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Bill Cosby and American Racial Fetishism
*Timothy Christensen *
/ Denison University/
christ65@msu.edu
(c) 2007 Timothy Christensen.
All rights reserved.
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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"
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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).
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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).
14. 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.
15. 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.
/ English Department
Denison University
christ65@msu.edu /
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Works Cited
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McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in
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