Michael Eric Dyson (10 page)

Of course, on some matters, Cosby in his recent statements was plain misinformed. He said more than once that 50 percent of black students drop out of high school. That is simply not true. Cosby was nowhere near the facts on this one, since the dropout rate for blacks is 17 percent.
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And while the white dropout rate is 9 percent, the dropout rate for black high school students has actually declined 44 percent since 1968, while the white dropout rate has slightly increased over the same period.
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In 1960, only 20.1 percent of black adults had completed high school; today it is nearly 79 percent, compared to 89 percent for whites.
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Despite the brutal obstacles blacks have faced, and which Cosby outlined in his dissertation, they have fought to become educated in far greater numbers than the generation he applauds, a fact that Cosby fails to recognize when he says that the black poor “don’t want to accept that they have to study to get an education.” Thus, contemporary blacks have not failed the civil rights
generation; neither have they failed to extend the legacy of literacy we have created since our time here as slaves.
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Cosby also asserted that black youth—referring to them with the objectifying, abstracting, thing-like “it,” not a new practice with Cosby, to be sure, but no less disconcerting in any case—“can’t speak English,” that “[i]t doesn’t want to speak English,” that Cosby can’t speak like them (his speech, one supposes, notwithstanding), and that everyone knows “it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads.” It is utterly remarkable that Cosby, after the mountain of scholarship on Ebonics (coined by Robert Williams in the ’70s, Ebony + Phonics = Ebonics) and Black English, could with one wave of his Ebonics-indebted rhetorical wand dismiss what he has so brilliantly deployed, and commercially exploited, over the years.
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Black English captures the beautiful cadences, sensuous tones, kinetic rhythms, forensic articulations, and idiosyncrasies of expression that form the black vernacular voice. Bad grammar does not Black English make; it is a rhetorical practice laden with complex and technical rules—for instance, the use in Black English of zero copulas, or forms of the verb “to be.” To say “I am going” is one thing, suggesting a present activity; but to say “I
be
going” in Black English is something else, suggesting a habitual practice, a repeated action.

Black English grows out of the fierce linguisticality of black existence, the insistence by blacks of carving a speech of their own from the remnants of African languages and piecing and stitching those remnants together in the New World with extant patterns of English for the purpose of communication
and survival. Of course, much of that communication had to be masked through ranges and intensities of signifying, in terms of not only the content of black speech but its very form as well. Thus, complex linguistic rules emerged from the existential and political exigencies that shaped black destiny: speaking about white folk in their face without doing so in a way that resulted in punishment or perhaps death, leading to verbal hiccups, grammatical hesitations and linguistic lapses; articulating the moral certainties of black worldviews without compromising the ability to transmit them in the linguistic forms that best suited their expression, while adapting them to the religious passions of the white world; capturing in sound the seismic shifts in being and meaning of New World blacks that came in staccato phrases or elongated syllables; unleashing through the palette a percussive sense of time peculiar to the negotiation of an ever-evolving identity with grace and humor (when I was in grad school, my German professor said about a certain phrase, “the tense can only be translated in the Black English terms, ‘It bes like that’”); and situating the absurdity of modern blackness through the constantly modulating forms of diction that lent a protective veneer of spontaneous rationality to rapidly evolving patterns of speech.

And by their creative linguistic transformations, black slaves inflected, and infected, the speech of their masters. As one observer proclaimed, “It must be confessed, to the shame of the white population of the South, that they perpetuate many of these pronunciations in common with their Negro dependents.”
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For Cosby to dismiss
that
, the very kernel of
black life in Black English, verges on self-denial; for him to ridicule its most vulnerable practitioners borders on racial disdain. As James Baldwin argued in his powerful essay “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” black English

Cosby has over the years, despite his rabid resistance to Black English, deployed its rhythms, tics and habits of speech.
As linguist John McWhorter recently commented, “Bill Cosby speaks more ebonics than he knows . . . and people don’t want to hear it. It’s not their favorite flavor.”
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The theme song to
The Bill Cosby Show
included a string of nonsensical articulations, such as “flizzum flazzum,” that owed their spirit of playful verbal invention, if not their content, to Ebonics. The speech Cosby gave damning poor black parents and their children is loaded with Ebonics, from its inflections, intonations, diction and stylistic flourishes to its grammatical eliminations (of syllables) and, simultaneously, its vernacular substitutions. That’s also why it was especially troubling at the 2003 Emmys when comedienne Wanda Sykes, in all of her vernacular splendor and her animated shtick, asked an obviously peeved Cosby the secret of his and other early black comics’ success, and he stared at her with menacing intensity and fatal scowl and said, icily, “We spoke English.”
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Even earlier when
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
—not in the cleaned-up, linguistically correct language of the 2004 film but in the original cartoon series—appeared on the scene, they brought verbal resonances to Saturday morning television that were rooted in black community. A cartoon series set in the projects, with the intonations of black children ruling their roost through stories with moral meaning, it was
visual vernacular;
the aesthetic communicated a dialect of style. And when Mushmouth created a distinct pattern of speech, he created a linguistic rule of his own—by inserting the “B” sound into his speech, he asserted the rule of the ubiquitous “B” in syllabic construction. “Hey man” became “hey-ba man-ba,” and his own name became “Mush-ba
Mouth-ba.” Cosby has reaped huge financial dividends, and cultural capital, off of that cartoon and its film; it seems disingenuous for him now to deprive real-life children of the very legitimacy of perspective and verbal creativity he allotted to cartoon and cinematic characters.

