Tim Christensen

English Department
Denison University
christ65@msu.edu

 

Review of: Michael Eric Dyson’s Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?New York: Basic Civitas, 2005.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong. People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t that a sign of something? [emphasis added]

–Bill Cosby, “Address”

 

Bill Cosby’s controversial “Pound Cake Speech,” delivered at the NAACP’s May 2004 commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, rapidly generated a stream of media commentary. The political context for the speech, which would have to include the conservative desire to criticize the NAACP and lay claim to the legacy of the civil rights movement, combined with the exhortative nature of the speech itself (Cosby told his audience to “hit the streets” and “clean it out yourselves”) that seemed to express deeply-held but taboo American sentiments regarding the black underclass, made for a voluminous and often virulent reaction. University of Pennsylvania humanities professor Michael Eric Dyson entered the fray almost immediately, and because, as he claims in Is Bill Cosby Right?, he “was one of the few blacks to publicly disagree with Cosby,” he “ended up in numerous media outlets arguing in snippets, sound bites, or ripostes to contrary points of view” (2). Having read or viewed some of Dyson’s early responses to Cosby’s remarks, I did not expect this book to deviate from the popular discourses through which issues of race are interpreted in the mainstream news media. Unsurprisingly, the media discussion of race following Cosby’s remarks was essentially similar to the one that preceded his remarks, with the difference, I think, that Cosby emboldened many white conservatives to make explicitly racist arguments about black bodies and black culture that they might otherwise have resentfully suppressed. Bill O’Reilly, for instance, complained that Cosby was allowed to say things for which “me and a number of other white Americans” have been “vilified” (“Cosby’s Crusade”). Liberal commentators, on the other hand, played their habitually impotent role in the debate on race, generally accepting Cosby’s remarks as truthful but claiming they were mean-spirited: they were careful not to question the dogma of black cultural pathology and instead limited themselves to critiquing the manner or spirit in which the remarks were made. Jabari Asim, for instance, believes “it is true that some blacks continue to engage in conduct that contradicts and undermines the aims of the civil rights movement,” adding that Cosby “has every right to take them to task.” Dyson, despite his comments about Cosby’s “elitism,” fits comfortably into the latter category, willing to concede the cultural inferiority of black Americans as the entry point into the legitimate discussion, and to work from there.

 

In Is Bill Cosby Right?, however, Dyson deviates from the strict doctrine of black cultural pathology in a couple of significant ways. First, while Dyson’s argument does, ultimately, resolve itself into a classic liberal reprimand of Cosby for his lack of sympathy, at certain points in his argument he also emphasizes the distinction between the ethical and the normative that is so often lost in discussions of race and inequality in the United States. Additionally, he offers two brief discussions of the performativity of racial identity that might have provided an alternative framework to the stultifying American dogma of race had Dyson been willing to acknowledge and develop more fully the implications of a performative theory of racial identity.

 

Dyson’s rhetorical strategy is to begin each chapter with a snippet of Cosby’s speech and to take Cosby’s claims initially quite literally, testing their facticity against empirical data. Cosby’s false claims and truncated analyses then serve as the basis from which Dyson provides a broader discussion of the immense gulf between the perceptions and realities of racial inequality in America. This strategy works most effectively, I believe, in the chapter titled “Classrooms and Cell Blocks,” which opens with Cosby’s assertion that there is a 50% drop-out rate for black high school students (a statistic Cosby also repeats in interviews and in subsequent speeches), and points out that this claim is simply wrong, a case of both factual inaccuracy and hyperbole. Dyson takes the actual figure from a study by Alec Klein, published in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (Autumn 2003), that estimates a 17% drop-out rate (Dyson 71). (The National Center for Education Statistics calculates a much lower 10.9% drop out rate for black high school students, compared to the overall national average of 10.7% [Kaufman 28]). Dyson then uses the difference between Cosby’s perception and any sort of empirically verifiable reality to contrast widely held and frequently expressed perceptions of the “black poor” (or “Ghettocracy”) among the “black middle class” (or “Afristocracy”) to various realities of the production and reproduction of inequality in American education (Dyson xiii-xiv).

 

In the same chapter, Dyson takes Cosby to task for other erroneous claims, attempting to turn the tissue of factual error in Cosby’s speech back upon itself in order both to place Cosby’s remarks in a context of black middle class elitism and to redefine the discussion of American racial inequality in a more complex cultural and historical framework. I am pleased that Dyson (or anybody, finally) scrutinizes Cosby’s comments on Black English. Cosby derides the speech of “the lower economic [black] people” as essentially incomprehensible (“I can’t even talk the way these people talk”) and denies that is English (“It doesn’t want to speak English,” “There’s no English being spoken”); he justifies this position by claiming that “these people aren’t Africans; they don’t know a damned thing about Africa.” Yet, in attempting to disconnect black speech from African roots, Cosby unwittingly chooses as his example of “bad grammar” a construction in African American speech that linguists have demonstrated to come from West African languages (the construction “where you is,” which Cosby repeats and claims cannot understand). Dyson exploits Cosby’s statements on this matter and the practices of bodily adornment (dress and tattooing) first to expose his ignorance of African cultural practices (both contemporary and historical), then to put forth the ideas that black American culture need not draw from African culture to have value, and, finally, to expose the conflation of the normative and the ethical in the public discussion of black language and culture.

 

The last example shows how exhausting it can be to attempt to isolate and to explain everything that is wrong with any given statement in Cosby’s speech. Here Cosby is not only factually wrong, but simple-minded in his conception of what makes for cultural legitimacy. Furthermore, the foundational assumption of Cosby’s critique (without which it would cease to be a critique) is the assumed equivalence of cultural “correctness” and moral virtue. It is therefore necessary first to demonstrate that he is wrong on a literal level (some Africans do, in fact, practice tattooing and body piercing, etc.), then to explain all the reasons that his criteria for establishing the relevance of his factually inaccurate observation are self-contradictory or simply dumb (why would the fact that a custom is not derived from an African culture strip it of expressive power or legitimacy?), and finally to explain that the foundational assumption behind the critique is an unthinking conflation of the regulative and the ethical. While the argumentative strategy of the book is up to this remarkably tedious task, Dyson nevertheless seems to get bogged down in this process to such an extent that he fails to develop his own arguments for an alternative approach to thinking about race in contemporary America.

 

Dyson comes closest to developing an alternative frame for a discussion of race in those portions of the book that emphasize the performative aspect of racial identity, in which he focuses on the various conflictual processes according to which young African Americans, in particular, negotiate and renegotiate, enact, and, in the very process of enacting, redefine and resignify their racial subject positions. It is already a departure from American discourses of race for Dyson simply to distinguish between correctness (as in speaking “Standard English”) and moral value (Black English is often conflated with profanity and assumed to have somehow a causal relationship to intellectual degeneracy and moral turpitude), but it is in the sections of performative analysis that Dyson develops the distinction between the normative and the ethical that is the finest feature of his argument. Twice Dyson seems to be on the verge of offering a performative framework that could present an alternative to Cosby’s fetishistic ethics of race. The first instance occurs when, early in the book, Dyson introduces the term “antitype.” In this brief discussion, Dyson opposes the complexities of the semiotic construction of the subject exploited by those who employ “antitypical” strategies of resistance to the fetishistic world of absolutes that enables the Manichean moral universe of black conservatives such as Cosby. While many black conservatives rely on “a tradition of interpretation” that reduces “black identity . . . to a mantra of ‘positive’ versus ‘negative,'” those who employ the antitype assert that “black identity” cannot be reduced to “a once-and-for-all proposition that is settled in advance of social and psychological factors” because it is “continually transformed by these and other factors” (34). Antitypical strategies of resistance, it seems, exploit the irresolvable tension between the signifier and the signified, a tension that cannot be acknowledged by those who, like Cosby, seek to reduce images of blacks to either “positive” or “negative” “once-and-for-all” (34). In its simplest form, the antitype therefore alters the “positive” or “negative” valence of a given image, highlighting, in the process, the fact that the simple repetition of an image alters, distorts, and transforms its meaning. In Dyson’s terms, this means that black writers, artists, and musicians frequently employ the performative identity politics of the antitype so that “the line between stereotype and antitype is barely discernible, a point not lost on creators of black art who seek to play with negative portrayals of black life in order to explore, and, sometimes, unmask them” (33-34). The antitype forms a potentially effective method of resistance to the extent that it is at the same time different and indistinguishable from the stereotype that it repeats, or to the extent that it exploits the foundational ambivalence–the irreducible, uncanny difference from itself–of the stereotype.

