Quote: (11-25-2014 04:40 AM)2Wycked Wrote:
Leave the floor to Ta-Neishi Coates:
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The author of this moment is Bill Cosby. In 2004, he gave his "Poundcake Speech," declaring black youth morally unworthy of their very heritage. Cosby followed the speech with a series of call-outs. I observed several of these call-outs. Again, unlike typical black Republicans, Cosby spoke directly to black people. He did not go on Fox News to complain about the threat of the New Black Panther Party. He did not pen columns insisting the black family was better off under slavery. He was not speaking as a man sent to assure a group that racism did not exist, but as a man who sincerely believed that black people, through the ethic of "twice as good," could overcome. That is the core of respectability politics. Its appeal is broad in both black and white America, and everywhere Cosby went he was greeted with rapturous applause
Dude proves, once again, he doesn't understand American politics, but understands what his readership wants to believe. I mean, fucking Christ, Fox News didn't exist as it exists now at the time of his first piece on Cosby:
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He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”
Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.
“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’
So, men are at fault for problems in the black community? Hmm. . .
Don't waste your time reading the piece. It reads like any mediocre writer desperate for a regular weekly spot at a left-wing outlet.
But -- look at this! -- Coates distances himself from his first piece on Cosby, because he was just starting out as a writer and treading murky water with regards to the accusations -- but it's like OMG so much clearer now, even though he always knew Cosby was a rapist!
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Lacking physical evidence, adjudicating rape accusations is a murky business for journalists.
Yeah, no shit. Adjucation is something a court does, not an amateur "journalist." Wait, was this a Freudian slip on his part?
Coates goes on:
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At the time I wrote the piece, it was 13 peoples’ word—and I believed them. Put differently, I believed that Bill Cosby was a rapist.
Rape constitutes the loss of your body, which is all you are, to someone else. I have never been raped. But I have, several times as a child, been punched/stomped/kicked/bumrushed while walking home from school, and thus lost my body. The worst part for me was not the experience, but the humiliation of being unable to protect my body, which is all I am, from predators. Even now as I sketch this out for you publicly, I am humiliated all again. And this happened when I was a child. If recounting a physical assault causes me humiliation, how might recounting a sexual assault feel? And what would cause me to willingly stand up and relive that humiliation before a national audience? And why would I fake my way through such a thing? Cosby's accusers—who have no hope of criminal charges, nor civil damages—are courting the scrutiny of Cosby-lovers and rape-deniers. To what end?
Why does he feel the need to include this?
Then he shows why:
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The Bill Cosby piece was my first shot writing for a big national magazine. I had been writing for 12 financially insecure years. By 2007, when I finished my first draft, I had lost three jobs in seven years. I had just been laid-off by Time magazine. My kid was getting older. I was subsisting off unemployment checks and someone else's salary. A voice in my head was, indeed, pushing me to do something more expansive and broader in its implication, something that did not just question Cosby's moralizing, but weighed it against the acts which I believed he committed. But Cosby was such a big target that I thought it was only a matter of time before someone published a hard-hitting, investigative piece. And besides, I had in my hand the longest, best, and most personally challenging piece I'd ever written.
It was not enough.
:tears for the left-wing race/gender baiter:
Coates: Like -- OMG -- I was like really, really poor and TOTES needed to get published. I totally knew this douchelord was a rapist, but my kid needed a new diaper, so I went ahead and had some troll left-wing site publish my poorly-written article. Umm, like somebody will totally call him out soon enough about all the rapes. It was totes tough to write something mainstream for a mainstream outlet. #Ferguson.
Coates job is 100% dependent on being a bottom bitch for liberal outlets.
What a faggot.
ADDENDUM: His newest article has no comments because the comments were closed to begin with. #AllLiberalsWantIsFreeSpeech
I clicked on that article, read the 2008 Ta Nehisi Coates piece on Cosby and thought it well done, especially in illustrating Cosby's black nationalism and his insistence on black self-sufficiency, dignity and economic independence, versus waiting for handouts and depending on people who don't particularly care for them to make conditions better.
Men of that generation, and I recognize the thinking because men in my family think the same way, truly in their hearts believe in patriarchy and as such, believe that society and families (the unit of the society) need to be led by men so if society and families fail then men must assume the mantle of that failure. It's an anethma to them to blame mere women for their failures; that is the way they think. I recognize that mindset in older men I know.
I thought this passage was quite illuminating and demonstrates a view point that a lot of RVF'er have expressed in various threads:
"Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but
strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an
America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot."
Malcolm X, and other black nationalists, said similar sort of things:
"Malcolm X...faulted blacks for failing to take charge of their destinies. “The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” Malcolm said. “But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.”
Again, one of the things I really admire about Cosby is that he has built a legacy in terms of business interests and cultural relevance, and he did in a v shrewd way, especially the latter. Read the passage below and contrast that with an "art form" like hip hop that normalized the use of slave-master language for black ppl and transmits the worst stereotypes of blacks to the globe. My friend was in a club in France last year and was mortified when "Niggas in Paris" started to play.
"Behind the scenes, Cosby hired the Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint to make sure that the show never trafficked in stereotypes and that it depicted blacks in a dignified light. Picking up Cosby’s fixation on education, Poussaint had writers insert references to black schools. “If the script mentioned Oberlin, Texas Tech, or Yale, we’d circle it and tell them to mention a black college,”
He bemoans the out of wedlock rate and lack of shaming for its perpetuation, both the man and the woman:
"No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”
He shares our loathing of SJW types who make excuses for criminal behaviour in his very famous "Pound Cake speech", particularly relevant in light of Ferguson:
"Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’ "
Honestly, there is not much that I disagree with him on.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...an/306774/