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BILL COSBY'S MUSINGS
Thu Sep 30, 7:59 PM ET
By Gerald Boyd
For weeks, comedian Bill Cosby has been attacking the parenting failures and personal values of some African-Americans, and it's been easy to turn his comments into a big story. In fact, it's been too easy.
Instead of using Cosby's assertions as a starting point for a serious examination of what is really going on in the lives of African-Americans, and especially the urban poor, news organizations have presented them with little if any scrutiny. Occasionally, they have brought on predictable talking heads to debate his charges, but not in a way that provides real illumination or clarity.
It's the same old song. When it comes to matters involving race or class, the media often opt for the superficial, rather than expending the time and resources to determine what really is happening. That's the case in terms of Cosby's remarks.
The charges, in a number of forums and media outlets, have been explosive. He has said of black parents: "Lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. They are not parenting. They are buying things for kids -- $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'" And of black women: "Five, six children -- the same woman -- eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon, you are going to have DNA cards to tell who you are making love to. You don't know who this is. It might be your grandmother." And of black youth, he said: "... with names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail."
Such rantings have made for great sound bites with Cosby fuming about maladies common to black communities. He puts the onus on blacks themselves, arguing that they have to stop playing the role of victim.
Parents are obviously at least partly responsible for the success of their children -- a point Cosby has hammered home in the media. But why some are falling down on the job is the real issue here. To suggest that's it's simply a lack of will is superficial, at best.
News organizations give us Cosby blasting obscenity-laden rap being played by parents on their car stereos with children seated in the back, or kids wearing their hats backward and their pants swinging low. But does any of this really explain why the problems plaguing minorities continue to exist from one generation to the next?
To say that these issues are complicated hardly begins to describe the challenge the media face in trying to explain what is really happening.
News organizations encountered a similar test in the 1960s as they sought to present the story of race in America. But in many ways that challenge was tame. Race was a story full of heroes and villains, and blacks wanting and deserving to be treated as equals. Today, the story of race is one full of paradoxes. On some fronts, there has been clear progress, yet too many blacks have not just been left behind, but are not even in the game. Blacks are tired of having to explain their thinking to whites, and whites are tired of having to listen.
In today's world, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, single parents now raise more than half of black children. That's one reason why almost 10 million African-Americans are living below the poverty level with annual incomes of less than $15,000. Children who complete high school are likely to go to college, but the percentage of blacks dropping out is nearly double that of whites. And black teenagers are far more likely to become pregnant than their white counterparts, or to end up in jail.
Those are the facts, or the headlines. But they say little about the why -- and more important, what can be done to end such woes.
Once Leon Dash, then a reporter at The Washington Post, spent more than a year in a D.C. housing project to explore why teenage girls were becoming pregnant at an alarming rate. What he found was surprising and revealing. The teenagers regarded motherhood as a badge of honor rather than the yoke it would become. That's the kind of reporting we need today.
It's great that such a prominent figure as Cosby would call attention to some of the critical issues overlooked by a media now dwelling on war, politics and international strife. If only the media would take his cue and dig beneath the surface, they would be doing a far better public service that simply airing some provocative sound bites.
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