 

During his discussion of the antitype, Dyson often seems close to Homi Bhaba’s conceptualization of stereotyping. Bhabha conceives of the stereotype in racial discourse as a structuring device that provides a constitutive point of identification for the (racial) subject. Precisely because the stereotype serves this purpose, it “must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed” (66). Because the antitype similarly draws attention to the stereotype as the always excessive foundation of racial subjectivity, Dyson might have used this concept in the way the black artists he cites in his discussion do (his literary example is Toni Morrison). That is, Dyson might have used the concept of the antitype as the basis for an alternative ethical framework for imagining racial identity. Such an ethical framework would be based on constantly calling attention to the stereotype’s uncanny difference from itself. Such an ethics would therefore be based on the refusal to attach an image to the aporetic point of identification that (reiteratively) founds the subject. This refusal would, of course, require the sacrifice of the false sense of subjective self-consistency and metaphysical certainty that attaching any definitive image to this space of subjective paradox supplies. Such an ethical framework would, instead, recognize and leave open the space of what Derrida has termed the “ungraspable . . . instant” of “exceptional decision” that marks the discursive emergence of the (in this case, racial) subject (274). Because the antitype differs from conventional stereotypes precisely because it is built on a recognition of the ultimately indeterminable founding moment of selfhood, it might have provided the basis for a reconceptualization of the (racial) self along the lines opened by this acknowledgement. Such a reconfigured notion of selfhood would contrast starkly with the imaginary subjective wholeness produced through papering over the space of the real with the image of the black body–in other words, through the fetishization of the black body–as Cosby does on behalf of the black middle class (274). It would render the Manichean worldview dictated by the assumption of the fetishized absolute–in this case the racial stereotype–untenable, because it would expose the stereotype as contingent, a logically arbitrary and infinitely exchangeable effect of the semiological construction of the self.

 

Dyson engages in a second analysis of black identity as performance when he discusses black fashion and speech in the context of American consumerism in the chapter “What’s in a Name (Brand)?” Here he argues at length that the revulsion Bill Cosby expresses toward black bodies and black speech

 

echoes ancient white and black protests of strutting and signifying black flesh. It is impossible to gauge Cosby’s disdain, and the culture’s too, without following the black body on the plantations and streets where its styles were seen as monstrous and irresistible. (103-04)

 

Arguing that black youth culture should be understood as the negotiation of identity in a broader consumer culture “where performance has always been at a premium,” he maintains that black youth forge identities through a complex dialectical interaction with mainstream images and ideals that allows them to “both embrace and resist the mainstream in finding their place in the aesthetic ecology” of American society (113). Dyson here terms this strategy of creating and recreating one’s identity in a hostile environment “jubilant performance,” and once again seems on the verge of offering an alternative to Cosby’s fetishism (113).

 

Here, however, Dyson does not just drop the subject of performativity before it yields any substantive analysis, as he does with the antitype earlier in the book, but actually repudiates the possibilities of a performative ethics. When he argues that the performance of black identity does not draw its power from “the ethically questionable gesture” of “merely posing,” but is instead rooted in black cultural traditions, Dyson retreats into a humanistic ethics of identity for which identity must ground itself in some cultural essence in order to achieve depth and meaning, despite his having profoundly problematized the idea of “authenticity” in his criticisms of Cosby’s speech (115). We are not surprised to discover that this retreat is marked by an avowal of black cultural pathology (“There is no denying that black youth are in deep trouble” due in part to their “hunger to make violence erotic” [116]) that places Dyson comfortably back inside the boundaries of mainstream acceptability. The rest of the book is largely defined by this shift from a performative to a humanist ontology of racial identity, and Dyson, in the last two chapters, closes his book with an appeal to Christian charity that is, I think, tainted with the plea to all the Cosbies out there to feel sorrier for poor black youth and thereby overcome their “empathy deficit” (234). This appeal implicitly restores the condescending liberal acceptance of the cultural pathology of the black poor that Dyson elsewhere works hard to banish.

