Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (3 page)

By then, most of the sailent facts in the case had come to light. It was questionable that race had played any role at all in the killing of Ennis Cosby. The gunman, a Ukranian immigrant, was high on drugs at the time of the shooting and told police shortly after his capture that he regretted what he had done and that he had pulled the trigger because the young man "took too long" to remove his wallet. But none of these facts impressed Camille Cosby: "Presumably [the killer] did not learn to hate black people in his native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero," she wrote. "Nor was he likely to see America's intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the Soviet Union before the killer and his family moved to America in the late 1980s." In Cosby's fevered view, America's "intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs" were responsible for the death of her son.

It is a logic that is as familiar as it is paranoid. The charge that white Hollywood portrays blacks in a stereotypically negative fashion is a standard protest heard from black spokesmen ranging from Louis Farrakhan to Jesse Jackson. But it has little basis in fact. Going back to the 1940s, white Hollywood has produced and directed an entire library of features about black Americans and their struggle for equality (
Home of the Brave, Pinky, Sergeant Rutledge, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Defiant Ones
), not to mention many of the principal epics of black liberation and pride,
Roots
and
Makolm X
(both produced by whites) and
Amistad
(written and directed by whites) to name three, and television sitcoms and series focusing on admirable black families (
Julia, The Jefersons, Good Times, Sister Sister, I'll Fly Away
). At the same time, black artists have themselves produced many of the negative stereotypes, from "blaxploitation" films like
Super Fly
to gangsta rap videos, which are the targets of many of the complaints.

But it is the name Cosby that almost by itself represents a refutation of the paranoid claims that white America and Hollywood are hostile to blacks. Camille Cosby enjoys a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions because of the success of a television show featuring her husband as the head of a model black family. For ten years, the
Cosby Show
was the top-rated television program in America (and Bill Cosby the top-earning entertainer) thanks to the loyalty of tens of millions of viewers who happened to be white. If America was the country of Camille Cosby's paranoid imagination, the success of both the real and fictional Cosbys would be inexplicable.

As if to demonstrate the irrationality of these complaints, the
Cosby Show
was actually attacked quite regularly in the years of its popularity, often by the same people. They accused the show of being "unrepresentative" and "unrealistic," in other words of being an attempt by white network executives to portray African Americans as
better
than they actually were, while hiding the poverty, oppression and other injuries of race that white America had inflicted on them.

Nor does the illogic stop there. On what basis does Camille Cosby make the claim that because there were no blacks in the Ukraine, the killer of her son must have learned racism by watching American television? Is she suggesting that the presence of a persecuted group is
necessary
to provoke the irrationality of bigots? Do racists need evidence to substantiate their racism? There are no Jews to speak of in countries like Poland and Japan, but Jew-hatred is rife in both places. Has Cosby forgotten (or as a leftist has she merely blanked out the memory of) Russia's racist culture that led to the mass expulsion of African students from Moscow's Lumumba University and Moscow's official protest at the Olympics that the American team's inclusion of black athletes was an unfair advantage because of blacks' innately superior abilities?

Early press reports of the Cosby murder indicated that, as a youth, Ennis Cosby's killer was raped by blacks in prison. What would Camille Cosby's reaction be to the claim that black rapists were responsible for her son's death? Yet that is exactly the logic she employs in attacking America for the drug-induced act of one immigrant sociopath. "Yes," she writes, "racism and prejudice are omnipresent and eternalized in America's institutions, media and myriad entities."
Eternalized
? Are white Americans born racists and destined to die as such? This is indeed the accusation made by black racists like law professor Derrick Bell, who in several popular books has claimed that America is irretrievably hostile to blacks. How are Cosby's and Bell's views that white Americans are inherently morally depraved different from the attitudes of southern crackers and KKK racists towards blacks?

Like Cosby, Bell is culturally a product of the communist left, which fifty years ago brought a petition to the United Nations, at the behest of the Kremlin, charging the United States with "genocide" in its treatment of blacks. Perhaps it is also appropriate to recall that the Cosbys were vocal supporters of the notorious Tawana Brawley, who falsely accused a group of whites of raping her. (Brawley, incidentally, has made an after-the-fact career out of touring campuses to repeat her lies at the invitation of black student associations who reward her with handsome fees for her testimony.) At the time, the Cosbys put up reward money for anyone who could prove Brawley's lies were true and appeared at rallies organized by Al Sharpton to incite hatred and violence against the innocent whites she smeared.

In her
USA Today
column, Cosby began her "proof" of what she believed to be America's ineluctable racism with the meaningless fact that the Voting Rights Act would technically expire in ten years. From this she concluded, preposterously, that "Congress once again will decide whether African-Americans will be allowed to vote" and commented "no other Americans are subjected to this oppressive nonsense." On what planet is Camille Cosby living? What could possibly have inspired the idea that whites are plotting to take away the voting rights of American blacks? What majority in this country would deny African-Americans the right to vote, a right guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment? To be sure, this right was once denied in the American South, but black Americans led by King and supported by the overwhelming majority of white Americans-including the government, the courts, and law enforcement agencies--restored it. The Voting Rights Act was passed by 90 percent majorities in Congress. The once segregated South is today a region whose major cities are run by African-American elected officials, while black legislators like congresswoman Cynthia McKinney are now regularly elected in majority white districts.

