Moving Past the Cosby (Side) Show.....

A few weeks ago I read an article in which a journalist was questioning why rape criticisms against Bill Cosby didn't get much media attention. The accusations have been percolating since the mid-1980's and many people were aware of the accusations, although not necessarily the full details. Now they charges have broken through into mainstream public consciousness, and they're all over the media.

The media deserves no award for bravery, coming to the story this late in the game. Whatever excuses may have existed in the past, it is difficult to see the story as anything but the media's siding with the rich and powerful up to the point that the story penetrated the public consciousness -- by virtue of a comedian's accusations against Cosby going viral. While some in the media are offering some introspection, and you'll find an occasional mea culpa, the intensity of the present coverage seems to me to reflect another failure of the media, its tendency to shine a spotlight on an issue of current controversy or debate in order to try to grab as many viewers or readers as possible, even if that means tending toward the salacious or missing the forest for the trees.

Dare I suggest, I think there is a very big forest out there, covering the same time period as the accusations against Cosby, and that the media is continuing to protect the wealthy and powerful.

A few years ago in the U.K., a series of stories broke about a deceased entertainer who, as it turned out, was a serial child molester. If you even scrape the surface of the story, you hit the same sort of issue you encountered in the Jerry Sandusky case -- acts that were sufficiently brazen and careless that they ended up being witnessed by others, but with the decision made not to involve the police. Not to kill the golden goose, or tarnish the image of his employer, but to cover up. The accusations against Cosby are similar to those made against Roman Polanski, except Cosby is alleged to have targeted adults.

Corey Feldman has indicated that, as teen stars, he and Corey Haim were targeted by predatory adults. You don't have to look very hard to find "casting couch" stories in which young actresses, and some young actors, found themselves in awkward situations with people -- usually unnamed -- who were trying to obtain sexual favors in exchange for a part, or other help advancing their careers. Sometimes when a story breaks about a predatory individual it's immediately apparent that his predilections were widely known, and widely ignored. Australian entertainer Rolf Harris, accused of sexually assaulting teenaged girls, earned himself the nickname "the Octopus". An Australian news journalist recounts,

Rolf Harris was known as “the Octopus”. But he wasn’t the only one.

During 25 years in television, I was warned by colleagues about dozens of stars who would grope, molest or harass anyone who took their fancy.

These include a presenter who is a household name.

An example is given of how that nationally famous news presenter sexually groped a female employee as recently as two years ago, but his identity is withheld. The article identifies only two sexual offenders, both of whom had already been publicly identified by others and one of whom had been criminally convicted.

I stumbled across a letter written in response to a Richard Cohen column,

Richard Cohen wrote in his Nov. 18 op-ed column, “None of our business,” that the sexual misbehavior of a “great man” should go unpublished. I disagree.

A man who believes in his own greatness may feel he is exempt from rules of honorable behavior that apply to others. That belief reveals a possibly dangerous arrogance in his character.

Sure, the press can go overboard with scandal, and as a former reporter and journalism teacher, I deplore that. But as a woman, I’d like to know if a so-called great man lies to his wife and uses women as sex objects. I may vote for him anyway when weighing that knowledge against his other attributes, but I’ll see him more clearly as imperfect and flawed, and most certainly avoid calling him “great.”

The column is about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the FBI smear campaign against him,

I did not know at the time [in 1964] about King’s affairs. I learned about them later, once the FBI bugs of King’s home and hotel rooms had become common knowledge in newsrooms around the country. But here’s the thing: No one printed a word of it. I know of no item in a gossip column and, since celebrity TV junk was still in the future, nothing on the air either. Lots of people knew the secret, but the press in those days respected the privacy of public figures: King was saved from ignominy. He was preserved for greatness.

Cohen also mentions Gary Hart, FDR, JFK, Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Lyndon Johnson, Anthony Weiner.... For the most part, examples that involve consensual extramarital relationships. Jefferson's case is particularly discomfiting -- you can't have a consensual relationship with a slave, although contemporary knowledge of the affair might have offended more people based upon her race than upon the fact that it was an extramarital affair or involved a profoundly coercive power dynamic.

Cohen's complaint also is of another time. Gary Hart brought to an end the era in which you could be an unapologetic skirt chaser and still aspire to national office. Senator Bob Packwood helped end the era in which powerful politicians could do whatever they wanted to their employees behind closed doors -- and, if you recall, he threatened to take down other politicians who he claimed had committed acts comparable to his own, before choosing instead to exit politics and enrich himself by becoming a lobbyist.

