Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? - Softcover

"One of the most eloquent and wide-ranging black public intellectuals...He moves fluently between academic and popular audiences, between 'high theory' and 'low life."

The acclaimed "hip hop intellectual" exposes the raw nerve of class and generational warfare in black America with this provocative defence of impoverished African Americans. Nothing exposed the class and generational divide in black America more starkly than Bill Cosby's assault on the black poor in spring 2004 - an attack, which has become infamous throughout America. The comedian-cum-social critic lamented the lack of parenting, poor academic performance, sexual promiscuity and criminal behaviour among what he called the "knuckle-heads" 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, doctors, intellectuals, bankers, civil rights leaders, entertainers and other professionals - looks with disdain upon the black poor who make up the "Ghettocracy" - single mothers on benefits, 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 rather than tackling the systemic injustices that shape their lives. He exposes the flawed logic of Cosby's diatribe and offers a principled defence 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 pre-eminent 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.