 

It is in the midst of Dyson’s appeal to Christian charity in these chapters, in fact, that we become fully and unequivocally aware of the meaning of the book’s subtitle. Earlier in the book, we cannot help but be aware that Dyson scrupulously distances himself from those who define the black poor in terms of moral and intellectual deficiency. When, for instance, he defines the “Ghettocracy” not only in terms of material affluence, but in terms of values and attitudes that can operate in the absence of any qualifiers of wealth or poverty–for this category includes professional “basketball and football players, but above all, hip-hop stars”–he writes that “their values and habits are alleged to be negatively influenced by their poor origins” (emphasis added) (xiv). His careful qualifications and occasional irony when representing the views of the Afristocracy, however, prove insufficient to dismantle the Afristocratic view of the black poor in the absence of any alternative to this sort of class-based ethics. Dyson’s ultimate affirmation of conservative black middle class views of the black poor becomes explicit when he asks “what to do about the poor” (234). When he answers this question by arguing that “compassion for the poor” is the “hallmark of true civilization,” we must recognize that Dyson’s language in discussing “the poor” has become that of the Christian missionary lamenting the spiritual darkness of the heathen (235). The black poor, whom Dyson has defined in terms of wealth only secondarily, and whom he has defined primarily in terms of their lack of the middle class ethics required to sanctify wealth, seem to require the intervention of bourgeois missionaries if they are to attain a state of spiritual grace. While the book’s subtitle, “Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?” can be interpreted in many ways, we come to realize that Dyson invests it with a very particular meaning: it implies that it is the moral imperative of the black middle class to uplift the “race,” and that the black middle class has “lost its mind” precisely to the extent that it has abandoned this moral imperative.

 

Dyson’s retreat from a performative to a humanist ontology of identity is, then, significantly marked by his acceptance of the cultural pathology of the black poor, and by his call to the black bourgeoisie to fulfill its historical mission to redeem the black poor by teaching them the values of God and the middle class. Dyson’s willingness to restore these two ideas to their role as organizing principles in his discourse on the black poor finally betrays the promise of his flirtation with thinking racial identity using a performative framework. In so doing he loses the chance to recognize the contingency of identity and to acknowledge the fact that “race” is merely a semiological effect of the performance of identity (be it linguistic, artistic, or otherwise). Dyson abandons as “ethically questionable” the idea that “race” exists only in the symbolic sense, providing a temporary, imaginary continuity to a radically discontinuous performance of the self (115), and restores the object of Cosby’s rant, the stereotype of the degenerate and wanton poor black, as the structuring device of Dyson’s discourse on race in order that this discourse would remain ethically sound. Dyson is, in the end, unwilling to abandon this object, despite his seeming determination to expose it as a figment of imagination in the earlier chapters.

 

In his brief discussions of the “antitype” and of “jubilant performance,” Dyson exploits the rift between image and affect, between signifier and signified, that is sutured in American ideology by a malleable racial fetishism. In his decision not to develop these arguments fully or embrace their implications, Dyson loses the opportunity to suggest a frame for rethinking the Manichean ethics of racial identity that would have the potential fundamentally to displace popular discussions of race. This is a shame because Cosby demonstrates contemporary racial fetishism in a simplified form that, I believe, would make the concept of racial fetishism cognizable, and therefore at least potentially subject to criticism, to Dyson’s popular audience. Cosby’s speech insists that one need only look at or listen to poor blacks in order to have irrefutable evidence of their degradation. Thus, Cosby appeals to his audience:

 

Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong. People putting their clothes on backwards. Isn’t that a sign of something going on wrong? Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t it a sign of something . . . . Isn’t it a sign of something when she’s got her dress all the way up to the crack? (emphasis added)

 

Much can be gleaned from these lines, in addition to Cosby’s apparent fascination with cracks. We see here that the evidence Cosby offers is not really his thin tissue of factually inaccurate claims about the black poor. Instead, Cosby’s evidence is the impressions made upon his delicate senses by poor and working-class black bodies. It is, in other words, to the self-grounding sensuous truths of black bodies that Cosby appeals. The confirmation of his views appears to him as each feature of the adornment of the bodies in this imaginary confrontation seems to come alive and speak to him. As he tells us repeatedly, he is scanning their bodies for signs–signs of degradation, of violence, signs of sexual pathology–that will tell us irrefutable truths about the bodies on whose behalf the signs speak. He indulges in fetishism in its most elemental sense: inanimate objects (clothing, bodily adornment) come alive and speak, while actual people become inanimate objects–not he or she, but over and over again, “it.” “It’s right around the corner. It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English” (emphasis added). Is it really a surprise that “it” can’t speak? How would “it”? And why would “it” need to, when “its” clothing speaks for “it,” telling us everything we need to know about “it,” offering this information as incontrovertible sensual truth? For Cosby it is clear that while the subaltern cannot speak, “its” clothing can.

