Michael Eric Dyson (5 page)

Even after Cosby rewrote the rules of the TV sitcom with the unprecedented success of
The Cosby Show
in 1984, he wasn’t spared the critic’s lash.
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Tired of the endless cycle of “car chases and breasts and characters yelling at each other and saying Yowie!” Cosby turned his attention to crafting a half-hour series that would showcase the strengths of the American family.
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As early as 1966, Cosby said that “[s]omeday I want to do a family situation comedy on television and it will be a hit because people want to see what goes on in a Negro home today.”
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A few years later, Cosby was more forthright than ever about the prospects of a series with a black, non-stereotypical cast. When asked if such a show could be successful on TV in 1969, Cosby was blunt.

By the time Cosby got his wish more than fifteen years later, his views had drastically changed. He no longer believed that a show about the family should explore the struggles of the average
black
family. Neither did he feel in any way compelled to address racism or the plight of black folk in a world still populated by white bigots. The Huxtable family that Cosby created was solidly upper middle class—Cosby played an obstetrician, his TV wife a lawyer—and hardly ever uttered a sentence about racial or class struggle. In fact, no sign of poor black folk was spotted until near the end of the series’ run when a visiting relative of modest means was embraced by her wealthier kinfolk. Cosby’s statement about the black family sitcom in 1969 proved to be an aberration in his solidly color-blind philosophy. By 1984, with the arrival of the Huxtables in American homes and at the top of the Nielsen ratings, Cosby’s dream television family just happened to be black. One critic gushed, “Yes, the family is black, but that fact is totally ignored. No racial jokes are made, no problems of prejudice discussed. The Huxtables are comfortable middle-class Americans . . . and their stories could take place almost anywhere. Nobody actually says this
family represents the whole human family, but the delicious ordinariness of its pleasures and tribulations has given millions a fresh, laughter-splashed perspective on their own domestic lives.”
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In
The Cosby Show
the comedian found the most influential vehicle yet to promulgate his color-blind politics and to swipe at critics who believed that he comforted whites and copped out of addressing the problems of black America. Cosby, and his show’s consultant, noted Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, bristled at the charge that the Huxtables weren’t black enough, or that they were minstrel makeovers of fifties sitcom characters. Poussaint contended that “it is racist to suggest that the series is merely
Father Knows Best
in blackface.”
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Relying on the inferential racial politics Cosby has mastered, Poussaint argued that the “Black style of the characters is evident in their speech, intonations and nuances.”
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As for Cosby, he, too, blanched at the suggestion that his television family hadn’t dealt with controversial issues like racism, poverty and interracial dating, and that they ignored the masses of blacks who were far less wealthy than the Huxtables.

Cosby’s racial politics—made up of his belief that color is a crutch that has no place in his art; his desire to bring the races together by focusing on their similarities, not their differences; his yearning to be seen as a human being and an American without reference to race; and his resistance to racial representation and crusading—spin out from, and wash back against, broader currents of debate in black culture. Failing to identify these currents dooms us to believe that Cosby’s racial politics are exceptional or original, when they are neither. Along the way it will become clear how Cosby’s recent views ratify certain beliefs while rejecting others in black culture. In light of Cosby’s beliefs over the last forty years—about race, universalism and human identity—it is hard not to conclude that his public denunciation of the black poor sullies his principles.

Cosby’s words about lower-class blacks have not spiraled into a vacuum. His comments have been received in a specific cultural and political context. Cosby’s remarks also have
reinforced and discarded views about how poor black folk behave and how they ought to be treated. I will address these views, and the contexts that frame them, later in the book, especially in Chapter 5. For now, Cosby’s views should be placed within black cultural debates that have to do with the
stages
,
status
,
styles
and
strategies
of black identity. As with any outline of thought and reaction, these categories are meant to provide a convenient handle on broad trends within black culture. They are neither exhaustive nor pure, since they bleed between lines of strict definition. Yet, they can help to identify and organize ideas of cultural identity that unmistakably imprint Cosby’s beliefs.

