AlterNet: Bill Cosby's New Book Full of Racial Stereotypes

Predictably, folks I otherwise agree with have the same knee-jerk reaction to a black person making statements that black folks need to clean up our own house.

AlterNet: Bill Cosby's New Book Full of Racial Stereotypes

For instance, it is considered a myth that black kids will accuse other blacks, who pursue intellectual excellence, as 'acting white'. However, I am not a mythical figure and although anecdotal evidence isn't good evidence it is also not entirely empty.

The first time I heard that I was 'acting white' for getting good grades and reading for pleasure was junior high school, back in 1980, which was the first time I went to a school that had more than just one or two other blacks in it. The last time I heard it was sometime around my last year of undergrad. The difference? Between junior high and my junior year of college, I was going to school with a fair number of other black folks--the height coming in high school. After high school the number of other blacks I was in school with tailed off dramatically. Coincidence? Perhaps but the correlation is too tight to be dismissed out of hand. Look, what I think pisses people off when folks like Cosby make these kinds of public pronouncements is this; MOST of what you'll hear coming from the left side of the spectrum will put the emphasis on the larger society with a tossing, obligatory nod to education or some other kind of self-determination bromide. So when Cosby or McWhorter or Steele makes a statement emphasing more what black folks should be doing--pushing one another hard to do well in school, etc.--it can *appear* that that is all they are saying. In this it is like white privilege--no small number of white folks feel, not entirely unjustfiably--that things are different and they are. There was a time when no white person was going to have to worry that a black woman was going to be *better* qualified for their job than they are. So now that they have to compete to *any* degree with folks from the chocolate side of the Force feels like a loss of position and privilege. Please note that one can acknowledge the above while *still* recognizing that this is precisely what a equal society *should* feel like--a loss of privilege for one group as things even out.

Now, all I'm saying--and I want to be clear that this is all that is being said--is that the vague hand-waving of "yes, yes, black folks should encourage one another to get an education" isn't *enough* emphasis. As I said on another thread here related to race, black folks have got to strive to be the best and brightest people in the room, every time, every room. Anything less than that must, until we are *truly* an equal society (or least more just in a Rawlsian sense than we are now), be considered less than smashing success simply because it will be *seen* as such.