In Defense of Bill Cosby
January 18, 2006
Robert Lashley
January 18, 2006
Robert Lashley
On the week that Bill Cosby made his remarks two years ago, I was at my grandfather's house for a funeral in the family. The day before, I decided to walk to Sam and Terry's barbershop to get a hair cut. For 50 years Sam and Terry's has been one of the few enduring institutions in the African American community in Tacoma. I got my first haircut there in 1983, at the tender age of five, from Sam Moore, the co-founder still going strong in his 9th decade. Anyone with a inkling of sense, history or any sort of cultural sophistication knows that the African American barbershop is one of America's great conservative institutions, a sort of folk lyceum, where a democracy of Ideas is permitted to flow free from politically correct discourse and dogmatism. A lot of my pragmatic Hurstonian conservative philosophy comes from the hundreds of conversations I have overheard and had at Sam and Terry's, as well as my taste in soul music and African American literature. I also owe a lot more to Sam personally, because he was the last man to cut my father's hair when he was in the hospital, rife from the spiral meningitis and complications from diabetes that would kill him only a few weeks later; an act he didn't have to do, because for the last 20 years of his life my father was a degenerate dope fiend.
Over the past several years, however, my contrarian paradise has crumbled. The barbers that I was raised with have either retired or died off, and a new generation of kids, raised on the brutal ethos of the streets and filled with the same sense of brutal entitlement that gangstadom has spawned, have made it a different place altogether from my memory. A deep division between young and old (over the discovery that one of the younger barbers was just cutting hair as cover for his burgeoning crack dealership, which explained why he drove to work in a Bentley), led to a mass exodus of people, and the tacky gangsta nationalism of most of the young barbers, demands you accept their psycho-racial-sexual dogma but ostracizes you if you don't.
On that particular day, my number was called. My crimes that afternoon were two. I committed the transgression of wearing a tweed jacket, black sweater, black slacks and glasses, a no-no for the " thug barbers" there because to be an appropriate African American by their standards was to wear saggy pants, sport jerseys and doo-rag caps. My second transgression was to bring a book, James Baldwin's Notes of A Native Son. It didn't matter that Baldwin was one of the greatest prophets on race relations in the history of the 20th century. The fact that I brought a book to read deeply offended their sensibilities, because to read, in their mind, was acting white.
As I was reading, one of the barbers cracked up. Looking to see what was funny, I saw that the butt of his joke was me.
"What's wrong with you," n*gga," he asked
"Excuse me?" I replied
"Why you acting like an herb?"
For those who don't know, "herb" is a derogatory name that the hip hop generation of African American's has for people who seek knowledge and don't want to be gangstas. Now, it would be something different altogether if I "wore" whatever knowledge on my sleeve, condescending to whoever was there. But being tagged with the " dumb ghetto n*gger" label for most of the first 22 years of my life, I'm highly sensitive about that.
"What's your problem, brother? Why you on me so much? Im just trying to get a haircut?" I said. But it went on, a kind of vulgar grilling on my blackness, with Sam being my only defender in the shop. I consider myself a relatively tough SOB, ( both living on the hill and taking the bus to white schools will do that to you) but leaving that shop that afternoon, I was emotionally cut deep. One of the few safety zones I have ever had, one of the few places in my life that people saw my intelligence and not my color, was gone. I had to prove, and to an extent still have to prove to too many white people that I am a person of substance, and not a beast who was going to rob and brutalize them. (Yes I have my half-dozen racial profiling stories with the police, but that's another article). I didn't have to do that at Sam and Terry's, people used to respect me and appreciate the fact that I liked to read books. Not anymore.
But halfway back home, I looked at broader aspect of what happened and started to cry. Because if those thugs did that to me, a 25-year-old college student, imagine the hundreds of young kids they have done it to also. Kids younger than me, who didn't have my brilliant loving mother or my beautiful griot of a grandmother. Kids who faced the same brutal disadvantages I had, and personally, lord knows what I went through to get to where I am. Kids who had the chance to discover the love of knowledge snatched away from them by some monosyllabic racist thug. Is there anything legal that is more destructive, more pernicious and more horrifying than the death, no execution, of an inquisitive mind.
So how does this relate to Bill Cosby's remarks?
It continues at:
http://blogcritics.org/...
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