Bill Cobsy, The Nexus of Father Figure and Power Corruption

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"Pound Cake" speech, Bill Cosby, Conrad Bain, Culture of Poverty, Diff'rent Strokes (1978-86), Education, Father Figures, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Jell-O, Misogyny, NBC, Racism, Rape, Robert Reed, Sexual Assault, The Brady Bunch (1969-74), The Cosby Show (1984-92), Violence

Jell-O Pudding Pops ad with Bill Cosby, circa 1983, November 20, 2014. (http://pinterest.com).

In the aftermath of my Mom’s second divorce in September ’89, she would sometimes engage me in conversations about manhood and fatherhood. It was as if she didn’t think of me as a man in really any sense at all. This despite years of handling adult responsibilities and running interference between her and my now ex-stepfather Maurice.

George Michael, “Father Figure” video screen shot, 1988. (http://vevo.com).

One Christmas holiday day in ’90, we were sitting in the living room at 616 watching a rerun of The Cosby Show on NBC, then the most popular show on the most popular network in the US. My Mom asked me, “If you could pick your father, you’d want it to be Cosby, right?” I stared blankly at my Mom, wondering where the heck that question came from. I didn’t say anything. But my Mom took that as me thinking, “Yeah, he would’ve been a great father for you.”

At the time, I certainly thought that Bill Cosby would’ve been an entertaining father, if I’d been lucky enough to have a near-billionaire as my dad. What I really wanted was my father, Jimme Collins, to get himself sober, to be lucid enough to talk to now that I was in my twenties. Beyond this, I didn’t give Cosby or my Mom’s question and comments much thought.

Over the years, I’ve watched TV dads come and go, frequently with some tragedy or controversy. Robert Reed of The Brady Bunch (1969-74) fame comes to mind, with his in-the-closet status and his early death from colon cancer and HIV complications. So too does Conrad Bain, because of the backlash Diff’rent Strokes (1978-86) received as a result of its dated way of treating issues such as race and poverty with his character Phillip Drummond as the father to two Black kids, not because of his personal life. But Bill Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, an obstetrician and gynecologist (talk about irony) and father of four daughters and one son, became for many “America’s Dad,” a title that the media has celebrated recently in the wake of The Cosby Show‘s thirtieth anniversary of its first airing earlier this fall. He was supposed to be above reproach.

Bill Cosby in midst of his “Pound Cake” speech (with Rev. Jesse Jackson in background), NAACP 50th Anniversary of Brown decision gala, Washington, DC, May 17, 2004. (http://blackpast.com).

I’ve long been disappointed with Cosby, though. For his culture-of-poverty arguments against welfare mothers, crack babies and pregnant teenagers. For his frequent need to chastise Blacks living in poverty for not knowing “proper moral behavior” (this from a person who purportedly holds a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts). Not to mention his double-standard on monogamy.

Now even the oblivious set has become aware of the growing number of accusations from women who’ve said that Cosby had allegedly committed rape and other forms of sexual assault going back at least thirty-two years. I’ve been aware of these accusations and rumors for nearly twenty years, in the wake of Cosby’s son Ennis’ death in ’97. I hoped that these accusations were false ones at first. Who would want to believe that “America’s Dad,” the Jell-O Pudding and Pudding Pop Man, was also drugging and raping women in his spare time?

I think what we need to recognize the most, maybe even more than systemic racism or our culture of imperialism and violence, is that this society of ours is somewhere between an oligarchy and a plutocracy. Bill Cosby’s stance on race, community and morals has only mattered because of his fame and fortune, not because of his expertise and certainly not because of his professional experience. Bill Cosby’s a comedian, an actor, a philanthropist and a philanderer, and perhaps a rapist as well. Americans all too frequently fall for the facade of father figures and others whom seem to say what we want to hear. When all those with power and money really want to do is to wield that power and money to their own capricious and narcissistic ends.

Touré’s Post-Blackness ≈ I’ma Be Me?

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Pound Cake" speech, Acting White, American Identity, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Bill Cosby, Black Identity, Blackness, Boy @ The Window, I'ma Be Me (2009), Identity Issues, Intrarace Relations, Litmus Test, Post-Blackness, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Post-Racialism, Race, Racism, Reaching Youth, Self-Discovery, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Touré, Wanda Sykes, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011)

Illustration of red wolf with dinner after a hunt, by Sandra Koch, September 29, 2012. (http://nc-es.fws.gov). In public domain.