Camille Cosby is a woman whose country has showered her with privilege, making her family wealthy and famous beyond the wildest dreams of almost anyone alive, including all but a handful of the white targets of her wrath. Yet Camille Cosby's hatred of her country is so deep as to provoke the following preposterous observation: "African-Americans, as well as all Americans, are brainwashed every day to respect and revere slave-owners and people who clearly waffled about race . . . Several slave-owners' images are on America's paper currencies: George Washington ($1), Thomas Jefferson ($2), Alexander Hamilton ($10), Andrew Jackson ($20), Ulysses Grant ($50) and Benjamin Franklin ($100)." Forget that the characterizations of Hamilton, Grant and Franklin (whose last act was to file an anti-slavery petition to Congress) are probably libelous. What American is taught to praise these men for having owned (or possibly having owned) slaves? America is probably unique among the nations of the world in teaching every one of its children from kindergarten on that slavery was wrong, that all people are created equal, and that tolerance of differences is a cardinal virtue. Perhaps Cosby should direct her concerns to black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan who are still waffling about slavery in Africa more than a hundred years after the spiritual heirs of Washington and Jefferson abolished the institution in the United States. Camille Cosby's column is, in fact, a cornucopia of common but unfounded complaints about "institutional racism" in American life made by the political left. She refers, for example, to the fact that "America's educational institutions' dictionaries define 'black' [as] harmful; hostile; disgrace; unpleasant aspects of life." She describes this as evidence that white people, who control language, apply the term "black" to African-Americans in order to denigrate them. But the responsibility for the term "black" is properly assigned to Malcolm X and his militant followers, who
demanded
that AfricanAmericans be called "black" at a time when whites and their dictionaries universally referred to African-Americans as "Negro" and "colored." Subsequently, Jesse Jackson demanded that blacks be called "African-American," and white Amerïcans again acquiesced.

The irrational hatred of America in general, and of white America in particular, manifested in Cosby's screed, is unfortunately the expression of more than an individual paranoia exacerbated by a perfectly understandable grief. Suppose, for example, that the mothers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman had authored a parallel column titled "Black America Taught Our Children's Killer to Hate Whites?" Is there a (white-owned) newspaper in America that would even print such a claim?

In contrast to Camille Cosby's perverse view of America as a nation of racists, it is worth repeating that this is the only country in the world where children are instructed from pre-school days that racism is morally wrong, that American blacks have been the vic- tims of egregious crimes, and that expressing prejudice is socially unacceptable. In fact the only group that is allowed to vent racist venom publicly in America today are African-Americans themselves, as the deplorable outburst by Camille Cosby attests.

In her malicious column, Cosby also quoted the most celebrated and honored African-American writer of his generation, James Baldwin, to this embarrassing effect: "The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not, then, nor is there now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution." Can Baldwin be referring to the Supreme Court that ended segregated schools? The White House that sent federal troops to integrate schools in the South? The schools themselves that teach youngsters that racial prejudice is wrong? The Congress that enacted all the civil rights laws? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department that enforce these laws? Yet how many African American leaders are ready to step forward to dissociate themselves from such slanders, or from the vicious hate-America, hate-whitey sentiments expressed by such prominent and publicly acclaimed figures in the African American community as Camille Cosby, James Baldwin and Derrick Bell?

Ironically, a kind of answer was provided the day prior to the appearance of Cosby's
USA Today
column. On that day the chairman of the president's specially convened panel on race, and its most distinguished African-American member, John Hope Franklin, urged President Clinton to abandon the idea of creating a "color-blind" society. This should have been a warning to all Americans that the future of America's pluralistic, multi-ethnic social contract is in danger.

W
HEN A YOUNG MAN named Matthew Shepard was tortured and left to die on the high plains of Wyoming simply because he was gay, the nation was outraged. Earlier that year, an even more brutal attack was made on the person of James Byrd Jr., a black man in Texas. Like Shepard's murder, Byrd's was followed by outpourings of anger and grief from editorial pages and political pulpits across the country.

These were appropriate, if extraordinary, responses to horrible crimes against ordinary citizens, whose untimely deaths would otherwise have been unremarkable because, gruesome as they were, they are all too common. It was the fact that the perpetrators and victims were set apart by communal bigotries, for which the crimes served as violent individual expressions, that made the acts seem so important. The enhanced sense of human depravity that colored the public reactions to these incidents lay in our shared conviction that their nature as hate crimes made them an outrage to the nation's sense of self, as well as a threat to its communal future.

Well and good enough. These responses are signs of health in the body politic, the presence of a will to summon the better angels of our nature, and to keep the savagery that lurks beneath the surface of any civilized society safely at bay. But these expressions did not exhaust the public response to the two crimes. While libertarians and conservatives looked on in dismay, a coalition of leftwing activists, led by Congressman Barney Frank and other gay spokesmen, mounted the Capitol steps in Washington to pressure Congress into passing a bill that would extend existing federal hate crimes legislation to cover the categories of gender, sexual orientation, and handicapped status, and to make all such crimes easier to prosecute. They were joined in the call by the president himself.

Conservatives immediately raised civil liberties concerns about the proposed legislation, arguing that probing the intentions of any perpetrator, and especially one involved in crimes against victims who are already the targets of community prejudice, poses troubling problems. One such issue was the temptation offered to aggressive prosecutors to impute such intentions where none might exist. In a sobering column, George Will recalled a recent example of perverse legal reasoning in applying the hate crime standard. In 1989, a white female jogger was raped and beaten into a coma by a gang of black and Hispanic youths on a "wilding" rampage in Central Park. The act was not deemed a "hate crime" by prosecutors, and the perpetrators did not suffer enhanced penalties under the law "because they also assaulted Hispanics that evening. They got more lenient treatment because of the catholicity of their barbarism." Of course, the act they committed — rape — could be characterized as a hate crime itself.