“Friction between the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world.” -Booker T. Washington, The Awakening of the Negro.

Kinism desires black dignity, and sees it as the only means by which Godly relations between the black and white man can be rationally established and sustained.The failure of integrationism is seen in its enervation of the black man, its destruction of his cultural institutions, and the diversion and misdirection of the white culture to which it was forcibly joined.

Bill Cosby’s brand of black conservatism is a welcome tonic to the trite and tired rhetoric of the NAACP. While Kinism is a white phenomenon, it shares certain features with the healthier strains of black nationalism. Cosby’s resistance to the powerful temptation to blame black under-performance and social malaise on so-called “structural” (meaning white-maintained) discrimination, while limiting his appeal in the “where’s mine” faction of the black community, is enticing to an older generation of blacks, a manlier breed, and its sympathizers among the spiritually wandering hip-hop generation. Likeness is also to be found in Kinism’s focusing of the spotlight of critique on the limitations and errors of Western materialism -a white phenomenon, just as Cosby looks to the moral and social pathologies of the black community at large as the source of its difficulties.

In the linked article (which is well worth your time to read), it is noted that the “bootstrap” approach to black under-performance and moral decline is not always well received among black leaders in academia and social activism. To wit, Cosby is criticized by both the author of the article, and various leaders he cites, as diminishing the legacy of discrimination and the need for structural reforms. But to what extent can it be claimed that those who defend the need for structural reforms are merely vested in the perpetuation of the widespread perception of victimization? If the establishment of an economy by, of, and for blacks was possible a generation ago, what is the reason for the precipitous decline of this beachhead of independence? We must look to integration, and the nature of its claims as the chief cause in the decline of black independence. It cannot be said that opportunities in the white economy are less than they were when the restrictions of Jim Crow were first cast aside, and yet black business, outside of the handful of celebrities and athletes in white patronized industries, has for the last several decades experienced an astonishing retreat -a retreat that coincides with the formalization of a regime of dependence on white “fairness” and the cultivation of subconscious racial guilt to establish a foothold in the white economy. This is a recipe for failure and indefinite servility.

We can only hope that not only does Cosby succeed in re-awakening the black conscience, but that, more broadly, the dignities of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination take root at the core of black social values, leading to a resurgence of black nationalism and a re-awakening to the role of race in the strengthening of both white and black communities.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/cosby

Comments: