AN OPEN LETTER TO BILL COSBY
BY MTUME YA SALAAM

July 8, 2004

Dr. Cosby,

I am intimately familiar with the realities of growing up in an impoverished black community (the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, LA) and I was deeply disturbed by your comments at the Brown v. Board of Education gala and by your subsequent interview with the Washington Post. My problem with your comments fall into two general categories: 1) factual inaccuracies, and 2) a stereotypical and broad-brushed attitude towards what is a complex and multi-faceted problem.

As a Doctor of Education, I am sure you know that the dropout rate among black high school students, while too high, is approximately 13%, not 50%, as you stated. Also, your comments implied that both the black dropout rate and the rate of teenage pregnancy among blacks are increasing when in fact the black dropout rate has been trending downwards for more than two decades and the black teenage pregnancy rate is 30% lower than it was a decade ago. You also criticized poor blacks for buying their children “$500 sneakers.” As far as I know, no such sneakers are popular or even publicly available. You criticized poor blacks for naming their children “names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all that crap.” I assume that you realize ‘Shaniqua’ and ‘Taliqua’ are invented names; Mohammed, by contrast, is the Islamic equivalent of a Biblical name and is quite common among people of various ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, not unlike the name ‘William.’

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I know you’ve been thinking it. And if you haven’t, you probably haven’t been paying attention. The art we once called hip hop has been dead for some time now. But because its rotting carcass has been draped in platinum and propped against a Gucci print car, many of us have missed its demise.

I think the time has come to bid a farewell to the last black arts movement. It’s had a good run but it no longer serves the community that spawned it. Innovation has been replaced with mediocrity and originality replaced with recycled nostalgia for the ghost of hip hop past, leaving nothing to look forward to. Honestly when was the last time you heard something (mainstream) that made you want to run around in circles and write down every word. When was the last time you didn’t feel guilty nodding your head to a song that had a ‘hot beat’ after realizing the lyrical content made you cringe.

When I heard Jam Master Jay had been murdered, it was the icing on the cake. A friend and I spoke for hours after he’d turned on the radio looking for solace and instead heard a member of the label Murder, Inc. about to give testimony about the slain DJ’s legacy. My friend found the irony too great to even hear what the rapper had to say.

After we got off the phone, I dug through my crates and played the single ‘Self Destruction.’ The needle fell on the lyrics:

They call us animals
I don’t agree with them
Let’s prove em wrong
But right is what were proving em?

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