I find it difficult to be wistful for an era in which the powerful could easily abuse the weak, even in a nominally consensual adult-to-adult relationship. It may be that media coverage of politicians' sexual peccadilloes has the unfortunate effect of causing somebody with non-abusive tendencies to either stay out of politics or to lose an election, but I think there is nonetheless a significant net benefit. We have enough sociopaths and narcissists at the head of government and industry without also giving them -- restoring to them -- free reign to sexually abuse their underlings. In the current era, MLK would know that if he didn't control himself with women he would almost certainly be held accountable in the court of public opinion. It would be up to him to decide if it was worth the risk. It should not be the media's job to protect him from himself, let alone to "protect" us from knowing the truth.

We have had an evolution in our society over the past fifty years, relating to how we treat sexual abusive conduct and how we respond to sexual harassment in the workplace. The improvement has come not only through improved legal remedies for victims of abuse, but through the publicity surrounding abuse cases. There is a valuable social lesson to be learned from stories about abusers being held accountable for their conduct, both in terms of helping other victims of abuse feel less isolated and in letting them know that legal remedies are available.

It's really easy, alarmingly easy, to rally to the defense of the rich and powerful with little risk to your professional reputation. There's certainly a lot more risk in taking on the rich and powerful, and more difficulty in convincing your publication's lawyers to let you push a story into the public consciousness. I find it difficult to give a reporter or commentator credit for ignoring an open secret for years or decades, only to jump onto the story when it is finally broken by others, even if they admit that they should have addressed the story earlier or that the media failed to properly handle the allegations.

If journalists or commentators want to convince me that they're actually sorry to have not covered the story at an earlier time, or that they want to improve their profession, I suggest that they start covering some of the other "open secrets" about our business, entertainment and political figures and celebrities, rather than again waiting until they can safely and easily jump onto the bandwagon.

Educational Performance, Culture and Poverty

It is difficult to dispute that there is a consistent, international correlation between poverty and reduced educational performance. There's plenty of data to support a causative effect - impoverished parents are less likely to have previously achieved academic success, even to the point of obtaining a high school diploma. The small children of impoverished families are, by comparison to middle and upper class families, much more likely to be intellectually understimulated and to have much smaller vocabularies. I have some sympathy for this argument:

The biggest barrier to educational achievement today is not any of the things the media talk endlessly about: poorly prepared teachers, badly run schools, too many tests, low standards. It’s child poverty—which, like poverty in general, has just dropped out of the discourse.

But what does that mean? You'll probably get very different answers from Al Sharpton and Bill Cosby. But I don't believe that you have to point your finger at the poor to identify the problem: On the whole, our nation isn't particularly serious about educational achievement.

During the years followingWorld War II, the U.K. poured money into a system of grammar schools, channeling kids deemed to have strong academic potential into strict, academically focused schools based upon tests administered at age 11. This system was not perfect - it channeled a lot of kids who would have fared well on an academic track into a vocational track, and it pushed a lot of kids from working class families into academic programs that weren't necessarily a good fit. But that's how you ended up with working class kids from Cumbria getting Oxbridge Ph.D.'s, despite their parents' relatively low educational background and income. But you would be hard pressed to find among the parents the same sort of cavalier attitude toward education that exists not just among "the poor", but across much of modern society. When parents perceive education as a way out of poverty, and push their kids to succeed to the best of their ability, they diminish the impact of their own lack of means or educational achievement.

Writing for The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley has attempted to demonstrate that our nation's problem with education runs deeper than poverty:

We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?

Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students—by this measure at least—might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.

* * *

How would our states do if we looked just at the white kids performing at high levels—kids who are not, generally speaking, subject to language barriers or racial discrimination? Or if we looked just at kids with at least one college-educated parent?

As it turned out, even these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

Seriously, we live in a nation in which parents are horrified by the idea that their kids might be held back a year in school due to their inability to keep up with their peers in class, but in which large swaths of the population will happily withhold their kids from school for a year so as to give them an advantage in size and coordination by the time they are participating in high school sports. If you're looking at academics, high schools are not high pressure environments for academically capable kids - but a high school culture that's focused on sports and social events can be extremely awkward for a kid denounced as a "geek", "nerd" or "egghead". It can be socially awkward to consistently know the correct answers when called in in class. And as we've encouraged more and more kids to go to college, that culture has percolated up into undergraduate programs.

