  In the days after Bill Cosby's infamous speech, I urlLink posted my response on both blogs. Since then, I've looked into the matter a little further, and I feel the topic deserves a follow-up. First of all, Tavis Smiley, always a fantastic and professional interviewer, had Bill Cosby on his show the week after the Washington Post turned the speech into a media foray. Smiley's interview can be urlLink heard here (the audio's in two parts, be sure to listen to both) or urlLink read here , and it's well worth hearing in its entirety.
In the interview, the most striking interchange is when Tavis Smiley asked Bill Cosby about the negative reactions to his speech. Bill Cosby had previously mentioned that the high school drop-out rate for African American students is at 50%, and in response to this question he said, "...somebody took issue and tried to say that I was excusing white people from what is supposed to be happening with fairness. I'm not. I'm saying, OK, Bill Cosby never said this. He never said a thing, OK? 2 years from now, wanna make a bet on 60%?
Wanna make a bet on more deaths in the neighborhood than the police are doing? " When Smiley had Cornel West on his radio show--and I respect Cornel West as one of the most brilliant minds of our time--Cornel West said of Bill Cosby that he believed Cosby's words came from a good place in his heart.
I only understood this comment after hearing the above-quoted words. When I lived in Germany, so many older Germans brought up to me WWII, even though I had no accusatory feelings toward them. They would bring forth apologetic-sounding stories that explained why they felt too afraid of Hitler's government to take a stand against it. A very old man in Aachen, heard Americans were visiting his neighbors and he came over to ask if he could take Mandy (another American exchangee) and me to the American military cemetery there. He wanted to show us how Aachen had given the highest, most beautiful land (in a region under the sea level, the highest land is a really big deal) dedicated to the servicepeople who helped defeat the Nazis. It was as if the guilt of not taking a stand, even in light of the assured death of any who did, against the Nazis back then was somehow atoned by better honoring the dead of those who did take the stand. Years later, this experience still haunts and inspires my actions. It is the primary reason why I tried so hard to prevent the military action again Afghanistan and the war against Iraq.
Even then, especially then, I was certain history will shine light on the US government's false motives and misguided murders in the name of the state. How could I look my grandchildren in the eye as they studied our time without doing everything in my power to stop it? I protested in Houston, Austin, Santa Fe, Taos, and Washington D.C. alongside hundreds of thousands of likeminded men and women.
I wrote letters to all my political representatives, including Cheney and Bush. In the end, I can't feel like my actions did anything to stop the war machine. To the contrary, every dyer prediction written on every protest poster has come to pass. No weapons of mass destruction, no reduction in global terrorism, countless casualties... In some sort of resigned grief, John and I could only give money to Doctors without Borders, UMCOR, and others who mitigate the consequences. My only solace is that at least I was not silent. This is the tie that binds Bill Cosby's speech to myself. One has to remember that Bill Cosby's son urlLink Ennis was killed in a violent, random assault in 1997. I'm sure that this, in no small way, pressures him to speak rather than remain silent. In urlLink Culture of Fear , Barry Glassner reported that African Americans are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. As the dropout rates prove, this is only one of many ways African Americans are falling like flies from the ranks of the manifest destiny America promises.
I continue to believe Cosby failed to recognize the true causative factors regarding the status of African-Americans who drop out or even commit crimes. This is a point better stated and researched in an editorial in today's New York Times by Barbara Ehrenreich called urlLink Today's Cosby Kids . In the end, I don't agree with much of what he said, or even the venue in which he chose to share it. But I do understand why he felt he had to say it. 
