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05/31/2004:

"Shrill Bill Cosby and the speech that shocked black America--Ebonics! Weird Names! $500 Shoes!"

by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Village Voice
I never got Fat Albert. Dumb Donald wore a lampshade for a hat, Russell dressed like a bag lady, and Bucky appeared to be the victim of a back-alley orthodontist. Bill Cosby's distorted, funny-looking kids couldn't shoot fire from their hands, and they wouldn't know a weather dominator from a flux capacitor. Instead, they were a dumb and dumpy bunch who conquered the travails of life (deodorant? candy overload?) with one simple weapon—Fat Albert's formidable moral center.

I thought about that moral center last week, when Cosby ventured down to Washington and ripped into the have-nots among us. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Ed, and the Coz had been invited to Chocolate City by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP proper, and Howard University. The triumvirate had decided to honor Cosby for having "advanced the promise of Brown." Cosby decided to do some advancing of his own.

The comedian launched into a relentless attack on poor and working-class African Americans, criticizing them for everything from what they name their kids to how they speak. "Ladies and gentlemen, the lower-economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," he told the audience, in remarks later quoted by gossip columnists. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for their kids—$500 sneakers for what?"

And then: "They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't?' 'Where you is?' . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"
Ouch.
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