 

Dyson, however, forfeits the possibility of making any efficacious critique of Cosby’s unrelenting racial fetishism–which is clearly the heart of the matter–when he repudiates the idea that racial identity is performance. His retreat into an ontology of cultural authenticity, marked by his repetitive embrace of the dogma of black cultural depravity, means that he ultimately reclaims the metaphysical boogeyman that Cosby confronts in the speech, the “monstrous and irresistible” black body, as his own (Dyson 104).

 

Given the widespread support that Cosby’s speech generated, and the fact that even those who publicly disagreed with him almost without exception accepted the essential truth of his remarks, it seems undeniable that Cosby has given voice to a form of racism with which much of America is eminently comfortable, a racism that can continue to pass itself off as “common sense.” Moreover, the immense popular response tells us something important about contemporary racism: although Cosby refers to cultural signifiers of otherness, his logic of difference is more or less identical to that of more traditional racists who take race to be biological. That is to say, although he invokes signifiers of cultural rather than biological difference, these signifiers operate in essentially the same fashion. Cosby’s invocation of the fetishized physical features that he uses to characterize and simultaneously stigmatize poor blacks requires no external evidence, only a reiterative appeal to common sense, because its truth is made self-evidently visible by the bodies that provide a point of suture for his ideals of cultural normalcy and racial progress. As Anne McClintock writes of the racialized body of nineteenth-century social sciences, “progress seems to unfold naturally before the eye as a series of evolving marks on the body . . . so that anatomy becomes an allegory of progress and history . . . reproduced as a technology of the visible” (38). Cosby offers a similar technology of the visible in the politically acceptable form of “cultural difference” that is free from the controversy and guilt that sometimes accompany the invocation of racial fetishes (e.g. The Bell Curve). This elemental similarity suggests that the distinction between understanding race in cultural and in biological terms has become more or less irrelevant in a contemporary American context: the logics of cultural and biological explanations of racial inequality are essentially identical, as, I would argue, are their material and institutional effects. Both operate on the same basis, drawing their strength from fetishized physical features that form the basis of a semiotics of the body.

 

On the other hand, by acknowledging what “race” actually is on the most fundamental level–a mere effect, in a certain ideological context, of positing the “I” in language–we might be able to move beyond the false choice of deciding whether poor blacks are naturally or merely culturally inferior. As Cosby’s speech and the response to it starkly demonstrate, “the fundamental ideological gesture consists in” attaching “an image” to “the gap opened by an act” (Zupancic 95). Dyson ultimately repeats this gesture by affixing the black body to the aporetic space opened by the performance of racial identity in order to bestow ethical certainty and respectability to his discourse on race and class. What would happen, however, if we were simply to refuse this gesture? It is, after all, possible to recognize a more complex ethical structure, one that acknowledges the space of radical indeterminacy opened by the performative act. It is, certainly, possible to refuse to paper over this space with imaginary monsters. Joan Copjec writes that it

 

is only when the sovereign incalculability of the subject is acknowledged that perceptions of difference will no longer nourish demands for the surrender of difference to processes of “homogenization,” “purification,” or any of the other crimes against otherness with which the rise of racism has begun to acquaint us. (208)

 

Cosby’s ability to conjure those signifiers of otherness that set his remarks above reproach and beyond the reach of empirical validation attests to the fact that such ethical adulthood eludes popular discussions of race in the United States. And Dyson’s failure to remark on this aspect of Cosby’s racism is a lost opportunity to frame a discussion of race that would ultimately escape the fetishistic ethics of racial otherness.

 

Works Cited

 

• Asim, Jabari. “Did Cosby Cross the Line?” Washington Post 24 May 2004. 3 Aug. 2005. <www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51273-2004May24.html>
• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994.
• Cosby, Bill. “Address at the NAACP’s Gala to Commemorate of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.” American Rhetoric. 1 Aug. 2005 <www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/billcosbypoundcakespeech.htm >
• Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law.” Trans. Mary Quaintance. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Kaufman, P., M.N. Alt, and C. Chapman. Dropout Rates in the United States: 2001 (NCES 2005-046). U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004.
• McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• O’Reilly, Bill. “Cosby’s Crusade.” Human Events Online 13 July 2004. 3 Aug. 2005 <www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=4459>
• Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.