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Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle
Class Lost Its Mind?
Michael Eric Dyson
ISBN: 0465017207
Format: Paperback, 304pp
Pub. Date: January 2006
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
List Price: $14.00
BBP Price: $11.20 Save 20%
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Is Bill Cosby Right,
Michael Eric Dyson, 0465017207
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The acclaimed "hip-hop intellectual" exposes the raw nerve of class and
generational warfare in black America with this provocative defense of
impoverished African Americans.
Nothing exposed the class and generational divide in black America more starkly
than Bill Cosby's now-infamous assault on the black poor when he received an
NAACP award in the spring of 2004. The comedian-cum-social critic lamented the
lack of parenting, poor academic performance, sexual promiscuity, and criminal
behavior among what he called the "knuckleheads" of the African-American
community. Even more surprising than his comments, however, was the fact that
his audience laughed and applauded.
Best-selling writer, preacher, and scholar Michael Eric Dyson uses the Cosby
brouhaha as a window on a growing cultural divide within the African-American
community. According to Dyson, the "Afristocracy" -lawyers, physicians,
intellectuals, bankers, civil rights leaders, entertainers, and other
professionals-looks with disdain upon the black poor who make up the
"Ghettocracy" -single mothers on welfare, the married, single, and working
poor, the incarcerated, and a battalion of impoverished children. Dyson
explains why the black middle class has joined mainstream America to blame the
poor for their troubles, rather than tackling the systemic injustices that
shape their lives. He exposes the flawed logic of Cosby's diatribe and offers a
principled defense of the wrongly maligned black citizens at the bottom of the
social totem pole. Displaying the critical prowess that has made him the
nation's preeminent spokesman for the hip-hop generation, Dyson challenges us
all-black and white-to confront the social problems that the civil rights
movement failed to solve.
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