More thoughts on Cosby’s thoughts and the state of discourse about race

In Slate today, more thoughts on Cosby’s unfortunate recent remarks. Debra Dickerson doesn’t really have all that much to say; this article meanders a fair bit but doesn’t really seem to have much of a point of conclusion.

It does, however, point out many of the reasons someone like Bill Cosby might be very frustrated, and that’s fair. If I were Bill Cosby, I’d be frustrated too. But this is, to my mind, no excuse to ease up on the criticism of his recent remarks, which are really pretty terrible. It’s also telling and troubling how much praise was heaped on him for “not being afraid to tell it like it is.” I was challenged on this in comments a while back, so let me try to make the case a bit more clearly here, and explain why I find the kind of attack launched by Cosby so unacceptable.

First of all, Cosby’s remarks are getting treated as wise, sober reflection, when many of them were just plain weird, and bordering on bizarre. Take this gem, where he rather misses the point of Les Miserables:

The Post’s Hamil Harris reports that Cosby also turned his wrath to “the incarcerated,” saying: “These are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?” (source)

I mean, this is just weird–if the black incarceration rates were actually due to people being imprisoned en masse for the the theft of delicious single serving snack items for personal consumption, it would be a much greater injustice than it actually is.

But on to the main point: Cosby ridicules and laments many aspects of contemporary urban black culture, notably the dialect of English known as ebonics and that scourge of Bill O’Reilly, hip-hop music and its attendent culture.

Now, let’s think about this. First, it’s not really surprising that Cosby isn’t a fan–these cultural forms and practices emerged from a socio-cultural context quite foreign from his own. They’re not based on his experience. But to suggest (as so many commentators do without fear of being called out as racist) that these forms are to blame for the lack of progress in racial equality needs to be explored a bit more. The implication is these cultural forms make it harder for individuals to advance. Why? Well, one answer is that potential employers or people in positions of power don’t like them and will discriminate against them. This may well make is a good strategic idea for black people to abandon certain aesthetic forms in particular times and places. But when discrimination takes place, why on earth would we direct public criticism against the discriminatee rather than the discriminator? What possible justification is there for that?

The issue of employment seems central here. Jobs are pretty much the way to get out of poverty, and that generally goes hand in hand with a decrease in crime. While other forms of discrimination exist and matter, it’s really difficult to overstate the importance of access to well paying, secure jobs. The public discourse on race and jobs is dominated by one topic: affirmative action. The question is framed thusly: ‘Should member of historically (and contemporarily?) disadvantaged groups get a little extra help in securing valued positions of employment or paths to employent?”

It’s a reasonable question to consider and debate, but is misses much of what we should be debating about race and employment–the many large arenas of employment where discrimination is still widespread. Many people don’t think this exists so I’ll point you in two directions.

First, the recent work of sociologist Devah Pager, blogged about here, here, and here, see her research written up and published here (warning: PDF). Pager did an experiment–she sent out ‘matched pairs’ of job applications. The applicants were similarly qualified for the jobs for which they were applying, with two differences–some were black and some where white, and some of each group had felony cocaine convictions with jailtime. You can read about it in more detail if you want, but I’ll just give you the punchline–the callback rates.

White non-felon: 34%
White felon: 17%
Black non-felon: 14%
Black felon: 5%

I could note that felony conviction seem to hurt blacks more than whites, but that would be missing the much bigger point, which is that white drug felons did better than blacks with clean records!

Exhibit II: Some MIT professors sent out thousands of similar job applications in which the only substantive difference was the name–some common black names and some common white names. The common white name applications had a 50% higher rate of interest. The results are summarized and discussed here.

In this example, cultural forms about which people have no choice are a basis for discrimination. Of course personal responibility and individual choices matter. Not having a felony drug conviction obviously helps your employment chances no matter what your race, as Pager’s data demonstrates. But the massive injustice of structural racial discrimination in many, many labor markets is a problem that is absolutely absent from our public discourse. That black people can lessen their chances of being victims of discrimation is certainly true (hey, maybe if your middle name is Raymond you could use that); it’s also true that battered wives can avoid a beating sometimes by tiptoeing quietly enough and saying all the right things. Cosby ought to be taken to task for wasting an opportunity to take the discourse about race, progress, employment in a productive and much needed direction. Instead, lashing out in frustration, he plays the blame the victim card.