Two years after he decided he could not remain silent any longer, Bill Cosby is still speaking the truth.

From USA Today:

Excerpts from Bill Cosby's May 17, 2004, speech at the NAACP gala commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.


On poor people:

"The lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. ... I'm talking about people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? And where were you when he was 18, and how come you don't know he had a pistol?"


On illiteracy:

"Brown v. Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go, ra." ... Everybody knows how important it is to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with 'Why you ain't ...' You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."


On who's to blame:

"We cannot blame white people. White people don't live over there. ... It's not what they're doing to us. It's what we are not doing. Fifty percent dropout. Look, we're raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. ... They're angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things."


On black women:

"Five and six different children — same woman, eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you're going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you're making love to."


On teen sex:

"What is it with young girls getting after some girl who wants to still remain a virgin? Who are these sick black people and where did they come from? And why haven't they been parented to shut up? ...This is a sickness, ladies and gentlemen, and we are not paying attention to these children. These are children. They don't know anything. They don't have anything."


On Brown's impact:

"Basketball players — multimillionaires — can't write a paragraph. Football players — multimillionaires — can't read. Yes, multimillionaires. Well, Brown v. Board of Education, where are we today? It's there. They paved the way. What did we do with it? The white man, he's laughing — got to be laughing. Fifty percent dropout rate, rest of them in prison."


On taking responsibility:

"The church is only open on Sunday. And you can't keep asking Jesus to do things for you. You can't keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you. God was there when they won all those (court) cases. ... That's where God was, because these people were doing something. ... When you go to church, look at the stained-glass things of Jesus. Look at them. Is Jesus smiling? Not in one picture. ... So tell your friends. Let's try to do something. Let's try to make Jesus smile. Let's start parenting."



USA Today: Cosby gives a 'Call Out'

Bill Cosby had just listened as five mothers who lost their teenage sons to gun violence told their tragic stories. He looked out over the audience.

"I hope none of you ever has to get that call," he said. "Those of you with children that age need to look at the walls in their rooms, see what they're writing, see what they're listening to. If you don't want to know that your child has a gun or knows how to get a gun, and if you don't want to believe that this could happen to your child, look up here."

Just yesterday, Mr. Cosby's words would have been unremarkable. In our benighted age, however, his own people revile him as a self-hating Uncle Tom.

Some of Cosby's critics say his view is a simplistic one because it ignores institutional and societal forces, such as government neglect and racism, that have helped create the conditions in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

One critic, University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, wrote a book: Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?).

In a National Public Radio interview after his book was published last year, Dyson said, "Cosby's overemphasis on personal responsibility, not structural features, wrongly locates the source of poor black suffering - and by implication its remedy - in the lives of the poor. When you think problems are personal, you think solutions are the same.

"If only the poor were willing to work harder, act better, get better educated, stay out of jail and parent more effectively, their problems would go away."

Cosby dismisses Dyson out of hand. "The guy who calls me elitist, who is he? A professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And how much does it cost to go there?"