Is Bill Cosby Right? by Michael Eric Dyson

Dyson, Michael Eric. 2005. Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? New York: Basic Civitas Books.

46 - The civil rights movement perceived universalism in the guiding ideals of democracy and justice that should benefit all peoples. The movement argued that the "self-evident" claims of humanity for each community must be respected;

47 - one needn't destroy one's particular identity to fit in. As W.E.B. Du Bois argued in 1903, black folk didn't want to lose our identity as the price of our survival. [. . .] Unlike Du Bois, Cosby didn't see that black identities needn't give up their particular ethnic or racial slants to be universal; that's a false dichotomy engineered by the white merchants of a variety of universalism that seeks to project the normative as the universal. The two surely aren't the same.

80 - But I also thought of Elizabeth Chin's marvelous ethnographic study of the consumer behavior of poor black children, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture [. . .] Chin contends that black youth are not the "combat consumers" they are portrayed as being: either captives of a powerful fetish for brand names or predatory consumers willing to steal for Air Jordans or kill for a bike [. . .] Chin also notices that, unlike their middle-class and upper-class peers, the children she studied were made profoundly conscious of what it costs to clothe, feed and take care of them; hence, they usually spent part of the money they had on nec-

81 - essary, not pleasurable, itens. Chin explains her work in a powerful anecdote about the prejeduice she confronted and, by extension, the black youth she studied, in examining the consumer behavior of black youth. She says she had developed, as do most researchers, a one-line response to questions at cocktail parties about the nature of her research in New Haven.

"I'm studying the role of consumption in the lives of poor and working-class black children." Here I would more often than not get a knowing look. "Ah," the response would be, "you must have seen a lot of Air Jordans.". . . "Actually, no," I'd answer. "I only saw two pairs of Air Jordans on the kids I worked with." [T}his statement was nearly always met with incredulity. More than once people responded with something to the effect of "There must have been something wrong with your sample.". . . [T]hese comments also disturb me because so many people seemed to prefer haning on to ideas about poor black kids that had been gleaned from the pseudo experience provided by the kinds of news stories I have so extensively critiqued in the preceding pages. Like the terms inner city and ghetto, the "Air Jordans" response to thinking about poor and working-class black children and consumption obscures more about those children than it reveals.44

[page 255, note 44.] Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 60-61

92 - None of this is meant to dismiss black crime or serve a s an apologia for destructive behavior, but it is necessary to under-

93 - line the social and personal forces that drive criminal activity, even as we fight against an unjust criminal justice system that targets black men with vicious regularity. I speak as one who has been a victim of crime.

178 - Even Cosby's attacks on single black mothers contain an irony: Their numbers have actually gone down. In 1970, for black females between ages fifteen and seventeen, there were 72 pregnancies per 1,000, while in 2000, there were 30.9 per 1,000 [note 83]

[page 268, note 83.] From Michael Males, cited in Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Mushmouth Reconsider: you Can't Say That on TV--But Bill Cosby Can," Village Voice, July 13, 2004

212 - I suggest that we hold in mind several dimensions of responsibility, summarized in the dynamic, reciprocal relation between three interrelated types of responsibility: personal and social responsibility, moral and intellectual responsibility, and immediate and ultimate responsibility. Personal responsibility involves the individual's being accountable for her actions and acting in a

213 - moral fashion that is helpful to herself and to the members of her family, community and society. Social responsibility involves the society's exercising collective accountability to its citizens by acting, through agencies (social services, psychological services and the like), institutions (schools, religious organizations, governmment and the like), and spheres (private and public employment and the like) to enhance their well-being, especially the most vulnerable. [. . .]
Moral responsibility involves self- and other-regarding behavior that aims to realize the good intentions, and maximize the just actions, of persons and societies. Intellectual responsibility involves the exercise of mental faculty for the purpose of self-development and the development of society. [. . .]
Immediate responsibility involves persons and societies acting accountably to address issues, ideas and problems in

214 - the present time and environment. Ultimate responsibility involves persons and societies acting accountably to address issues, ideas and problems with an eye on their personal and social impact in the long run. [ . . .]
These meanings of responsibility should be kept in mind as we make demands for the poor to be more responsible. Too often we fail to give them credit for how they are already being personally and morally responsible, given the conditions they confront [. . .] We have at the same time failed to calculate, or to as aggressively demand, social responsibility toward the poor.