The stages of black identity refer to how blacks dynamically negotiate offensive, misleading or troubling information about black life. The first stage is stereotype, where white prejudiced beliefs and bigoted intuitions are dressed as objective observation and common sense—from D. W. Griffith’s film
Birth of a Nation
, portraying black males as rapist thugs, to Smith and Murray’s book
The Bell Curve,
offering “scientific” proof of black intellectual inferiority. Racial stereotypes may contain strands of truth wrapped around knots of willful ignorance and deadly distortion. At its heart, a stereotype is a lazy assessment of the other, a sloppy projection of bias onto a vulnerable target: Blacks are dumb, lazy, criminal, sex-crazed and so on. In early film and television, blacks were only seen as coons, maids, cooks, butlers and the like. Blacks spend a great deal of time fighting these labels and proving they’re not true.
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Cosby has attempted to resist stereotypes from the start of his career.
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The second stage is archetype, or the projection by blacks of the defining characteristics of black identity. Since most stereotypes are negative—and even when they involve ostensibly flattering traits like sexual prowess or the ability to dance and sing, they are tinged with paternalism and condescension—black archetypes are usually positive and spotlight the virtues of black identity. Thus, blacks reject Stepin Fetchit’s shuffling, bowing, dim-witted, demeaning portrayals of black masculinity in film and offer in its place the dignity and poise of Sidney Poitier’s legendary film roles, or Bill Cosby’s vast body of work on television. (But millionaire Fetchit, born Lincoln Theodore Perry, said before his death at age eighty-three in 1985 that all “the things that [Bill] Cosby and [Sidney] Poitier have done wouldn’t be possible if I hadn’t broken that law.”)
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Blacks argue that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is not as accurate a reflection of black life and identity, and not nearly as heroic, as the one presented in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
. Archetypes embody the efforts of black folk to wrest the authority of self-definition from whites who fail to see the beauty and power of black life, and to redefine our identities in more edifying terms.

The third stage is antitype, or the expression by blacks of the irreverent meanings of blackness that transgress against received beliefs or accepted norms. The creation of antitypes—from blaxploitation films to hip-hop music, from the comic routines of Richard Pryor to the silhouette art of Kara Walker, from Audre Lorde’s lesbian scholarship and activism to “homothug” gay drug dealer Omar portrayed on television’s
The Wire
by Michael K. Williams—permits blacks to challenge visions of blackness that exclude the unsavory and the politically incorrect. Antitypes embody efforts to explore the experiences and identities of blacks who are usually kept—because of class status, lack of power, gender and sexual orientation—from being visible in archetypal black representations. Black archetypes provide the backdrop for influential blacks to elevate or sink antitypical visions of blackness—for instance, Cosby’s embrace of antitype through his support of nontraditional gender roles on
The Cosby Show
and his resistance to antitype through his criticisms of the new black comics and hip-hop culture. The appeal to archetypes also permits powerful blacks to heap scorn and stigma on blacks who fall within antitypes’ borders, whether they are poor or gay or single mothers. Cosby’s blasting of poor blacks for their failure to hold “up their end in this deal” is a perfect example.

It should be noted that the work of some blacks crosses between the stages of black identity. Toni Morrison’s novels, and her literary and cultural criticism, may be viewed as both archetypal and antitypical, since they support
and
subvert beliefs about black identity. And Kara Walker’s visual art experiments with the images of blacks produced by racist whites, appropriating and signifying on stereotypes of black identity while veering into antitypical territory. At times, as with the comedy of Keenan Ivory Wayans on his 1990s sketch variety series,
In Living Color
, or the gangsta raps of Snoop Dogg, the line between stereotype and antitype is barely discernible, a point not always lost on creators of
black art who seek to play with negative portrayals of black life in order to explore, and, sometimes, unmask them.
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In the main, Cosby has been hugely unsympathetic to such efforts.

The stages of black identity are closely related to the styles of black identity, which have to do with seeing black culture and identity in either complex or simple terms. By extension, the styles of black identity concern whether we will be absolute or comparative, fundamental or flexible, in our views of blackness. Is black identity a once-and-for-all proposition that is settled in advance of social and psychological factors, or is it continually transformed by these and other forces? For instance, in the stages of black identity, stereotypes are seen by many blacks as negative, archetypes are seen as positive, and antitypes are viewed with great suspicion, depending on the kinds of political and racial struggles one seeks to wage. Often, black identity is reduced to the mantra of “positive” versus “negative”: An image or identity either uplifts or degrades black folk. Cosby is squarely in this tradition of interpretation. He decries “what many of today’s black comics are doing with the legacy he left them. Where Cosby’s routines were mostly good-natured and colorblind, he thinks comics are now foulmouthed, misogynistic and too eager to reinforce negative stereotypes of black people.”
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While positive-versus-negative conversations are often productive when directed at obvious examples—few blacks would disagree with the contention that Rush Limbaugh’s 2003 attack on the talent of black quarterback Donovan McNabb was laden with vicious stereotype—they are just as likely to stall in
more difficult cases, especially when competing visions of black identity are evoked within the culture.

For example, is rap music positive or negative? In the archetypal vision of blackness, that question is almost always answered in the negative because it is believed that rap embraces stereotypes of black people as violent, oversexed and criminally inclined, an argument Cosby has made on numerous occasions.
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The question of negative-versus-positive is seen as valuable because it yields the greatest insight about the processes and contexts of black identity. The antitypical vision of blackness might answer that despite rap’s admitted vices, it possesses, at its best, redeeming virtues: It counters official visions of history with narratives drawn from despised young folk; it joins the word and the drum, elemental aspects of black expressive culture; and it permits poor black folk another exit from the ghetto, even as its formerly poor artists continue to tout its virtues with mixed results. The answer to the question of rap’s influence points to competing visions of black identity, represented on one side by positive-versus-negative and on the other by complex-versus-simple.