42 years ago, Bill Cosby has been putting his fame and talents to use to help his community.

Cosby’s 1989 donation of $20 million kept historically black Tuskegee University afloat. Spike Lee’s epic Malcolm X wouldn’t have seen theaters but for Cosby’s largesse. And according to Poussaint, Cosby has sent scores of black youth to college over the years, and sought neither credit nor publicity. Perhaps that’s why Cosby’s critics are so foggy on his record.

Indeed, Cosby wouldn’t have met his co-author but for his work in the black community. The two met, over 30 years ago, at a BlackExpo event at which Cosby was performing. Cosby the entertainer made fast friends with Poussaint the doctor.