'Come on People' Cosby's Plea to Black Communities

Comedian Bill Cosby (left) and his friend, psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint.

hide captionComedian Bill Cosby (left) and his friend, psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, spent three years holding townhall meetings across the country to talk about how to stop cycles that perpetuate a culture of victimhood.

In a new book, Come On People, comedian Bill Cosby and psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint urge struggling African American communities to get "on the path from victims to victors." The authors spent three years holding townhall meetings across the country, talking to communities about the best ways to stop cycles that perpetuate a culture of victimhood.



Bill Cosby, comedian, and co-author of Come On People

Dr. Alvin Poussaint, co-author of Come On People

Excerpt: 'Come on People'

'Come On People' Cover

What's Going On with Black Men?


Your authors have been around long enough, and traveled widely enough, to think we understand something about the problem. And we're hopeful enough — or desperate enough — to think that with all of us working together we might find our way to a solution. Let's start with one very basic fact. Back in 1950, before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, when Rosa Parks was still sitting in the back of her Montgomery bus, when the NBA was just about all white, back in those troubled times, black boys were born into a different world than they are today.


How is that possible?


Build on Our Legacy

In 1950, we still feared our parents and respected them. We know that for a fact because we were both in our early teens that year and were both testing our limits. We and the others in our generation weren't saints. We'll be the first to admit that. We were filled with piss and vinegar like many teenage boys-white, black, and otherwise. If we saw something we wanted and didn't have any money-and trust us, few of us ever had money-we thought about taking it, sure. But something called "parenting," something that had wormed its way into our heads from the time we were still in the womb, said to us, If you get caught stealing it, you're going to embarrass your mother. The voice didn't say, You're going to get your butt kicked. We knew that and expected that from experience. No, that inner voice said, You're going to embarrass your mother. You're going to embarrass your family.

As we became older and grew more interested in girls, our hormones raged just as boys' hormones rage today. The Internet may be new. Cell phones may be new. But sex, we don't need to tell you, has been around since Adam and Eve. So has shame. We knew that if one of us got a girl pregnant, not only would she have to go visit that famous "aunt in South Carolina," but young Romeo would have to go too, not to South Carolina maybe, but somewhere. It would be too embarrassing for Romeo's family for him to just sit around in the neighborhood with a fat Cheshire cat smile on his face. And there was something else we understood: that girl likely had a daddy in the home. And he'd be prepared to wipe that grin off Romeo's face permanently. This was what parenting was about. It wasn't always pretty, but it could be pretty effective. Parenting works best when both a mother and a father participate.

Some mothers can do it on their own, but they need help. A house without a father is a challenge. A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe, and that's just about what we have today. Can we fix this? Can we change it? We don't have a choice. We have to take our neighborhoods back. We have to go in there and do it ourselves. We saw what happened in New Orleans when people waited for the government to help. "Governments" are things. Governments don't care. People care, and no people care like parents do-well, except maybe grandparents and other caregivers, and thank God for them.


Twenty years ago in this city we started the "Rites of Passage." Nobody else was doing it on the East Coast. We started looking at how the African-American male was going downhill. Twenty years from now, I hope we will not be having this same type of conversation. The purpose of our program is to nurture young men who can maintain, protect, and provide for a family and a community.


Why is the problem so grave? A mother can usually teach a daughter how to be a woman. But as much as mothers love their sons, they have difficulty showing a son how to be a man. A successful man can channel his natural aggression. Without that discipline, these sons often get into trouble at school because many teachers find it difficult to manage their "acting out" behavior. If you think we're exaggerating, talk to a teacher.


In our culture too often boys are reared and taught by women who want boys' behavior to be like girls'. But boys were never, ever created to sit still. Boys are active, always have been, always will be. And so sometimes mothers have to pass them on to uncles or other men. We also have to figure out how to get more males in the classroom so that these boys can have active participation with another man in their lives.

There is another thing that little boys don't do any more: go to church. When we were kids, once a week we had to get dressed to the nines in clothes we'd rather not wear and spend an hour sitting and kneeling quietly in a place we'd rather not be. But this was a useful and necessary discipline. We learned how to sit still. We learned how to sit quietly. We learned self-control, and we knew the consequences if we didn't. We could always go out and play ball when church was over, a little wiser for the experience. Today, many boys don't go to church and couldn't even put their clothes on straight if they did. Many of these kids have never tied a tie or buckled a top button or shined their shoes. Sadly, the first real suit many of them get to wear is colored orange. And what's really unfortunate is that the beltless, droopy-drawered look you see on the streets is a fashion straight out of prison. Boys like the defiance of the look, and some make it part of their permanent identity, but that look doesn't get anyone a job.

