If you didn't catch the Obama race speech, you can read the transcript [Here]. As I watched this speech, I was appalled that Obama pulled out the race card to try and focus the attention on race instead of focusing on Obama's affiliation with Rev. Wright.
If Obama was truly serious about looking at the issues that black community is facing, he would stop claiming racism at every turn and start listening to people like Bill Cosby. Bill Cosby has the courage to take a look at the real issues and urge the black community to examine themselves.
Cosby put it so well in his now famous speech given in 2004 on the anniversary of Brown vs The board of education:
Ladies and gentlemen, these people set -- they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have 50% drop out. In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.
Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.
I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?
The church is only open on Sunday. And you can’t keep asking Jesus to ask doing things for you. You can’t keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you . God was there when they won all those cases. 50 in a row. That’s where God was because these people were doing something. And God said, “I’m going to find a way.” I wasn’t there when God said it -- I’m making this up. But it sounds like what God would do.
We cannot blame white people. White people -- white people don’t live over there. They close up the shop early. The Korean ones still don’t know us as well -- they stay open 24 hours. I’m looking and I see a man named Kenneth Clark, he and his wife Mamie. Kenneth’s still alive. I have to apologize to him for these people because Kenneth said it straight. He said you have to strengthen yourselves, and we’ve got to have that black doll. And everybody said it. Julian Bond said it. Dick Gregory said it. All these lawyers said it. And you wouldn’t know that anybody had done a damned thing.
Fifty percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse? I want somebody to love me. And as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.” These people want to buy the friendship of a child, and the child couldn’t care less. Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents. And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid -- $500 sneakers -- for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.
It is time for the black community to distance themselves from people like Rev. Wright, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and all those who continually add fuel to the racial fire and start listening to people like Bill Cosby. Cosby has the courage to look at the real issues and he gets the concept of personal responsibility. Jackson, Wright, Sharpton will forever live in the past and will continue to keep the members of the black community in a emotional torment with nothing but anger for a solution..
4 comments:
And after hearing Obama's comments on the Philadelphia radio yesterday about his grandmother being a TYPICAL white person, I think we can see the true feelings of this man. Bill Cosby was criticized and Obama's speech is compared to Lincoln - man are we backward!
First of all - nice blog, I like it... Just found it on blog catalog.
Secondly - I'm no liberal (see my blog at www.rightcommentary.com) - but I didn't see Sen. Obama's speech quite the same way you did.
I thought the speech was actually a pretty decent summation of race problems in the United States since 1965. I found it thoughtful and accurate - by and large - until he got to part of the speech where he started lambasting various administrations (Reagan and Bush II) for the problems - and offered his own socialist agenda prescription to solve them.
I have found Bill Cosby's speeches to be also quite accurate and cutting. I think Cosby deeply cares about his constituency and is - at heart - ultimately concerned that the continued "victimization" of the "black community" will leave them impotent politically and economically. His call to arms to be individually accountable is how he feels to best combat that end state.
I don't see what Sen. Obama said and what Bill Cosby said as being all that out of whack with each other - but they are talking to different constituencies. Quite honestly, the speech last week for Sen. Obama had three constituencies - one, the Super Delegates who are attempting to evaluate his ability to be a "transformational" candidate and his ability to lead on difficult issues; two - White elites within the Democratic party who have always been uneasy with the racial tensions within the party and within the campaign, who were embarrassed and concerned by Rev. Wright's statements and Sen. Obama's affiliations; finally - three - elites of the black community, whom Sen. Obama had to in some manner protect (the line about "these problems are not in just black people's minds" was a nod to that constituency).
Cosby is speaking directly to black america - primarily black youths - saying, "Don't do drugs, don't sell drugs, don't go and throw your life away on the cheap. Life is hard - Life is a struggle - that is what is rewarding - that is what has brought the black community forward in America." Quite frankly - I think Cosby is right in his message... but its a call to action... not a descriptive polemic political speech - like Obama's.
Obama in the end scored seriously big points with that speech - he got himself out of a wringer over the caustic and anti-American statements of Rev. Wright... he legitimated the "black anger" in America that justifies saying those statements (I don't agree with that legitimation - but it happened nevertheless) - and he clearly came off as "Presidential" and has influenced both elites and Super Delegates in the race for the White House.
His speech was a huge win.... there's no other way around it.
I think he's the nominee now - and on my blog I wrote why... its over... and that speech was the final act.
Bryan
We sure can learn from ol' Bill Cosby. And he can make his points in a humorous way, which helps deflect criticism and makes his points stick.
Paul
You're dead on. Everyone--black, white, whatever-- needs to stop this cycle of entitlement and take ownership of our own lives and those of our children.
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