On Monday May 17, Bill Cosby was a speaker to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education at Constitution Hall at Howard University.
And instead of giving a nice cheery pep talk on education for blacks, he used the opportunity to publicly criticize and challenge the black community.
I admire his audaciousness to use such a forum to arouse the blacks with the truth and to risk his own image to challenge others to improve themselves.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics’.”
“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!”
”These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, saying, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?”
“People used to be ashamed. . . . [Today] a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands,’ or men or whatever you call them now.”
“People putting their clothes on backward: Isn’t that a sign of something gone wrong? . . . People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn’t it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up . . . and got all type of needles (piercing) going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a . . . thing about Africa.”
“I think that it is time for concerned African Americans to march, galvanize and raise the awareness about this epidemic to transform our helplessness, frustration and righteous indignation into a sense of shared responsibility and action.”
I also like this comment Cosby said years ago when he urged a group of young blacks to put more effort into their studies the way Asian students do.
“Do you know why they are called Asians?” he asked. “Because they always get A’s.”
Links:
Bravo for Bill Cosby – Thomas Sowell
Bill Cosby’s Pointed Remarks May Spark Much Needed Debate – Cynthia Tucker
NAACP leaders stunned by remarks of prominent comedian
His comments last Monday have ignited a firestorm
What Bill Cosby Said
Bill Cosby Stands Behind Critical Comments