Acknowledge the Problem

As these boys move through school, their behavior goes from bad to worse. The schools don't help much because they are often of terrible quality. Even the good schools are designed to favor girls, whose language skills tend to develop earlier than boys. The boys are much more likely to end up in special education programs than girls, or white boys for that matter. Special education at its best is helpful for kids who need it, but too many kids are warehoused in these classes and never make it back to the mainstream. And if the drugs or the warehousing doesn't work, the schools finally just suspend the kids or expel them. Troubled black boys in schools are more than twice as likely to be suspended as white boys or Hispanics, and this does no one any good except the neighborhood drug dealers.

Gregory Payton, in Cincinnati, talked about his journey:

Going into the service, flying around the country, fixing battleships — that's a good life. But what I couldn't figure out was, if it was so good, why did I put my whole life in a tube? I'm talking about a crack pipe. I put everything I ever had in that tube, and nothing came out the end but smoke. After coming out of the shipyard, I quit. When I say I quit, I quit everything. I gave up. I gave up on me. I was homeless.
But when I started listening to people, I started changing. And when I started changing, some things happened to me. And one of the things I did was I went back to work. But you know, in Cincinnati, they don't have ships. So I had to go back to college. You have to have a vision. You have to have people who believe in you too. You have to have people who support you. You feel support. You feel love. They seem like small things, but yet, they're so big, and they're so great. One of the things I do know is that we all make mistakes. But where I work now, they have a little sign on the door, and it says: a smooth ocean never helped build a sailor's skills. What I found out is that it starts with me and it ends with me. I can't blame anybody for anything. I just gotta keep my head down and keep moving. The thing I do now is I just don't quit anything.

When the boys get suspended or expelled — admit it, parents — there is usually a good reason. The problem is that not all of us will admit it. Our boy gets sent home, and what do we do? We get angry at the teacher or the principal or the school board. We call a parasite lawyer like those we see on TV. "No, Mrs. Jones, it's not their fault! How dare they punish little Jovon! Let's sue." By the first grade, we're encouraging the kids to use "the other dude did it" defense, and some of them never forget it. They'll keep repeating "The other dude did it" like a mantra right up to the day they die, all too often courtesy of the state of California or Texas or Florida, (at this time the leading states in applying the death penalty). To be sure, the justice system disfavors black males, and some are in the system who should not be. But tragically, too many of our sons deserve to be right where they are.


One advantage that African-American kids have over most people in the world is the ability to speak English. It's the international language of business. To be a success anywhere on the globe, you have to speak it. But we're letting this advantage slip away too. Many of our kids don't want to speak English. In our day, we used to talk a certain way on the corner, but when we got into the house, we switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except for some young people you see hanging around on the corners. You can't land a plane in Rome saying, "Whassup?" to the control tower. You can't be a doctor telling your nurse, "Dat tumor be nasty." There is no Bible in the world that has that kind of language.

We used to blame the kids for talking this way until we heard some of their parents. Some black parents couldn't care less. Too many teachers, of all ethnicities, couldn't care less too. Most black employers we know want to see the entire community prosper. But even they don't want to hire boys who can't dress properly, and who speak as if English were a second language. When we see these boys walking around the neighborhood, we imagine them thirty or forty years down the road wandering around just as aimlessly, and we want to cry. The problem is they don't see themselves down that road. These boys don't really know what the word future means. Neither did some of their parents. And that's why they're just hanging out at the bottom for five or six generations, trapped in housing projects that were built to stabilize people just long enough to get a job, move out, and move on. Even if there were more affordable housing out there, many of these guys would not be able to find their way to it!

Excerpted from Come on People by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint. Copyright by William H. Cosby Jr. and Alvin F. Poussaint, MD. Published in Nashville, Tenn., by Thomas Nelson

Books Featured In This Story

Come On, People
Come On, People

On the Path from Victims to Victors

by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint

Hardcover, 265 pages | purchase


Purchase Featured Books

  • Come On, People
  • On the Path from Victims to Victors
  • Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint




Support comes from: