chill bill
Did Bill need to chill or did Bill put it down like it ought to be put down….
I read the Clarence Page piece and I read the excerpts in the Washington Post about Bill Cosby’s comments about the plight of lower income blacks. Bill can say whatever he pleases even if it was in the public domain. The sense I get , and I am a Cosby fan, going back to the NBC shows, Fat Albert, the Sidney Poitier flicks and of course I Spy. See Bill is a trailblazer and a Philly guy from North Philly and Germantown Avenue. Bill knows bad, he knows ghetto, and he knows Coke, and he knows Jell-O too. But he truly loves education. He always seems to represent the grace and ease of the old school, the original old school, prior to 1964. The school many modern African-Americans did not attend. The post integration schooling, post Jim Crow, post the worst riots of the 60’s and massive economic shift of African-American prosperity in a generation. Bill didn’t receive his first 16 years of education under the difference and politics and misery and subliminal programming of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.
No scourge was as destructive as the crack epidemic of the 80’s. The already fallen people, who barely survived the heroin induced haze of the free spirit 60’ and 70’s, were already marked for extinction. The inner city which gave us shaquanda, Keisha and Boo were already knocked out cold by 1975. If you were an honor member of the black bourgeoisie or part of the striving middle class, you knew your place and shaquanda and tariq and friends never entered your world anyway. In that world you didn’t drink coke, you smoke it. And Jell-O was something for old people and kids. In Bill‘s case you never forget where you came from, it’s the place that where you came from makes a change and you just don’t get it, that takes you for a drop. And Bill and his wife have done so much to help inner city kids and aspiring college kids and historically black colleges, that we owe them that much. Wasn’t the Cosby show of the eighties the last real family shows? Bill was about teaching and giving lessons. Bill hasn’t changed, but the times have. I can’t blame pee wee and Charlie Brown and skebop if they decided that education and old school values of less bling and more hard work and resilience are what’s rewarded by the so called majority culture. If they decided that hustling and killing to get what ever is they deemed important enough to do that, made them act on it, then let the lord judge them.
If their parents were divorced, drugged and aids riddled, illiterate, uneducated and trifling. If your brother went to jail, your uncle went to jail, your cousins went to jail, and you knew they had room for you to. If you can’t read the number on the bus or the train, you never had a home; you don’t know how or where your next meal is coming from. You mother is the father, the uncle, the man, the only deterrent from you and the concrete sidewalks of death and peril. If all you had in your home of educational value is some stupid video games, the TV, the radio blasting the latest poop song. If no one never attended college in your home, if no one ever explained to you that manhood doesn’t equate with ending conflicts with death, but resolving them instead. If your neighborhood church is preaching about money and most of the congregation don't live in the neighborhood anyway. If the school you go to has got anti-drug trespassing signs in the front of it and metal detectors in the front. If all your friends by the time you reach fifteen have been involved in gangs, drugs, death, and mayhem. Well you get the picture.
It’s okay to vent our frustrations at all the knucklehead influences of the last thirty years. The truth is black people didn’t import and export the drugs, they didn’t make the killer guns, they didn’t approve the federal budgets, they didn’t cut back programs that worked and programs that didn’t. They didn’t build all these jails so some women’s or young girls child could go to work in and lose the right to vote as a convicted felon. They didn’t generate aids. They didn’t promote homelessness in our inner city. Black folks had nothing to do with all these record labels promoting negative images and cartonish images because Madison Avenue marketing types don’t know how to sell a car, liquor, a home, a record, an act, a book to black people. We don’t control those things. Black folks want quality, in education, in transportation, in finance, in community, in spiritual matters, but that’s from being delivered. So brothers like Bill, get frustrated at all the madness taking place. Where’s the respect and where’s the love for all the sacrifice being made over the years. I’ll tell you where it is. In somebody’s back yard sipping a coke and a smile. Just thank god we made it. By the grace of god go I.
Bill can say whatever, he‘s smart enough, and forget being “PC”, hey don’t feel bad if your from less than average circumstances. Bill says you got to own up to your end. Sometimes you got to do it in an unconventional way. You got to do it your way.
I read the Clarence Page piece and I read the excerpts in the Washington Post about Bill Cosby’s comments about the plight of lower income blacks. Bill can say whatever he pleases even if it was in the public domain. The sense I get , and I am a Cosby fan, going back to the NBC shows, Fat Albert, the Sidney Poitier flicks and of course I Spy. See Bill is a trailblazer and a Philly guy from North Philly and Germantown Avenue. Bill knows bad, he knows ghetto, and he knows Coke, and he knows Jell-O too. But he truly loves education. He always seems to represent the grace and ease of the old school, the original old school, prior to 1964. The school many modern African-Americans did not attend. The post integration schooling, post Jim Crow, post the worst riots of the 60’s and massive economic shift of African-American prosperity in a generation. Bill didn’t receive his first 16 years of education under the difference and politics and misery and subliminal programming of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.
No scourge was as destructive as the crack epidemic of the 80’s. The already fallen people, who barely survived the heroin induced haze of the free spirit 60’ and 70’s, were already marked for extinction. The inner city which gave us shaquanda, Keisha and Boo were already knocked out cold by 1975. If you were an honor member of the black bourgeoisie or part of the striving middle class, you knew your place and shaquanda and tariq and friends never entered your world anyway. In that world you didn’t drink coke, you smoke it. And Jell-O was something for old people and kids. In Bill‘s case you never forget where you came from, it’s the place that where you came from makes a change and you just don’t get it, that takes you for a drop. And Bill and his wife have done so much to help inner city kids and aspiring college kids and historically black colleges, that we owe them that much. Wasn’t the Cosby show of the eighties the last real family shows? Bill was about teaching and giving lessons. Bill hasn’t changed, but the times have. I can’t blame pee wee and Charlie Brown and skebop if they decided that education and old school values of less bling and more hard work and resilience are what’s rewarded by the so called majority culture. If they decided that hustling and killing to get what ever is they deemed important enough to do that, made them act on it, then let the lord judge them.
If their parents were divorced, drugged and aids riddled, illiterate, uneducated and trifling. If your brother went to jail, your uncle went to jail, your cousins went to jail, and you knew they had room for you to. If you can’t read the number on the bus or the train, you never had a home; you don’t know how or where your next meal is coming from. You mother is the father, the uncle, the man, the only deterrent from you and the concrete sidewalks of death and peril. If all you had in your home of educational value is some stupid video games, the TV, the radio blasting the latest poop song. If no one never attended college in your home, if no one ever explained to you that manhood doesn’t equate with ending conflicts with death, but resolving them instead. If your neighborhood church is preaching about money and most of the congregation don't live in the neighborhood anyway. If the school you go to has got anti-drug trespassing signs in the front of it and metal detectors in the front. If all your friends by the time you reach fifteen have been involved in gangs, drugs, death, and mayhem. Well you get the picture.
It’s okay to vent our frustrations at all the knucklehead influences of the last thirty years. The truth is black people didn’t import and export the drugs, they didn’t make the killer guns, they didn’t approve the federal budgets, they didn’t cut back programs that worked and programs that didn’t. They didn’t build all these jails so some women’s or young girls child could go to work in and lose the right to vote as a convicted felon. They didn’t generate aids. They didn’t promote homelessness in our inner city. Black folks had nothing to do with all these record labels promoting negative images and cartonish images because Madison Avenue marketing types don’t know how to sell a car, liquor, a home, a record, an act, a book to black people. We don’t control those things. Black folks want quality, in education, in transportation, in finance, in community, in spiritual matters, but that’s from being delivered. So brothers like Bill, get frustrated at all the madness taking place. Where’s the respect and where’s the love for all the sacrifice being made over the years. I’ll tell you where it is. In somebody’s back yard sipping a coke and a smile. Just thank god we made it. By the grace of god go I.
Bill can say whatever, he‘s smart enough, and forget being “PC”, hey don’t feel bad if your from less than average circumstances. Bill says you got to own up to your end. Sometimes you got to do it in an unconventional way. You got to do it your way.
posted by sevenchick at 9:50 AM
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