Ferguson went up in flames last night over the decision not to indict the police officer who shot “gentle giant” Michael Brown. Blacks showed themselves off by looting, burning down chain stores, blocking interstates, and firing off automatic weapons. White America finally got a good look at the communities our tax dollars support—and how they just don’t care about basic facts.
Radix tweeted out Monday night that some people show off their culture through architecture, music, art…or by burning down their local Little Caesar’s. Black culture—fully supported through redistribution of wealth from Whites—showed itself off through the anarchy we witnessed on TV last night.
But many White Americans don’t like to accept Blacks for who they are. They desperately cling to notions inculcated into them through years of public education and cable television. These notions portray Blacks as peace-loving, wise, and more than capable of succeeding in our society—if it just wasn’t for those White bigots standing in their way. Even for Middle American Whites, the behavior of the Ferguson rioters is a bridge too far for them to make conclusions on African culture. They are “colorblind” after all, and they know that serial adulterer and noted plagiarist Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn’t be out rioting—even though King justified it as the “language of the unheard.”
How do they keep believing that all Blacks can miraculously assimilate into Western Civilization when all the evidence tells them otherwise? Because of individuals like Bill Cosby, the Black Exceptions.
The Black Exception is an individual who’s promoted to Whites to disprove the notion that Blacks can’t function in our societies. They have adapted enough White behaviors to become almost like us—but Black, which is even better in the minds of many deluded Whites. They’re held up as what Blacks can become if given the chance and how apparently Blacks previously were in society. They’re articulate (this term is a must), amiable, patriotic, hard-working, responsible, and adhere to conservative family values. These Exceptions are propagated primarily to conservative Whites as White liberals seem a-ok with figures who have no problems playing to stereotypes. (It is after all deemed racist to have a problem with what constitutes authentic black culture today—no matter how much it violates the sensibilities of Urban Elves.)
Black Exceptions, to bourgeois White society, do not prove the rule. Rather, they are the rule. In the minds of colorblind Whites, Blacks can all be like Bill Cosby—and they once were in some mythical time in this country’s existence. (Fact Check: No they weren’t and they only didn’t rape and pillage back in the day due to the use of brutal force to control them.) Black Exceptions are pointed to whenever Black criminality becomes unavoidable. Exceptions are pointed to when Blacks riot. They’re pointed to when Black test scores continue to be well below average. They’re used not to justify the racial attitudes of White liberals, but to justify the nonsensical “colorblindness” of conservatives. They can be just like us, as long as they follow the advice of Cosby, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, and whoever else the media props up next.
Cosby is the ultimate example of this type and has long been a hit among conservatives—despite a liberal reputation and publicly denouncing the Tea Party as dangerous. His television venture The Cosby Show was one of the most successful sitcoms of the 1980’s and featured Cosby as arguably the last “father-knows-best” types in American TV. The show, in spite of it clearly being a “Black show,” garnered viewers across racial lines—largely owing to its downplaying of racial politics and Cosby playing a strong father figure that was no longer allowed for White men on TV.
Over time, Cosby grew even further into his role as the prime Black Exception. Long after his show went off the air, the comedian railed against Ebonics and other excesses of Black culture detested by White society.
Here’s some excerpts from his famous “Pound Cake” speech—given in 2004 to honor the 50th anniversary of *Brown v. Board of Education”—that denounced contemporary Black culture:
Are you not paying attention, people with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up (laughter and clapping ). Isn’t it a sign of something when she’s got her dress all the way up to the crack…and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body. What part of Africa did this come from? (laughter). We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans, they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail. (When we give these kinds names to our children, we give them the strength and inspiration in the meaning of those names. What’s the point of giving them strong names if there is not parenting and values backing it up).
This instantly made him a cause célèbre among conservatives and furthered solidified his reputation as a walking embodiment that “they are all not like that”… until it emerged this month that he had raped over a dozen women throughout his adult life.
When this emerged, Cosby managed to have the worst month of his life. In one week, he went from the beloved Black father figure to a sociopathic serial rapist in the public consciousness. His return to TV was canned and his holiday specials were scrapped. He’s gone from lovable to near-universally despised in the shortest amount of time in human history.
Worst of all for Cosby, this has forever tarnished his reputation as the Black Exception par excellence. It’s hard to tell fellow Blacks to wise up and start acting like they did in your day when you made a hobby out of raping (mostly White) women. His rapey ambitions have deflated the hearts of millions of Whites who turned into his show and thought he was different. To many Whites, his message of moral grandstanding and rage against Black culture presented a foolhardy hope that if Afro-American kids just listened to him, they could become dopey members of the middle class, too. That delusion is, thankfully, fading away quick in the face of numerous accusations of rape and intimidation. But like all dying delusions, Cosby still has fanatical supporters ready to defend him and what he represents.
This is what the great goober and Black believer Glenn Beck had to say about the Associated Press accusing the great Black Exception of rape:
You want to talk about rape? That’s media rape, right there… You’ve just raped Bill Cosby. You said you wouldn’t do it. You just did it and then you blamed it on him.
Not Cosby’s fault he raped, it’s the media’s fault for asking him about it.
Interestingly enough though, it wasn’t the AP or any other mainstream outlet that first ignited the renewed attention into Cosby’s private life—it was fellow a Black tired of the comedian talking down to his people. The comedian Hannibal Burress performed a stand-up bit in October that took umbrage with Cosby acting like a moral authority when he is in real life a rapist. He said that the more famous comic was the “smuggest old-black-man public persona that I hate. He gets on TV, ‘pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’”
His riff went viral and caused renewed scrutiny against a man with a squeaky clean, All-American image. Essentially, it’s his own people that are to blame for his fall from grace. The New Yorker reported it had to take a fellow Black man to take away the squeamishness of White liberals covering the rapes of Cosby, because they didn’t want to play up the stereotype of sexual predation attributed to Black men. Liberal notions first, facts second.
While the Left has no problem with thinking of Cosby as a sociopathic rapist and it not affecting their racial views, for many on the American Right this is a more serious concern. For years he’s been the man to point to when Blacks act Black and jeopardize colorblindness. Now they can no longer point to a rapist and say “they’re not all like that, just look at Cosby.” Sure, there’s still plenty of candidates out there, but none with the public goodwill and popularity that the TV star once had. And that’s all gone now.
White liberals have no problem defending the rioters of Ferguson and justifying their actions. They see America’s race problem as Whites not accepting Blacks for who they are—while ignoring the brutal truths. For conservatives, America’s race problem is due to Blacks not imbibing White values and behavior—while failing to realize those very same values and behaviors are inherently White.
The riots in Ferguson and the rape charges against Cosby will certainly not change how White liberals view race, but it will change the minds of at least a few conservatives. For the ones who will wake up to race will realize the obvious truth about Black Exceptions—they aren’t the rule. Ferguson is the rule.