Ripley's article suggests that our "smart kids can take care of themselves" attitude, academic rigor doesn't really matter because the best students can figure things out for themselves, is misplaced. Smart kids here do okay, but they do better in other nations. Is that "the end of the world"? Of course not. Many of those kids will go on to college, find their groove, and more than make up for the lack of rigor they experienced in high school. And college is not a magic bullet - there are plenty of successful people who dropped out of college or didn't attend college. There's also a balance to be reached between the type of "teach to the test" environment being forced on inner city schools (and to a significant degree on schools outside of the inner cities) and a flexible learning environment that fosters intellectual creativity and growth. U.S. graduates, whatever their faults, have done well in business and industry as compared to top performers from academically rigid schools in other nations.

But, apologies for the cliché, the world is changing. (It's always changing, and it always will continue to change.) I'm not sure that we have the luxury to allow high school and, increasingly, four year colleges continue to be a place to socialize and "find yourself". Fundamentally, they're supposed to be academic institutions. Even to the extent that many parents are content to revel in their children's performance on a sports team or enjoy the vicarious thrill of their child's popularity, I think schools owe serious students a better opportunity for serious study.

When we talk about the poor, we often speak in patronizing tones about "role models", and often as if Dennis Rodman's latest relapse will cause the average inner city teen to give up on his academic dreams. But the role models that make the most difference in a child's life aren't celebrities, and to the extent that celebrities are role models they should largely be relegated to the fantasy world. The most important role models are the adults that children encounter on a daily basis, starting with their own parents. No celebrity lecture on "the importance of education" is going to resonate as much as the same conviction, heard and felt on a daily basis, from your parents and community. It's perfectly fair for middle class America to say to much of the inner city, "Education is the best way out of poverty, so you should take education more seriously." But it's also perfectly fair to say that the failure to take education seriously is also an issue in many middle and upper class homes and schools.

What About Common Values

I'm somewhat used to hearing people like Michael Erik Dyson argue that Bill Cosby is wrong to focus on social factors which contribute to poverty, while disregarding economic and historic factors. The obvious retort is that as an individual you can't change history, and you can't change the socio-economic standing of your community, but you can change yourself. The statistics may suggest that a particular individual is most likely to end up in prison, but personal choices can instead place that individual in college. Even though Bill Cosby is addressing a particular racial minority, it is a mistake to view this as a race issue.

Recently the Washington Post ran an editorial by Khalil G. Muhammad, under what is perhaps an unfortunate headline, White May Be Might, But It's Not Always Right. Some significant errors in the editorial have been addressed elsewhere. But I am more interested in the argument itself, and what appears to be a glaring internal inconsistency, than with its support.

Muhammad opens by relating how his mostly white students at an Indiana university agreed with Cosby's perspective on parenting.

After hearing Cosby plead for poor blacks to embrace their parenting responsibilities, many of the students said they wished their parents had followed his advice. They regretted that some of their peers had done poorly in school, abused drugs and alcohol, and run afoul of the law. These problems, they agreed, might have been avoided with more supervision at home.

That could be taken as evidence of the universality of Cosby's argument - he's making his case to a particular audience, but his concepts of good parenting are not race-based. Muhammad doesn't take that view:

Cosby and the recent Pew study are the latest in a long finger-wagging tradition of instructing poor blacks to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and reject pathologically "black" values.

But who is defining these values as "black"? It does not appear to be Bill Cosby - that characterization seems to come from his critics. If presented as a straw man to knock down, it's a dishonest response. Muhammad appears to be deliberately misrepresenting Cosby, and misrepresenting a question posed by NPR, in order to build up this straw man.

Unfortunately, this line of questioning reinforces one of the most persistent myths in America, that white is always right. The myth reflects an enduring double standard based on "white" and "black" explanations for social problems. And it assumes that "white" culture is the gold standard for judging everyone, despite its competing ideologies, its contradictions and its flaws, including racism.

