Bill Cosby's speech at Xavier University

Comedian Bill Cosby recently gave an inspiring speech to students at Xavier University as part of his “”A Call out With Cosby” national tour. Peter Bronson at the Cincinatti Enquirer has an opinion piece up about the speech – here are some excerpts from it:

“I can feel your guilt,” he said. “I can feel your shame. But most of all, I can feel how sedated you seem to be.”

The standup comedian who used to ask “Why is there air?” now asks much tougher questions and has answers that some people don’t want to hear. “Dr. Huxtable” was writing prescriptions at Xavier’s Cintas Center on Thursday, and his tough medicine was greeted with waves of applause from an audience of 1,200, 90 percent black.

I expected him to say something outrageous to rile up the Political Correctness Police who misplaced their sense of humor in the 1960s and can’t spot the honest truth in a police lineup of bald-faced lies.

But it turns out that the most outrageous thing is what some people find outrageous.

Education: “If your child has never asked you a question about what he is studying, you are not protecting that child. And if you’re not doing it, be ashamed of yourself … I want someone to say to them, ‘Where is your damn homework?’ ”

Dropouts: “The graduation (ratio) for black women to men is 70-30. I feel sorry and sad for all these highly educated females who are so intelligent and have no educated men to marry.”

Drugs: “If you have heard a child say, ‘I’m going to stop flipping burgers and go out and make some real money selling drugs,’ did you stop that idiot and say, ‘You don’t flip burgers for the rest of your life. You do it until you can be manager of the burger-flipping place’?”

Parenting: “When are you going to challenge them about CDs full of vulgarity and profanity? … When are you going to challenge them with, ‘I want to know who your friends are before you leave this apartment’?”

Cosby asked foster parents, grandmothers, aunts and uncles who raise someone else’s children to applaud, then pointed to the crowd: “There’s your reality.”

Hat tip: Lucianne.com

Cosby clearly isn’t afraid of straying from the ‘play the race card’ tactic we so often see utilized by the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, among others. Earlier this month in New Orleans at a rally headed up by black ‘leaders’ Cosby said:

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Entertainer Bill Cosby urged New Orleans’ black population on Saturday to cleanse itself of a culture of crime as it rebuilds from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last year.

Cosby, whose criticism of some aspects of modern African-American culture has stirred controversy in recent years, told a rally headed by black leaders that the city needed to look at the “wound” it had before Katrina struck.

“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city’s convention center.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children,” he said.

“What kind of a village is that?”

Clearly, Cosby is a beacon of light on issues affecting those who are poor and uneducated in the black community. I have said before that I, and other white people can sit here and talk about the problems in the black community all day long, but that sometimes it takes people in the black community talking about those issues to get the discussion going beyond the usual “she/he is a racist!” reactionary comments you typically get from those who benefit from continuing to fan the flames of racial demagoguery. Of course even at that there are oftentimes the usual “Uncle Tom” slurs thrown at black people who stray from the ‘victim’ script, but Cosby – for the most part (even though he’s been criticized in the past) – so far seems to have been able to escape that.

My hat is off to Cosby for embarking on this ambitious tour. Now if we could get Thomas Sowell and Larry Elder to join him at those appearances …

Hat tip for the Reuters link: Right Voices

(Cross-posted at California Conservative)