RECONFIGURING THE COLOR LINE: RACIALIZING INNER‐CITY YOUTH AND REARTICULATING CLASS HIERARCHY IN BLACK AMERICA

Abstract

Listen carefully and you can hear a ideological assault on inner-city African American youth. Remarkably, with a few exceptions, it is (yet) beginnings of another neo-conservative movement. Instead, speakers Black public intellectuals, mainly on left-liberal side of politics. Erin Aubry Kaplan dubs them new breed of black social critics (2006). The attack began on a Monday night in May 2004. The place was Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, and occasion was NAACP's 50th anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education. The speaker was comedian and civil rights activist Bill Cosby. But this was funny, non-threatening, postracial Dr. Huxtable of The Bill Cosby Show. This was an angry, sarcastic Cosby. Imitating Ebonics, punctuated by incendiary polemics, he mocked poor and young in Black America. Resurrecting a recurring theme in African American political thought, Cosby insisted that fight against racial inequality needed to include more than civil rights legislation. It also required that Black community accept personal responsibility for some of its problems. Castigating the lower-economic for not holding up their end in this deal, he declared that people parenting.They buying things for their kids--$500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.' Referring to Black children in third person, he continued, (I)t's standing on da corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk way these people talk. 'Why you ain't, where is you go … .' I don't know who these people are (Cosby 2004).