Spike Lee: The New Bill Cosby?

It is telling when you write: Bill Cosby has been pilloried for years by the radically chic who’ve disliked his efforts to get African-Americans to take more responsibility for their own success and education.”

It implies that the dominant culture believes that blacks are not responsible for their dismal academic performance.

Is this the soft bigotry of liberalism that assumes without saying specifically so that blacks on average are not capable of leaning?

Or is it liberal ignorance to blame the bougy man of racism for that?

When reading articles like this I can’t help but feel that African-Americans are wasting precious opportunities that are available to them. We have a lot of educated people in my country but little or no opportunity available after finishing college. Where do they find it when they leave the country? America! Hollywood plays a major role in dumbing down a people and culture.

Me, I wondered whether the source newspaper capitalized “black” or someone at Via Meadia capitalized it for them. But the link doesn’t work.

“whom (sic) he said are primarily portrayed by Black actors.”

Education isn’t what it used to be anyway. We used to expect a minimum threshold of grammatical understanding from editors and reporters.

“Bill Cosby has been pilloried for years by the radically chic who’ve disliked his efforts to get African-Americans to take more responsibility for their own success and education.”

I poked around a bit online looking for some references to the radically chic who might be pillorying Cosby, but the best I come up with is the assessment of The Atlantic author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argues that Cosby’s critics are primarily African-Americans, few of them radically chic as far as i can tell. My hunch is that the era of radical chic was already on its way out in 1970 when Tom Wolff’s book ridiculed the movement.

On the other hand, there have been any number of less than chic social science studies of the nature of poverty and its persistence, some of which support Cosby’s prescription, some of which point to the difficulties of doing so. The chic seem to have moved on, the radically chic, radically so.

C’mon — name some names here!

P.S. It is not for no reason that the vaunted American public education system is not teaching the on-coming generations to be ‘stupid’.

They don’t teach reading. They don’t teach math. They don’t teach science. And let’s not get into how they don’t teach History. Let alone our Civics.

There’s a reason for all of that.

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive. Easy to govern but impossible to enslave.

Spike Lee’s never been on the reservation, he’s just been good at hiding it. Murray Kempton pointed out that if a white director had made Do the Right Thing, a movie in which blacks trash the white business keeping their community going, it would be denounced as racist. Unfortunately, being a good liberal, he thought that was an indictment of Lee, not of reality.

Will Spike Lee be the next Bill Cosby?

Hrm…no.

Is Bill Cosby blaming the current ills on black society on the CIA selling crack to them or inventing AIDS just for them? Doubtful.

Oh, he didn’t say the AIDS thing some detractor might say. Well, not to this particular audience but he said as much in a Rolling Stone interview a few years ago.

So, no worries. Spike Lee will never have to worry about being criticized by Black America as long as he remains as uneducated as they are.

How Dagger John Saved New York’s Irish:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a2.html

“Will the people who mocked and scorned Bill Cosby for trying to help families and kids do better now turn on Spike Lee?”

They might, because at least Spike Lee is a stone-cold racist.

It’s an odd thing about this blog – some articles, like those on foreign policy, are up to the minute and insightful – other articles, like this one, seem to have been plucked from a time machine. Since when does anybody even remember Bill Cosby’s name, let alone that he championed African-American responsibility? In the decades since, haven’t we had a black president who’s been saying some of the same things? That hardly makes Spike Lee a revolutionary. That’s not to say the problems aren’t the same, but the old radical chic has switched to sensible shoes and is worrying about its retirement – the new radical chic has moved on.

This is great. Now if we can get a certain subset of whites to also tell their kids that growing up ignorant is not what their ancestors would have wanted and is nothing to be proud of…

I’m in education, and it breaks my heart to see kids who ignore everything I try to teach them because somehow succeeding is selling out. Selling out to whom? They don’t seem to understand that being ignorant perpetuates cycles of poverty that their ancestors, black and white, risked their lives to escape.

Spike Lee should also focus on the knee jerk defensive posture that is taken by the black community when any dares to criticize it. The inability of the black community to deal with modernity and the demands of society has led them to ruin and destruction. Their culture which at one time was the glittering jewel of the world is now a bad joke of epic proportions. Hip hop has replaced blues and jazz. Ignorance has replaced the beautiful raw expression of Langston Hughes. It’s sad that this has happened, what’s even sadder is that they can’t face it.

@Big Soph – I’m not trying to make a case for Obama’s sincerity, I’m just saying that he’s made statements similar to Spike Lee’s.

