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Over the years, comedic icon Bill Cosby has taken on some humorous characters —Fat Albert and Dr. Cliff Huxtable come to mind—and shaped American culture for the better. But in his latest role, Cosby the prophet is excoriating young black culture, urging African Americans to take responsibility for their lives and to stop blaming the "white man."

"For me, there is a time," Cosby told a Rainbow/PUSH gathering in Chicago recently, "when we have to turn the mirror around."

In that meeting and in an earlier appearance before black leaders, Cosby, 66, spoke bluntly. Answering accusations that he was airing his people's dirty laundry in public, Cosby snapped, "Let me tell you something. Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day. It's cursing and calling each other 'nigger' as they're walking up and down the street. They think 'they hip.' Can't read, can't write, 50 percent of them."

Cosby's tough-love message reminds me of Shelby Steele's groundbreaking book, The Content of Our Character. Steele noted:

The barriers to black progress in America today are clearly as much psychological as they are social or economic. We have suffered as much as any group in human history, and if this suffering has ennobled us, it has also wounded us and pushed us into defensive strategies that are often self-defeating. But we haven't fully admitted this to ourselves. The psychological realm is murky, frightening, and just plain embarrassing. And a risk is involved in exploring it: the risk of discovering the ways in which we contribute to, if not create, the reality in which we live. Denial, avoidance, and repression intervene to save us from this risk. But, of course, they only energize what is repressed with more and more negative power, so that we are victimized as much by our own buried fears as by racism.

Forty years after passage of the Civil Rights Act and fifty after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, Cosby is saying things no white person could get away with. But he needs to say them. Of course, as a white male, I'm taking a risk to comment on these matters. I've never felt the sting of racial discrimination.

But I too have grown up with a permanent and visible physical difference. My disability—moderate cerebral palsy—is the first thing many people notice about me. It defines me in the minds of some, and it (like the color of one's skin) is inescapable. I think I understand a little of what Steele called "a lifelong voice of doubt," reinforced by decades of uncomfortable silences, patronizing treatment, and exclusion. Blacks are not the only people tempted to self-loathing, blaming others, and making excuses.

We also must acknowledge that blacks have no monopoly on social pathologies. Other groups, including whites, have members who make self-destructive choices. Unfortunately, some of what passes for black culture these days is highly dysfunctional. The first step in dealing with a pathology, either personal or social, is acknowledging its existence. Cosby, who has used his wealth to support education for blacks, did not present a dry academic treatise. Nor did he highlight the significant progress many blacks have made in educational participation, literacy, rising incomes, business, and entertainment. Yet even Jesse Jackson defended Cosby. "Bill is saying, 'Let's fight the right fight; let's level the playing field,'" Jackson said. "Drunk people can't do that. Illiterate people can't do that."

With a doctorate in education, Cosby, like a good professor, has set high standards. But I fear that he has overlooked the spiritual dimensions of this crisis. In so doing, he has missed the best hope for solving it—God's people working together in the power of the Spirit.

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48