Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III (RGIII, as he is known) has a problem. It turns out that some black commentators, and probably some black elites, don’t think he is black enough — because he dared to publicly state that he didn’t want to be judged solely by his skin color as an NFL quarterback.Last Thursday morning on First Take, ESPN’s Rob Parker uttered a comment for which he was later fired, although he probably only said what some African Americans think but don’t publicly express: “My question is, and it’s just a straight, honest question: Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?”I’d never heard the term before, so I did a quick search and landed at UrbanDictionary.com. Here is the definition I found there:
Cornball brother: An African-American man who chooses not to follow the stereotype . . . life choices include marrying white women, being a Republican, and not being ‘down with the cause.’
Bill Cosby got in trouble with the Blackness Police when he discussed the problems of the Black underclass. He was accused to blaming the poor when he had the courage to mention "that which must not be named."
It was the NAACP’s 50th-anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, in 2004, and Cosby had the audacity to talk about some of the serious challenges facing African Americans, particularly in America’s inner cities.“Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem,” he said. “We’ve got to take the neighborhood back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner.”Not exactly fighting words, you’d think. Cosby then addressed the problems confronting black Americans: senseless black-on-black crime in America, failing public schools that so poorly serve young black men, and a dysfunctional welfare state.“There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry,” he said. “Oh, God, they’re angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza?”He went on to talk about the problem of illegitimacy as it affects black America:Five or six different children, same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever, pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who this is. It might be your grandmother. I’m telling you, they’re young enough. Hey, you have a baby when you’re twelve. Your baby turns 13 and has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother.He closed out the speech with some words about the legacy of all of those who fought the civil-rights battles of the 1960s: “I just want to get you as angry as you ought to be. When you walk around the neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff’s not funny. These people are not funny anymore. And that’s not [my] brother. And that’s not my sister.”
Decades after ML King gave his heralded speech about wishing to be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, the people who share his skin color insist that if you are Black you must think Black, act Black, marry Black, vote Black. If you don't you will be denounced as a traitor to your race. You will be damned in the halls of academia and in the columns of newspapers and magazines. Broadcasters will condemn you and books will be written castigating you. The KKK does not have more rigid standards of race consciousness that the upholders of racial purity on the Black Plantation.
But there are encouraging signs. At least those enforcers of the Black code are finding a smaller audience. The conservative community has its own media now which it uses to denounce the racists on the Left. Bill Cosby is no longer alone on his judgment. Is there irony in the fact that the part of the culture that is most in tune with ML King’s wish about skin color and character is the white conservative? Perhaps not, because Dr. King was rumored to be a Republican.
But there are encouraging signs. At least those enforcers of the Black code are finding a smaller audience. The conservative community has its own media now which it uses to denounce the racists on the Left. Bill Cosby is no longer alone on his judgment. Is there irony in the fact that the part of the culture that is most in tune with ML King’s wish about skin color and character is the white conservative? Perhaps not, because Dr. King was rumored to be a Republican.
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