Description

Nothing revealed the generational and course divide in black America more starkly than Expenses Cosby’s now-notorious attack on the black bad when he received an NAACP award in the spring of 2004. The comic-cum-cultural critic lamented the possible lack of parenting, poor academic performance, sexual promiscuity, and criminal behaviour among what he termed the “knuckleheads” of the African-American neighborhood. Much more astonishing than his remarks, however, was the truth that his crowd applauded.Best and chuckled -marketing author, preacher, and scholar Michael Eric Dyson uses the Cosby brouhaha like a window on a growing cultural divide within the African-American neighborhood. According to Dyson, the “Afristocracy”—lawyers, doctors, intellectuals, bankers, civil-rights leaders, artists, and additional professionals—looks with contempt upon the black poor who constitute the “Ghettocracy”—single moms on welfare, the married, single, and working poor, the imprisoned, and a battalion of impoverished kids.