227 - One of the most dishonest effects of elevating Cosby as a spokesman of black interests is that conservative commentators pretends that he is the first prominent black leader to call for personal responsibility. [. . .] One conservative white columnist praised Cosby's bravery for airing dirty laundry while decrying the "complete breakdown of leadership within the [black] community," claiming that folk like Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson have "spent the past 20 years telling the black community that their problems are due to the white man keeping them down." [. . .] Farrakhan, of course, has been promoting a gospel of black self-help for decades, and while he assaults white supremacy, he recognizes the virtue of black folk, including the black poor, assuming responsibility for their destinies. [. . .]

228 - Sharpton has constantly applauded the virtues of hard work and self-determining action for black fol. And Jesse Jackson is in a long list of leaders who have understood the dynamic relationship between personal and social responsibility.

A People's History of Science, by Clifford D. Conner

Originally transcribed 9/11/08, then added to later in April 2010 - JH

Conner, Clifford D. 2005. "A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks." New York: Avalon.

130 - Finally, a people's history of science would be remiss if it failed to explicitly refute the insinuation of nineteenth-century "racial science" that the black people of sub-Saharan Africa were incapable of creating civilizations. The history of Kumbi Saleh--not to mention Gao, Jenne, Timbuktu, and any number of other African cities--is sufficient to counter that falsehood. More than a thousand years ago Kumbi Saleh was a thriving commercial city in West Africa, in the Kingdom of Ghana, with a population of fifteen to twenty thousand people. Neither London nor Paris was anywhere near that size until hundreds of years later.
It must also be emphasized that no sharp line can be drawn between the history of early Egypt and that of sub-Saharan Africa. Bernal maintained that "Egyptian civilization is clearly based on the rich Pre-dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt and Nubia, whose African origin is uncontested."40 The prehistoric origins of Egyptian civilization came from far south along the Nile River, which is to say from the heart of the African continent. Sub-Saharan Africans constituted a significant part of the Egyptian population in the age of the pharaohs, and they frequently rose to the pinnacle of political power. Statues, wall paintings, and documents make it clear that there were black African Pharaohs--Pepys I, for example, circa 2360 B.C.E.--and that there were periods during which all of Egypt was ruled by the territories along the southern stretches of the Nile.
Herodotus, who traveled extensively in Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E., said of the Egyptian people that "they are black-skinned and have wooly hair."41

[40. M. Bernal, Black Athena, p. 15
[41. Herodotus, History, book II, 104

144 - In fact, Plato believed that government was only possible on the basis of a lie, and he "devoted his life to the elaboration" of that lie.72 To uphold that falsehood, Plato urged that the books of the Ionian materialists be destoyed and "that his own fradulent book [the Laws] should be imposed by the State as the one and only obligatory source of doctrine."73 For dissenters who objected to his plans, he advocated the death penalty. This was Plato's idea of a political utopia, as he spelled it out in the Republic. [. . .]
What was the famous "noble lie" that Plato wanted to impose as the official doctrine of the state? Here is how he described it. Written in dialogue form, he had one of his interlocutors ask him: "How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke--just one royal lie?" He answered:

I propose to communicate [the audacious fiction] gradually, first to the rules, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. . . . Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power to command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be perserved in the children.75

[72. Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World, p. 126
[73. Ibid. p. 127
[74. Ibid., p. 94
[75. Plato, The Republic, book III, chapter 8, 1074b


