Michael Eric Dyson (17 page)

Predictably, some economists have tried to reverse the logic of Bertrand and Mullainathan’s study and place the onus on the blacks who are the victims of discrimination. In citing a study, “The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names,” by economists Roland G. Fryer, Jr., and Steven D. Levitt, economics professor Robert J. Barro argues that the economists prove that “the more black-sounding a person’s name, the more likely the parents have a lower socioeconomic status.”
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Thus, employers “might infer that a job seeker with a black-sounding name is more likely to have grown up in a less educated and poorer family,” and if these employers “believe, rightly or wrongly, that such a background lowers the chance of job success, this may help explain why audit studies find that employers react negatively to black-sounding names on resumes.”
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For Barro, the study proves that “a person’s name no longer predicts much about later economic outcomes, such as whether he or she winds up living in a rich or poor area,” and that “ultimately it matters whether your parents are well-educated or rich but not whether they name you Shanice or Molly.”

Barro is not defending the use of black names so much as he is discounting whatever discriminatory effects might result from employers’ choosing not to select blacks with unique names because it also suggests that they are poorly educated and less likely to be successful on their jobs. “Thus, the key issue is whether black-white gaps in income and other economic
and social indicators are still narrowing rather than whether employers are discriminating against black names.”
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What Barro overlooks is that if blacks continue to be discriminated against based on the likelihood that their names reveal their race, and if they are thus closed out of jobs that could substantially alter their own economic standing as well as that of their children, then that sort of discrimination is precisely the kind of economic and institutional behavior that will result in poor economic outcomes. The prejudices of the employers create a self-fulfilling cycle: As long as employers deny opportunities to black folk on the basis of their names—and since not all black parents who gave their children unique names were poor—they assure the very condition they claim to deplore. These are undoubtedly the sort of institutional barriers that should be eradicated. In Barro’s logic, black folk are to blame for the very discrimination they suffer.

It is worth considering that well-known and powerful blacks with unique names have become so accepted that their names no longer sound strange, or even prohibitively black, but resound positively throughout the culture: Oprah, Shaquille, Keyshawn and Condoleezza. Should they, like ordinary blacks, be encouraged to change their names, or to hang their heads in shame when their unique names are mispronounced or misspelled? Are their names signs of inferior intelligence or uncouth behavior? We have learned to love and admire the people, and, as a result, we love and admire their names, or, at the least, we don’t hold those names in secret derision or public disgust. Can we really imagine Cosby deriding Oprah or Condoleezza or Shaquille? Should
the burden of Cosby’s bias, and that of many, many more, rest on the heads of the uniquely named black poor? I think society should learn to name and let name.

The kind of prejudice that poor black folk, especially youth, confront in a persistently racist society, whether about their clothes, body modifications or names, is predictable, but tragic nonetheless. In too many quarters of our society, visions of black identity are still stereotyped, cramped and morally impoverished. But the venomous sentiments directed at the black poor, particularly black youth, by members of black culture are equally painful. The black elite and other critics often ignore the enormous obstacles that clutter the path of struggling blacks. If black youth choose to wear their clothes, and style their bodies, in ways that older blacks find offensive, then such offense may be interpreted as generational tension, or divergences in taste among the classes, but it should not be seen as an ethical deficiency among poor black youth.

And if their parents give them unique, unusual, fantastic, distinctive names, perhaps it does have meaning after all: to reach for equally fantastic and distinctive heights in the world, denied to their parents, that the children may yet fulfill. We should not allow
our
bigotry—and, as Howard Thurman pointed out, a bigot is a person who “makes an idol of his commitments”—to burden our brothers and sisters, who toil under almost unimaginable odds to make it from day to day. We should spare them our hang-ups, hates and hesitations. Perhaps there is perverse Afristocratic envy of the black young and poor who possess such distinctive names.
Maybe they have truly cast care for what others think of them to the wind and embraced with courage their freedom to explore their own bodies and create the meanings of their own names and fulfill their own destinies as best they can. That is a freedom all Americans, all humans, should enjoy. Even Bill Cosby, who, after all, gave each of his wonderful children names—not all of them conventional—that begin with E. When asked what they meant, he said they stood for excellence. Why can’t poor parents enjoy the same freedom with their children?

The timing couldn’t have been worse: Bill Cosby had to cancel a couple of legs of his national tour to lecture poor black folk about their moral failures because news broke of allegations
that Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted a woman who considered him “a great friend and mentor.”
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Other family troubles Cosby has wrestled with over the years—including a daughter who abused alcohol and drugs and claimed Cosby was an absentee parent, and his battle to restore his image as America’s Dad after a very public court case that revealed unsavory elements of his personal life, including allegations of an illegitimate child—offer sufficient reason to reflect on Cosby’s moral standing and its impact on his recent crusade against poor parents. That is true because his attack is funded, in large measure, by the moral capital he has accumulated over the years. To be sure, Cosby, in principle, could be as wrong as two left shoes in the latest allegations he faces and still be dead right about the poor. But it would be a mistake to see Cosby’s troubles, both recently and in the past, as unrelated to his arguments about the irresponsibility of the poor.