I know, I know. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011) has been out for over a year, and I’ve finally, finally managed to read it in the past couple of weeks. I did not want to like this book. I found — and still find — the title to be pretentious and over the top, a perfect fit for Touré’s Twitter and TV persona. Touré values his ideas like they all are new finds of platinum or a form of safe and sustained nuclear fusion. Sometimes Touré can be cutting-edge, but many times, he goes over the edge (as was the case in August on MSNBC with his “niggerization” of Obama comment).

But in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, Touré puts forward a variety of ideas and insights that I’ll be contemplating in my blogo-neighborhood off and on over the next few months. Touré’s is a very good book. It’s one that is both intellectual and yet revealing about the challenges Blacks face inter- and intraracially in the early twenty-first century.

The premise — once I got past the ridiculous term post-Blackness — is that African Americans and America has advanced just far enough in terms of race for all of our old conceptions of Blackness to have now become meaningless. That Blackness is fully infused in American — maybe even world — culture. That there was never one way to be Black in the first place. Touré himself says, “[t]here is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black — or is inauthentically Black — is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser blackness.” (p. 5).

Litmus paper used in litmus tests, September 29, 2012. (http://chemistry.about.com).

Ironically, though, much of Touré’s book picks apart the notion that the US has become post-racial in the past couple of decades, as best exemplified by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Of course, Touré uses notions of Blackness and where it has expanded beyond the authenticity litmus test to show that race/racial bias/racism is still alive and well in America. At the same time, Touré shows how post-Blackness has also provided opportunities for millions of Americans White, Black and Brown to reach beyond their own misconceptions of race and themselves, to enrich our lives in politics, scholarship, the arts, not to mention through hip-hop.

One of my main criticisms of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness is that Touré uses a term like post-Blackness (mind you, I hate terms like post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-racialism too) and doesn’t try in any way to provide a definition that distinguishes it from post-racial. For the purposes of this post, though, the main issue I have revolves around Touré virtually ignoring poor and struggling African Americans in his post-Blackness tour-de-force.

I get it when Touré says that he “never lived a typical Black experience.” (p. 53). At least, I think I do. That despite Touré middle class upbringing, middle-class neighborhood, private school experience, that his is but one representation of Blackness. And that Touré’s experience is as representative of Blackness as my experience of being a Hebrew-Israelite preteen in a working poor family while enrolled in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York would’ve been thirty years ago (see my post “A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity” from September ’11). Or, for that matter, Wanda Sykes’ comedy special I’ma Be Me (2009) was for her.

That’s great for us, for anyone with enough intellectual power, outsider status, unusual amounts of wisdom, or just plain middle class standing to get the details of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. But when Touré does bring up the twenty-five percent of Blacks who aren’t part of this post-Blackness elite, he talks at them, and not to them. Yes, I completely agree that Blackness isn’t to be defined in terms of poverty, prison, and projects. No, Blackness shouldn’t be defined by how “down” one is with an impoverished community or how “hard” someone is for beating the shit out of another person (see my “Raised on Hip-Hop?” post from April ’10).

Hakeem Olajuwon posting up Patrick Ewing, 1994 NBA Finals, June 1994. (http://rgj.com).

Still, while I stand with almost one hundred percent of what Touré says in Who Afraid of Post-Blackness in ’12, I don’t think that this book would’ve reached me thirty years ago. The way I would’ve seen it in ’82 or even ’87, a middle class Black guy telling me about how my poverty is insignificant to who I was would’ve been excommunicated from my life for eternity. It wouldn’t have helped me at all deal with the pressures I faced socially, academically and in my family (see my “The Silent Treatment” post from June ’10).

Touré wouldn’t have been able to provide for me a roadmap for how to be me and to ignore the crowd of those in my life — White and Black — who regularly told me that I wasn’t authentically Black or that I was “talkin’ White.” If mild-mannered me at twelve wouldn’t have been reached by Touré’s chapter on Black artists taking Blackness and standing it on its head, I imagine that young African Americans growing up in poverty or struggling with identity issues would find Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness about as easy to embrace as Bill Cosby’s criticism of poor Blacks in ’04.

For me as a writer, the question of how to reach beyond the already converted is always an issue. Touré, as good as he is in his book, merely affirms the path I’ve traveled over the past thirty-one years. He doesn’t really reach those whose path of Blackness has barely begun.