I have seen this problem first hand. I worked in public health in Dallas and had a black patient with an elementary school daughter who pleaded with me to help get her out of the project’s public school. The patient had been living with her sister in a better part of town but had been kicked out for earning money as a prostitute. Her daughter had been a straight A student in the good school district but was now struggling, because the kids in the all-black project school were taunting her for “talking white” and following her home from school, yelling “wannabe” (as in, want to be white) and other less pleasant names. I made several efforts but ran into persistent dead ends trying to work with an indifferent and over-whelmed school district. The patient dropped out of our study soon after so I lost track of her but I often wonder what happened to that little girl. Her own people were determined to have her limit herself, all in service to some stupid tribal identity.

Spike promoted that “ghetto-type” in some of his films. Now that doesn’t make him money anymore…seems he’s trying a different tack.

IOW, I’m extremely skeptical.

Spike Lee seems to be developing wisdom.

This is a crucial point.

When families break down, young children are not exposed to the wisdom of their grandparents, and instead they take their culture from their peers and from the entertainment industry.

When government policies facilitate and accelerate the breakdown of the family, they destroy the underpinnings of civilization.

I once heard Chris Rock, when someone talked about the racism of the “system”, reply “I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about picking up the trash in front of your house”. All three men (Cosby, Lee, and Rock) know how to succeed because they’ve done it. They relied on intelligence and hard work, and they made it. Too many people of all colors have failed to notice.

So black America has institutionalized ignorance. What a surprise. Not that conservatives have been doing everything they could to tell you this day would come, ever since LBJ’s Great Society.

Black America was destroyed by the government and our human tendency to opt for getting something for nothing if it is available. The left, the statists who believe more government was the answer to everything, took a highly stable and healthy black middle class, which had educated its children far better and successfully than the alternative in the last 50 years, and destroyed it.

The black middle class was a vigorous, thriving, secure and, dare I say, happy community, made up of a solid population of successful merchants, doctors, nurses, lawyers and teachers. But government took blacks and essentially made them wards of the state. And now the greatest single class of blacks in America by far is made up of those on welfare, food stamps, ADC and all the other alphabet of government support programs…and long before we spent ourselves into a depression. Indeed today it isn’t unusual to find young black Americans who are descended from four generations or even more of welfare recipients.

Because liberals “knew better”.

P.S. Don’t you just LOVE IT, when a ‘plan’ comes together?

It is Hollywood and it is drugs according to Lee. He portrays the black community as mere passive players. Maybe, just maybe they have to look more inward and realize that the fault may lie within themselves. It is time for them to hitch up there pants and accept responsibility for their own attitudes.

I was in the NYC public school system a few years ahead of Lee and by the late 1960s-early 70s the denigration of black students for “acting white” was already well in place. But what isn’t mentioned was it was in place in part because by the same time period, white liberals had begun to celebrate the “authenticity” of street culture, and in some cases, emulating it (with the group I hung around with, the one who worked the hardest to “act black” was also the only one whose parents sent him to private school in Grades 7-12.

Acting ghetto while you’re going to the Dalton School is almost a sitcom parody of goofy white teens, but the point is that African-American students for the past 45 years have been basically told there’s nothing wrong with not getting an education by rich white liberals who may like to mimic the ghetto culture, but who can go running back to their safe havens to avoid the negative consequences of that lifestyle).

31.Instructor says:

Spike promoted that “ghetto-type” in some of his films. Now that doesn’t make him money anymore…seems he’s trying a different tack.

Where is your evidence? I can’t think of any Spike Lee films that glamorize “ghetto-types.” By contrast, I can think of Lee films that are critical of drug addicts (Jungle Fever), gangmembers (Inside Man), and thieves (Malcolm X).

Given Lee’s track record on the silver screen, I’m not shocked that he would condemn the glamorization of ignorance as “acting Black.”

I remember seeing Spike doing a “townhall meeting” type event on the streets of Harlem 15+ years ago and he had high school students sitting on bleachers asking questions of him. His main point to them then and still seems to be his drumbeat today, “Education is the ONLY way out. It will not be drugs, gangs or theft. Eduction is the ONLY way out.”

In my work with families and schools, I have learned about the culture within urban communities. (e.g. Memphis, TN, as with many other urban communities, has the opportunity to turn things around, but it will not be because they need more funding or policies. It will only turnaround when the commitment to parenting and family comes to the forefront. With 73% of all children born out of wedlock in urban markets , the children have a minimal opportunity to receive a quality education, find local jobs to learn work ethic, pursue college, etc. The list goes on and on for the challenges they will face. Nobody can do it for Memphis, they must do it for themselves.)

I think that is exactly what Spike is trying to point out.