Cosby’s comments also reflect the pressure blacks have historically felt to be morally exemplary in a way that white folk as a group have never faced. As a result of the incredible demand for black folk to prove our ethical worth, we have often adopted harder approaches to our family and race. We discipline our children more harshly, we judge each other less sympathetically, and we pull out all stops to prove to the wider, white world that we stomach no breach of the moral compact to be perfect. This often leads to just the sort of judgmental and angry attitudes as Cosby has expressed to the black poor, and arguably, within his own circle as well.

Since Cosby has taken to singling out poor families for special censure, his own family problems suggest that not only
poor families have moral crises that warrant examination. At the very least, his travails should nudge him considerably toward humility and compassion, while they should cause the rest of us to find object lessons in the contrast between his pronouncements and his practice. It is hard not to conclude that Cosby has misspent his moral capital and, as I argued earlier, ranged far out of his analytical depth in misjudging the poor. Just when poor folk needed protection for the negative cultural downpour, Cosby came along, as the black elite have often done, to shower apocalypse instead of offering an umbrella. Contrary to what many of Cosby’s defenders have claimed, there is nothing courageous in buffeting the vulnerable with bromides one has proven on occasion not to swallow oneself.

For legions of his admirers, it is difficult to swallow the notion that Cosby may have fouled up at all, or at least in any way that would suggest grave moral defect. In isolation, at least, the latest allegations strike most of his fans as unlikely to be true because they seem way out of character for Cosby. But then, there is the character of the accuser to consider as well. Andrea Constand, a 31-year-old former employee of the athletic department of Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University, claimed that she had attended dinner at a Philadelphia-area restaurant with Cosby and a group of friends in January 2004. Afterward, at Cosby’s invitation, she joined him in his suburban Philadelphia home.
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Constand said after she complained to Cosby about her stress and tension, he gave her pills which made her dizzy and fall asleep. She admitted that her memory of the night’s
events was poor, but said that she definitely remembered Cosby fondling her. Constand claimed that after she awoke, her clothes were disheveled. She then allegedly drove herself home. Constand, a Canadian native who quit her job at Temple and returned home near Toronto three months after the alleged incident, didn’t come forward to tell her story to the Canadian police until a year later, in January 2005. The Canadian police referred the charges to the Philadelphia police, and to the Cheltenham township police where Cosby’s home is located. Constand told the police she took so long to press charges because of Cosby’s fame, and because she was concerned about her job at Temple.
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Constand’s father, Andy, said his daughter knew Cosby well, and that, “Indirectly, the incident was part of why she left Temple.”
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Constand’s mother, Gianna, said that her daughter “enjoyed [Cosby’s] friendship, his humor and his spirit,” and that she “found him to be very sincere.”
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But Gianna says their relationship was strictly platonic. “Sometimes people make bad choices and obviously he did.”
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Andy says that his daughter “feels a sense of betrayal and feels justice has to prevail.” He denied that his daughter’s motivation was money. “We live a good life, have a nice house. I have four cars. We’re not in it for the money. Justice has to be served.”
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Andy also explained his daughter’s reticence to press charges. “Sometimes it takes a long time to build up the courage, especially when the person is universal and when a person is very famous. He (Cosby) was very good friends with my daughter and she is a very honest and decent person.”
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Those sentiments are backed up
by Joan Bonvicini, coach of the University of Arizona women’s basketball team that Constand played on more than ten years ago. “She’s always been honest and upstanding. . . . I’ve never known her to lie.”
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Through his lawyer, Jack Schmitt, Cosby denied the allegations, saying they are “categorically false.” Later his lawyer Walter M. Phillips, Jr., said that the charges are “pointedly bizarre because it’s been a year since it allegedly happened, and she is coming forward. It will be vigorously defended.”
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Another accusation was made in 2000, as the
New York Post
reported that Lachele Covington, a 20-year-old actress who had appeared several times on Cosby’s CBS TV show,
Cosby
, filed a police report alleging that the comedian had put her hand under his T-shirt and guided it toward his sweatpants.
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The
Post
, and several other media outlets, reported that a tabloid account of Cosby’s alleged sexual misconduct went further: Cosby was accused by Covington in the
National Enquirer
of fondling her when they had dinner together at his East Side townhouse in New York City.
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After drinks and dinner with the star, she asked for career advice, and Cosby is alleged to have responded, “There isn’t anything you can’t do if you put your mind to it.”
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Covington reported that Cosby said that when he wanted to think deeply, he used relaxation techniques, and seeking to demonstrate them, he allegedly moved behind her, rubbed her head, slid his hands down her arms, stopping short of her buttocks. Then, when Covington laid down to relax further, Cosby is alleged to have committed the troubling sexual acts.