145 - Plato's "noble lie," then, was the ultimate ideological justification of elitism: that social hierarchies are immutable because they were created by God, and that the ruling class deserves to rule because God made its members out of superior material. The aristocrats are the Golden Men, whereas the farmers and artisans are composed of brass and iron. As part of this ideological program, Plato promoted two separate religions--a sophisticated, abstract one for the intelligentsia, and a cruder one, with the traditional anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, for the masses. To ensure the continued observance of the latter, Plato proposed sentencing disbelievers to five years in prison for a first offense and death for a second. [. . .]
Platonic elitism, unfortunately, is not merely a matterof ancient history; it is stil drastically afflicting the human race even in the twenty-first century. The architects of American foreign policy who carried out the imperialist asaults on Afghanistan and Iraq are known to be zealous disciples of political philosopher Leo Strauss, an admirer of Plato. "The effect of Strauss's teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite," said Shadia Drury, who has written extensively on Strauss's ideas and their consequences.78 "Leo Strauss," she continued, "was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics" who "justifies his position by an appeal to Plato's concept of the noble lie."

[78. See Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss; and Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right.

159 - Before leaving this subject [alchemy-JH], a word about its "dark side"--the mystical aspect--is in order. Alechemy has, throughout the ages, been closely linked with mysticism, an association that was especially strong in Hellenistic Alexandria. The seemingly miraculous transformations that the artisans were able to produce in their firey furnaces had such a powerful effect on the imagination of Neoplatonic philosophers that it induced the latter to spin fanciful metaphysical systems from alchemical metaphors. As a result, "to the already confused terminology of alchemy was added a still greater mass of philosophical speculation, using chemiccal terms, but with almost no chemical content." The mystical philosophers scorned the practical alchemists as mere "puffers" (an allusion to their use of bellows to stoke their fires). However, it was the practical alchemists "who preserved and advanced alchemy as a science until it became chemistry, while the others lost in a cloud of obscure nomenclature and speculation, contributed nothing further to chemistry."123

[123. Leicester, Historical Background of Chemistry, p. 47

161 - Arabic-Islamic scholarship was not simply a passive reflection of previous Greek triumphs; it also received major inputs from Persia, India, and China was itself a source of original contributions to scientific culture. That can be seen most clearly (but not only) in the field of mathematics. Whereas Greek mathematicians kept almost exclusively to geometry and scorned arithmetic as a tool fit only for lowly practical pursuits, Muslim mathematicians adopted the base-ten, position-value number system from India and utilized it to further mathematical knowledge in ways unimaginable to their Greek predecessors. [. . .]

162 - But Muslim scholars were not simply translators and copyists; they added extensive critical commentaries, sometimes based on their own scientific investigations, to the corpus of Greek science. When scholarship in Europe begain to revive in the twelfth century, the works of Aristotle and Galen recovered from Arabic sources had been refracted through the interpretive lenses of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi (Rhazes), and many others. The new learning, however, rapidly hardened into an orthodoxy that hindered further acquisition of knowledge of nature.

262 - Leonardo da Vinci is today hailed as the supreme example of a Renaissance man who mastered many diverse fields of knowledge and combined achievements in the beaux arts and in science to a degree attained by no individual before or since. Ironically, however, in his own time he was denied the prestige of a fully learned man because he lacked a classical education and was not literate in Latin. His originality, one leading historian of science has written, "was partly due to his ignorance and his lack of academic ambitions."

455 - The important lesson to be learned from all this is that the social meanings attributed to biological theories are "not logically inherent in the theories themselves."16 Whether evolution proceeds slowly or in bursts has nothing whatsoever to do with the way political struggles unfold. Nor is the red-in-tooth-and-claw competition of biological evolution a model human societies should aspire to emulate. In general, attempts to reduce the laws of the science of society to the laws of biology is bad science that encourages bad social policy.

[16. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, p. 378

473 - The privatization of science was greatly facilitated by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed universities and small businesses to patent the findings produced by federally funded research. As surely as night follows day, major corporations were certain eventually to gain the same priviledges, which they did in 1987. The boundary lines separating government, industrial, and academic research have increasingly blurred. The upshot is that public dollars pay universities to produce knowledge that becomes the private property of corporations.