Okay, then - let's cast aside all racial components of Bill Cosby's argument. Let's look exclusively at what Bill Cosby favors - stronger families, family support for education, educational achievement, staying out of legal trouble, comporting behavior to the norms of the majority culture - which of those aspirations would Muhammad describe as either representative of "white culture" or as inconsistent with "black culture"? If the argument is that a minority culture should be treated equally with the majority culture, and its differences in lifestyle and dialect should not affect the prospects for a member of the minority in education, employment, or any other sphere of life, that's an ideal which I have never seen actualized in any culture. Perhaps Muhammad views the axiom, "When in Rome..." as a "white value", but is there any nation where it does not apply? Further, as previously noted, even where the response to the minority is unfair, and even where the majority reaction may evolve over time and become more accepting, it's not something an individual can change. By all means work for change but, fair or not, base your personal choices on reality.

If lower-class "black" values are so distinct from those of the rest of America, particularly the "white values" supposedly now embraced by middle- and upper-class blacks, why, according to the Pew report, do less than a third of white Americans graduate from college? Are legions of whites similarly devaluing higher education? Are they "acting black"?

Perhaps this is intended as a reductio ad absurdem and not as a straw man but, again, this doesn't have to be a race issue. The choices made in poor white communities that result in economic failure and the perpetuation of poverty do not represent "acting black" any more than the analogous choices made in poor black communities represent "acting white". In both contexts, raising children with Bill Cosby's advice in mind can help break the cycle of poverty.

If we insist on explaining racial disparities in terms of black vs. white values, then we need to explain what exactly white values are. When we do, we'll find that whiteness is an inadequate standard by which to judge good black people vs. bad ones.

Which is probably why that standard is the preferred straw man of Cosby's critics, rather than one he proposes.

Cosby on Poverty

I had thought that enough time had passed that Bill Cosby would no longer be subjected to screeds accusing him of being unfair to the African American poor. Wrong. Michael Eric Dyson just can't stop pouring it on.

By convincing poor blacks that their lot in life is purely of their own making, Cosby draws on harsh conservative ideas that overlook the big social factors that continue to reinforce poverty: dramatic shifts in the economy, low wages, chronic underemployment, job and capital flight, downsizing and outsourcing, and crumbling inner-city schools.

None of these can be overcome by the good behavior of poor blacks.

Dyson claims that the problem is that Bill Cosby is looking only at individual choice, while disregarding societal issues which affect those choices. But couldn't it be said of Dyson that his arguments minimize the importance of individual choice while holding greater society responsible for poverty? Is there any reason why poverty cannot be attributed, quite correctly, to both problems with society and to poor choices by individuals? Dyson would not claim that poor people are inherently criminal, or programmed for teen pregnancy - quite the opposite:

In rigged town-hall meetings, Cosby assembles community folk and experts who agree with his take on black poverty: that it's the fault of the poor themselves.

It's often difficult to point out just how harmful that sentiment is, because most black folk do believe strongly in taking their destiny into their own hands. They believe in hard work and moral decency. They affirm the need for education and personal discipline. When they hear Cosby say that poor black folk should go to work, stay out of jail, raise their children properly and make sure they go to school, they nod their heads in agreement.

So these are "rigged town-hall meetings" which are attended by people who Dyson argues actually do reflect the majority opinion? That's an interesting way to "rig" a meeting.

Presumably these people agree with Bill Cosby that individual choice - the choice to take the path they model, or such individual choices as becoming an unwed parent, joining a gang, committing crime, or vandalizing the neighborhood are not made inevitable by poverty. Sure, societal problems can make it more difficult to make the correct choices, and from a "big picture" perspective you can show correlations between certain of society's ills and a greater number of poor choices by those affected by the ills. But is it not true that many of the problems can be fixed, or at least improved, from the bottom up as well as from the top down? And given the tendencies of today's society, is it really constructive to sit around and wait for a top-down fix, while ignoring the individual choices which collectively make inner city life so miserable for so many?

Parents & Education

Apparently, Bill Cosby recently addressed the subject of the role of parents in raising educated, well-socialized children, or perhaps more accurately the failure of many parents in impoverished communities to do so. In describing Cosby's statements, Colbert King suggests that this is in large part a racial issue. However, my experience with similar populations of individuals of other ethnicities suggest to me that Cosby's comments, for the most part, can be widely applied to a subset of any given ethnic group.

Unfortunately, this is one of those problems which is easy to identify and very hard to solve. Particularly in a society that, although extraordinarily wealthy, is unwilling to make a significant investment in breaking that cycle.