Fat Albert's Lessons For Cosby

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, BlackNews.com columnist

In the movie, Fat Albert raps, utters goof ball inanities, and engages in slapstick antics with his gang. Some of his gang guys talk jive, some of which is barely comprehensible as English, prance, swagger, and appear to be type A under-achievers. The movie could be written off as silly, Animal House adolescent fare that mercifully will fade quickly at the box office. But Fat Albert was culled for the big screen from the long running 1970s cartoon series, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. As its predecessor, Fat Albert is Cosby's latest big jab at young black male stereotypes. That jab, however, must be measured against Cosby's self-appointed one man crusade against slouch pants, slurred verbiage, gang banging, dope smoking, educational rudderless young blacks.

When the furor first hit, Cosby backpedaled slightly and claimed that he was not making a grand indictment of all young blacks, just those who fit the slacker profile. To his credit, Cosby has put his money and actions where his mouth is. He has hosted town halls in black communities, shelled out some bucks for scholarships, and upped his contributions to historically black colleges.

Yet on every occasion that Cosby has mounted his moral high horse, his words belie his disclaimer that he's only chastising misbehaving young blacks. In a CNN interview in November, he unloosed another broadside against young blacks for their profanity, and dysfunctional behavior. He did not qualify his tirade with the words, "most," "many," or "some" before "young blacks." In his Washington Post column the day after Christmas, William Raspberry chided Cosby for "yelling" at blacks.

If a few members of Cosby's on screen Fat Albert gang can display some of the behavior that drives him up the wall, why can't Cosby see that while some young blacks do display that same behavior off the big screen that doesn't mean that they're all prime candidates for the cemetery or a prison cell? The kids in Fat Albert's on-screen world aren't the universal every young black.

In Cosby's skewed vision of the real world, they are. Despite his kind of, sort of, disclaimer, Cosby still refuses to credit the majority of black youth and their parents for doing the right thing in school and on the streets. And they do.

In June 2004, a month after Cosby's initial outburst, a U.S. Commerce Department report found that black high school graduation rates hit a record high. Eighty percent graduated. Equally significant, the number of blacks graduating leaped ten percent from 1993 to 2000. That was double the increase on non-Hispanic whites. A survey of student attitudes by the Minority Student Achievement Network, an Illinois-based educational advocacy group in 2002, found that black students were as motivated, studied as hard, and were as serious about graduating as whites.

Though far more young blacks than whites are in prison, on parole or probation, the overwhelming majority have avoided the dead end cycle of crime, drugs, gangs, and violence. According to the National Youth Gang Survey in 2001, slightly more than one in ten young blacks self-identified themselves as gang members, and the length of time they were in gangs was less than one year. The survey also found that the fastest rise in gang membership was among young whites.

Many young blacks have seen the personal and social devastation that the streets have wreaked on friends, relatives, and acquaintances and they want no part of it. The black students that tumble through the educational cracks do so not because they are stupid, lack ambition, or are terrified of seeming too smart. They fail because they are trapped in crumbling, underserved public schools, stocked with inexperienced, insensitive, or indifferent teachers and administrators, and lack parental and social supports. While most young blacks do not self-describe themselves as gangsters, many do identify with the swagger, clothes, rhetoric, sex and violent antics of gang members, and some rappers. This further fuels public belief that all young blacks are thugs, and, of course, educational losers.

Some poor young blacks can't read or write, join gangs, deal drugs, terrorize their communities. Many whites, Hispanics, and Asians also engage in the same type of foul-mouthed, destructive behavior. Yet Hispanic and Asian American leaders, public officials, and community activists, unlike Cosby, don't publicly mistake their misbehaving young persons as being the singular standard bearers of conduct in their communities. They have not made the negative behavior of some Asian and Hispanic youth a racial rather than an endemic social problem. Cosby has done that with black youth.

The characters in Fat Albert represent the good, the bad, and the ugly among young blacks. But Cosby didn't and still won't admit that young blacks off the screen represent as much, if not more, of the good than the bad and the ugly.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of The Crisis in Black and Black a featured columnist for Alternet and BlackNews.com and African-American newspapers nationally. He is the publisher of The Hutchinson Report Newsletter, an on-line public issues newsletter.

For media interviews, contact:
Mr. Hutchinson at 323-296-6331 or hutchinsonreport@blacknews.com