Cosby seemed not to notice his own Black English in 1997 when he penned an op-ed for the
Wall Street Journal
, “Elements of Igno-Ebonics Style.”
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Cosby was responding to the Oakland School Board’s controversial, and widely misinterpreted, decision to use Ebonics in the classroom to help black children bridge the gulf between their native dialects and speech habits and “standard” English. Cosby lampooned Ebonics speakers in feigned dialects and then scolded the Oakland School Board: “Granted, if you don’t teach Ebonics, the children will find it anyway. But legitimizing the street in the classroom is backwards. We should be working hard to legitimize the classroom—and English—in the street. On the other hand, we could jes letem do wha ever they wanna. Either way, Ima go over heanh an learn some maffa matics an then ge-sum ‘n tee na’ then I’ll be witchya.”
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But Cosby, and many more besides, missed the point. The Oakland School Board made the decision to boost black children’s literacy in “standard” English by meeting the students where they were rhetorically; like all good teachers, they began with the given and then used it to arrive at the goal. Between the given and the goal lay expanses of black linguistic practice that the Oakland teachers sought to use in their efforts to respect the speech of their students while bringing them up to snuff on “standard English.”

The Oakland teachers realized, as do most black folk, that we must code-switch, or, as Cosby phrased it, speak one variety of English on the streets and another in the home, on the job and the like. The recognition of Black English’s legitimacy is not an argument against learning “standard” English; it is to recognize that discussions of language, especially involving poor and minority peoples, are discussions about the issues Cosby addressed in his dissertation: power, domination, black inferiority, white superiority and white supremacy. Who can, or should, determine what language is legitimate and useful, and when it can or cannot be spoken? Of course Cosby is right to stress the need for black youth, and their parents, to understand the contexts where some languages are more useful than others. But the sense of propriety is driven as much by power and the cultural normalizing of the taken-for-granted (and hence taken for standard and taken for true and right) linguistic styles of the white mainstream as by an innate sense of what is good or bad language. The more languages folk have at their disposal, the more easily they are able to negotiate with the hidden premises of power that underlie discussions about linguistic appropriateness. To ignore the cultural and racial contexts that deny access to such multilinguisticality, and to overlook the rigid racial and educational hierarchy that reinforces privilege and stigma, are intellectually dishonest.

Perhaps there is a deep element of shame that Cosby has not yet overcome in the use of black style and Black English. In a 1969 interview, Cosby movingly spoke of how he confronted the black embarrassment associated with black style.
In his junior high school, at Christmastime, Cosby and his schoolmates had been allowed to bring in sound recordings to share with the class and celebrate the holiday season. Cosby didn’t own any records, but a couple of black girls brought in Mahalia Jackson’s version of
Silent Night
, while white kids brought in recordings like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s version of the
Hallelujah Chorus
and Bing Crosby’s
White Christmas
. When the white kids listened to Mahalia Jackson, they snickered, “because of their own ignorance and, at the same time, we were embarrassed because it wasn’t white. Mahalia just didn’t sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Clara Ward didn’t sound like Bing Crosby.” Cosby said at the time that “this no longer happens, because of the black-is-beautiful re-education, because of the fact that our culture, our music is something to be proud of.”
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Cosby admitted that it hadn’t been easy to “throw out all the brainwashing,” but black folk were making the effort. As an example, he told another, perhaps even more poignant, story from his life.

If Cosby could only see Black English in this light, with this compassion and this discerning of the social and racial networks that sustain cultural expression, he might appreciate its power and beauty.

When Cosby claimed that black parents bought their kids $500 sneakers instead of spending $250 on Hooked on Phonics, I immediately had two thoughts. First, I recalled that in 1994 Hooked on Phonics had agreed to settle charges brought by the FTC that it lacked sufficient evidence to support its widely advertised claim that its products could rapidly teach children with learning disabilities to read, regardless of the problems they had. Educational experts countered the Hooked on Phonics advertising juggernaut by suggesting it only worked as an “after-school adjunct to comprehensive reading instruction that teaches children more than sounding out letters and words.”
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Hooked on Phonics has been the subject of very little academic research and, as a result, is not looked upon by many knowledgeable education specialists as
an important means to help children to read. At best, it plays a supplementary role that helps with some of the skills necessary for children to read. Perhaps the black parents that Cosby blasted were more aware of the overstated claims of Hooked on Phonics than he appears to have been. If one has limited resources, spending $250 on a product that has not been proved to deliver what it promises is sound educational and consumer practice.