Cosby's black conservatism

If Rev. Wright had stuck to building the self-esteem and fortunes of "his Own" without getting into the "evils of Whitey" stuff, there never would have been a problem. Patronizing only Catholic-owned businesses would be fine; telling all your Catholic friends that the Jewish baker down the street puts poison in his bread would be a different matter.

Is Bill Cosby really a conservative, or is this one of those cases where a liberal strays from the party line on an issue or two and gets labeled as the Other? I've been a Cosby fan ever since my uncle loaned me his Wonderfulness album, so I'd love to think he's one of the good guys; but I thought he was still pretty liberal on everything but personal responsibility. (Which is a pretty big piece, granted.) Guess it's time to put his book on my list.

I saw Cosby and Poussiant interviewed about "Come On People" (which I will probably buy as soon as it comes out in paperback).

Currently, I am reading John McWhorter's book, "Losing the Race." McWhorter's views are somewhat complementary but also somewhat at odds to Cosby and Poussaint.

He identifies three factors as the chief psychological/cultural barriers to black progress in the present day: victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism. Where he agrees with Cosby and Poussaint, it seems to me, is in the sense that "the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." I think that's very healthy.

I'm all for self-determination and self-sufficiency, but it's possible to achieve those two goals, I believe, without the kind of separatism that leads to alienation and disaffection from the larger society.

Rod, unless I'm mistaken you still haven't engaged Obama's own "Cosby" moments on the campaign trail where on more than one occasion he's given a passionate "personal responsibility" speech to a majority black audience citing the importance of it to everything from education to healthcare (a little digging on You Tube might turn them up). I think they're getting underplayed in the MSM because they challenge the caricature they want to paint of Obama as a "blame America first" ultra liberal.

Secondly, I finally got a chance to talk with some of my friends who attend TUCC last week. As always, I'm struck by the way they are both passionate about progressive politics but have surprisingly "conservative" orthodox theology. Additionally, I again felt that these black women were incredibly passionate about increasing self-reliance and personal responsibility: denouncing uninvolved parents as a major hurdle for their own black youth.

I consistently find that when you actually engage and listen to people on a personal level, the facade of our stereotypes really do fall apart and we realize people are more complex than the labels we apply to them. I'd apply this to conservatives too. I'm consider myself part of the "radical middle" and I love to torture my liberal friends with evidence to the contrary that conservatives are "old-rich-white-republicans who hate the poor and the environment". When you're at your best, Rod, you help fracture that caricature.

Korean people don't decide to only patronize Korean businesses. They choose to live in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods and it is their entrepreneurship that makes the business.

You've never been to Koreatown in Los Angeles, Annandale in Northern Virginia, Koreatown in San Francisco.

I think I'm just old enough (barely) to have had the experience, faintly, of growing up in what amounted to a Catholic ghetto (albeit a very nice middle-class one) -- there were lots of Catholic families in my neighborhood who belonged to the local parish and sent their children to the school, and many of us lived close enough to walk to school together. (When President Nixon pushed up the start of daylight savings time in the early 70s, we were actually walking to school in the dark. What parent today would let his or her children walk to school in the dark?! But my parents didn't give it a second thought.) Many of the guys I grew up with and went to school with also belonged to my scout troop. There was a member of the parish who ran a restaurant, and he always catered parish events. There were other businesses we patronized that were known to be owned by Catholics. The manager of the local grocery store was high school classmate of my mother's (of course she had gone to a Catholic high school. I don't remember how old I was when I came to understand that not everyone was Catholic, because pretty much everyone in my universe was. It was like John F. Powers' book *The Last Catholic in America*, where Catholic school children grow up thinking that there are two religions in the world, Catholic and Public, and each one has its own school system. ;-)

Matt K
Secondly, I finally got a chance to talk with some of my friends who attend TUCC last week. As always, I'm struck by the way they are both passionate about progressive politics but have surprisingly "conservative" orthodox theology. Additionally, I again felt that these black women were incredibly passionate about increasing self-reliance and personal responsibility: denouncing uninvolved parents as a major hurdle for their own black youth.

As an actual progressive, abet a white one, let me chime in here and state that existing progressive policies have been somewhat disastrous when aim at black people, and that I completely agree with Cosby.

To fix communities that have no economy but are not crime-ridden(1), I would stop aiming help at individuals and start aiming it at communities. This is, and conservatives will hate it, going to require the government to purchase property and fix it up and build buildings and lease and rent it out below cost for a while.

I.e, don't subsidize individual people, subsidize the entire area. This will, if you can imagine, operate something like lowering taxes during a recession. More people will do business in that area, because it's cheaper. You'll even attract new people to the area. Then you slowly unsidize the area.

Progressivism has always been the easiest to do when aimed at individuals who need somewhere to sleep overnight, and hardest to do when attempting to 'social engineer', and its black policies has been an abject failure for the past 20 decades. Of course, no political philosophy is that great at it, or has actually accomplished anything there.

1) For crime-ridden ones, duh, you have to get rid of the crime first, which is another problem entirely.

My answer was (is) that respecting oneself and one's own people does not require one to demonize other peoples -- and if it does, you'd better rethink it.

Except for fags.

Tyro, I wonder if blacks *are* an "ethnic community" - I'm white, but lived with my family in a black neighborhood for awhile. There were black neighbors on welfare. These folks were "shunned" by their black neighbors who were middle class, but who had chosen the neighborhood to live among blacks. There were also Caribbean immigrants, who despised the American blacks on welfare. Having bought one of the "welfare houses" on the street, one of these immigrants literally danced in the middle of the street to learn it would no longer be a "hovel." These various mentalities existed side by side, and we seemed the only ones to talk to them all.

I've seen this in other neighborhoods in which I've lives, which makes me wonder if the various "subgroups" are at odds like that, is there a way to have an "ethnic community"?

I grew up in a household with two parents and a terrific grandmother, who quit the 10th grade so that she could help raise her brothers and sisters. Discipline, church, respect for self and others, and success in school were expected and highly valued. These values were never identified in my household as "black" conservatism or any kind of conservatism. In fact, we were (and continue to be) staunch Democrats. I guess my point is that the values of personal responsibility and hard work can be held by individuals that don't identify themselves as political conservatives.

The kid on my block training to be a drug dealer is a human being. As is Cindy the friendly neighborhood streetwalker. As are the neighbors who call the cops (and maybe they may actually show up) when the dealers decide to blast their car stereos. However, zooming out till the differences are no longer visible doesn't make the crime in my neighborhood go down.
The black middle class deserted this neighborhood years ago, taking their values with them. Single motherhood, drugs, an education that serves to make you feel good as opposed to one that gave you marketable skills haven't done the black neighborhood any favors.