Response to Camille Cosby

This was written by David Horowitz in Salon Magazine.

Mrs. Cosby's racial paranoia
What right does a grieving mother have to blame American racism for
the murder of her son by a Ukrainian immigrant?
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
What can be said about a mother who exploits the tragic death of her
own son to deliver a racist diatribe against a nation that has
showered her with privilege, making her family wealthy and famous
beyond the wildest dreams of almost anyone alive, including the very
objects of her hate? Yet that is exactly what Camille Cosby has done
in a USA Today column: "America Taught My Son's Killer to Hate Blacks.
"

Unlike the mothers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Camille
Cosby was able to see swift justice rendered by the American court
system to the criminal psychopath who murdered her son, Ennis. But
this result was apparently unsatisfactory. In her eyes, the killer
himself, Mikhail Markhasev, was a victim of America.

"Presumably, Markhasev did not learn to hate black people in his
native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero.
Nor was he likely to see America's intolerable, stereotypical movies
and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the
Soviet Union before the killer and his family moved to America in the
late 1980s."

Paranoid logic bleeds all over these words. Cosby enjoys a fortune
that is estimated in the hundreds of millions, thanks to the success
of a television show that featured a model black family in which her
husband played a doctor. Year after year, "The Cosby Show" was made
the No. 1 television program in America by tens of millions of
viewers who happened to be white. It was ritually attacked, on the
other hand, by black militants using tones not unlike those employed
by Camille Cosby, as being allegedly "unrepresentative" and
"unrealistic." In other words, in this perverse black militant view,
"The Cosby Show" was attacked as an effort by white America to
portray African-Americans as better than they were.

On what basis, moreover, is the claim made that the presence of a
persecuted group is necessary to provoke the irrational hatred
directed toward it by bigots? Is Cosby suggesting that bigots need
evidence to substantiate their racism? There are no Jews to speak of
in countries like Poland and Japan, but Jew-hatred is rife in both
places. Has Cosby forgotten (or as a leftist has she merely blanked
out the memory of) Russia's protest at the Olympics that American
teams had an unfair advantage because of the presence of blacks?

"Yes," she writes, "racism and prejudice are omnipresent and
eternalized in America's institutions, media and myriad entities."
Eternalized? Perhaps it is appropriate to recall at this point that
the Cosbys were the most public supporters of the racist lies of
Tawana Brawley a few years back, putting up money in the hope of
proving that the lies were true.

In her current rant, Cosby begins her "proof" of America's
ineluctable racism with the fact that the Voting Rights Act will
expire in 10 years. From this fact she concludes preposterously that
"Congress once again will decide whether African-Americans will be
allowed to vote" and comments that no other Americans are subjected
to this oppressive nonsense.

On what planet is Camille Cosby living? What majority in this country
is going to deny African-Americans the right to vote (which is, after
all, a constitutional right)? In fact, the only African-Americans so
denied in the past resided in the American South, a region whose
major cities today are run by African-American elected officials, and
where black legislators like Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., are
elected in majority white districts.

It is her second example, however, that reveals the full depth of her
hatred of country: "African-Americans, as well as all Americans, are
brainwashed every day to respect and revere slave-owners and people
who clearly waffled about race ... several slave-owners' images are
on America's paper currencies: George Washington ($1), Thomas
Jefferson ($2), Alexander Hamilton ($10), Andrew Jackson ($20),
Ulysses Grant ($50) and Benjamin Franklin ($100)."

Forget that the characterizations of Hamilton, Grant and Franklin
(whose last act was to file an anti-slavery petition to Congress) are
probably inaccurate. What American is taught to revere the fact that
these men owned (or may have owned) slaves? Perhaps Cosby should
direct her concern to Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, who are
still waffling about slavery in Africa more than 100 years after the
spiritual heirs of Washington and Jefferson abolished the institution
in the United States.

Cosby also picks up the hoary chestnut of language: "America's
educational institutions' dictionaries define 'black' as 'harmful;
hostile; disgrace; unpleasant aspects of life.'" The idea is that the
term "black" was applied to African-Americans to denigrate them. The
reality, however, is that it was militants like Malcolm X who
demanded that African-Americans be called "black" at a time when
whites and their dictionaries universally referred to them as "Negro"
and "colored."

The irrational hatred of America in general, and of white America in
particular, that is manifest in Cosby's screed is unfortunately the
expression of more than a single individual's paranoia exacerbated by
a wholly understandable grief. Suppose, for example, that the
grieving mothers of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman had authored a
parallel column titled "Black America Taught Our Children's Killer to
Hate Whites?"

Is there any white-owned newspaper in America that would even print
it? In contrast to Camille Cosby's perverse view of America as a
nation of racists, this is the only nation in the world where
children are indoctrinated from preschool on that racism is morally
wrong, that blacks in particular have been the victims of egregious
racial crimes and that the expression of prejudice is socially
unacceptable. In fact, the only group in America allowed to vent
racist venom these days is African-Americans themselves, as Cosby's
outburst exemplifies.

For she is hardly alone. In her column, she quotes the most
celebrated and honored African-American writer of his generation,
James Baldwin, to this embarrassing effect: "The will of the people,
or the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not,
then, nor is there now, a single American institution which is not a
racist institution."

How many African-American leaders will dissociate themselves from
slanders like this or from the vicious hate-America, hate-whitey
sentiments expressed by Camille Cosby?

Ironically, a kind of answer was provided the day before Cosby spewed
her racist rage in the pages of USA Today, when it was revealed that
the chairman of President Clinton's race panel and its most
distinguished African-American member, John Hope Franklin, had urged
the president to abandon the idea of creating a "colorblind" society.
If this was what enough African-Americans actually wanted, they might
be able to get it. But not without a fight from the rest of us.