Purchase

Amazon

Powell's Books

Add to Wish List

Also by Michael Eric Dyson:

Tears We Cannot Stop, January 2017
Hardcover / e-Book
Who's Afraid Of Post-Blackness?, September 2011
Hardcover / e-Book
Can You Hear Me Now?, May 2009
Hardcover
April 4, 1968, April 2008
Hardcover
Know What I Mean?, July 2007
Hardcover
Debating Race, February 2007
Hardcover
Come Hell or High Water, March 2006
Hardcover
Pride, February 2006
Hardcover
Is Bill Cosby Right?, February 2006
Paperback / e-Book
Is Bill Crosby Right?, April 2005
Hardcover

Is Bill Crosby Right?
Michael Eric Dyson

or has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?

Basic Civitas Books
April 2005
288 pages
ISBN: 0465017193
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction

The acclaimed "hip-hop intellectual" exposes the raw nerve of class and generational warfare in black America with this provocative defense of impoverished African Americans

Nothing exposed the class and generational divide in black America more starkly than Bill Cosby's now-infamous assault on the black poor when he received an NAACP award in the spring of 2004. The comedian-cum-social critic lamented the lack of parenting, poor academic performance, sexual promiscuity, and criminal behavior among what he called the "knuckleheads" of the African-American community. Even more surprising than his comments, however, was the fact that his audience laughed and applauded.

Best-selling writer, preacher, and scholar Michael Eric Dyson uses the Cosby brouhaha as a window on a growing cultural divide within the African-American community. According to Dyson, the "Afristocracy" -lawyers, physicians, intellectuals, bankers, civil rights leaders, entertainers, and other professionals-looks with disdain upon the black poor who make up the "Ghettocracy" -single mothers on welfare, the married, single, and working poor, the incarcerated, and a battalion of impoverished children. Dyson explains why the black middle class has joined mainstream America to blame the poor for their troubles, rather than tackling the systemic injustices that shape their lives. He exposes the flawed logic of Cosby's diatribe and offers a principled defense of the wrongly maligned black citizens at the bottom of the social totem pole. Displaying the critical prowess that has made him the nation's preeminent spokesman for the hip-hop generation, Dyson challenges us all-black and white-to confront the social problems that the civil rights movement failed to solve.

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!