The Daily/Nightly Show (Not Just Cos)

For years now I’ve been kinda pissed off at Bill Cosby, not because of the rapes (I simply didn’t know about them, celebrity gossip is of very little interest to me even if true) but because I felt he was unduly critical of, and set unrealistic expectations for, black fathers.

If you listen to his early work you’ll realized that his relationship with Big Russell (his dad) was dysfunctional and violent and even the warm and fuzzy stories he told about his interactions with his wife and children were abusive power struggles, at least in the mental and emotional sense.

And then he spent 8 years as TVs favorite Dad, a loveable curmudgeon straight out of the 50s, tough but fair.  Not just that, but rich too.  He a Doctor, his wife an Attorney, they owned their own Brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.

1%ers.

Needless to say this is not the life experience of most U.S. citizens, let alone African-American ones.

The pont of the show in Cosby’s mind was to show how to raise successful children with the measure of that success being college graduation.  After that you were on your own as he frequently proclaimed and demonstrated in his later treatment of Sondra and Elvin.  When Denise started becoming independent she pretty much got exiled and finally disappeared altogether.

So that’s your TV view of the epitome of black fatherhood.

What I will call the myth of black fathers being irresponsible arises I think partly from the abuse of slavery where slave owners considered their property cattle and bred and sold them as such.  Before the Civil War there was an entire vein of Abolitionist literature about loving families broken by evil masters and fathers escaping and struggling to reunite with their loved ones and liberate them, most often ending in Romantic Tragedy as all perished.  Afterwards there arose the fiction of the nobility of ‘The Lost Cause’ and the excuse making for the horrific practices of slavery and propoganda of the happy, inferior African-American, content with field work and incapable of anything else- first because we are ‘Exceptional’ and nothing we do is ever wrong, and second because it helped justify continued and pervasive Jim Crow discrimination both North and South.

And narratives of the irresponsible underclass, whatever race or ethnicity, were always popular with the elites who used them to validate and rationalize their continued oppression.

Another expression of this in modern times is 1965’s The Negro Family: The Case For National Action by every racist conservative’s favorite “Liberal”, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  While there are many flaws and entirely valid criticisms I propose two for your consideration- the first is that the Report focuses only on ‘out of wedlock’ births as a symptom of family dysfunction and doesn’t properly correct for class bias (including all poor families as a group) or recognize other symptoms of dysfunction which vary by culture (inbreeding and domestic violence and child abuse for example).

The second is simply- who gives a rat’s ass about getting married now anyway?  Certainly not 1%er White folk.

Oh, gays.

So my question for Larry is-

Why are you buying into this?

Continuity

Every Day Is Exactly The Same

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 2/4: Wes Moore
• Thursday 2/5: Bob Odenkirk

Wes Moore is the next Colin Powell.  He was a Captain in the 82nd Airborne, served as assistant to Condoleezza Rice, and worked at Citigroup.  He currently hosts his own show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.  If he’s not pitching the show he’ll be whoring his newest book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters.

Bonus video and the real news below.