Opinion of Bill Cosby

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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, What he drive, Where he stay, Where he work, Who you be... 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. In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around. 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 they won't spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.

I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol? And where is the father? Or who is his father?

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. With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail.

Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' — or men or whatever you call them now. We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us. We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.

We cannot blame the white people any longer.

It's not like any of what he said isn't true. Just look at the 1991 LA riots. Yea, that will change people's opinion of you. It's not like there isn't a culture of failure in the black community.

I swear sometimes I think many of you largely live in a fantasy world. I think I'll pay more heed to Bill Cosby and Don Lemon then the white upper middle class social justice warriors of Atlas.

So much of this is total drivel. Barack Obama is the whitest acting black guy in the US, and 6 whites in 10 still hate him viscerally. You can't get too uppity, you know.

As for Cosby, he made his fame and fortune in the only avenue besides sports that black men are socially permitted to thrive in in the US, namely entertainment. If he had pursued any other career path -- education, engineering, etc. -- that wasn't totally shut out to him like business, he would have faced decades of underemployment before being forced out of work entirely by the 2008 economic crash. The heights he uses to lecture the struggling black masses are frail, indeed.

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What I dislike about Cosby (besides the rape thing. Way to stereotype black people, Dr. Morality) is the fact that he uses 'aesthetics' as the main criteria for disliking black "culture", which he never defines himself, and that he confounds his distaste with cultural tropes with the (bad) social conditions of impoverished black people by arguing, somehow, that one implies the other.

Cosby himself may never define what he means by black culture, leaving the whole basis of his argument implicit, but his disingenuous supporters fill that gap with whatever prejudice they happen to bear.

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What I dislike about Cosby (besides the rape thing. Way to stereotype black people, Dr. Morality) is the fact that he uses 'aesthetics' as the main criteria for disliking black "culture", which he never defines himself, and that he confounds his distaste with cultural tropes with the (bad) social conditions of impoverished black people by arguing, somehow, that one implies the other.

So you disliked that he was a old man, who like most old men complain about the youth today.

Cosby and his supporters go considerably past complaining about youth. He's condemning 40+ million people on the basis of what a subset of youth do today.

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What? Who ever implied that the black community is silent about the dysfunction of poor US blacks, or that it needs a Bill Cosby or you to make claims about what is somehow unknown? Any number of columns in black and mainstream, US and foreign, newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc. demonstrates otherwise. Just because you don't read them doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

And nowhere did I imply that Cosby "put these notions into people's heads." People have their own prejudices which they carry with them, and feed it with examples whenever them meet them, and ignore cases when it doesn't. Both Barack and Michelle Obama lecture the same message to downwardly mobile black people that Cosby thinks he is giving, and that fact matters to these prejudiced people not at all because the Obamas don't use vituperative or condemnatory language. If anything, those two are hated more than the down and out blacks.

If it were simply the matter of having the satisfaction of seeing a hypocrite go down in flames (a public entertainer condemning youth -- and everyone else -- for the youth following the trends set by the public entertainment industry), then I should be the happiest to see Cosby ruined by these rape charges. In fact, I wish he would survive them (by showing that they could not have possibly happened), just so he can be taken down later.