Airing Dirty Laundry
Cosby and Poussaint’s book stirs up a caldron of commentary pro and con.
By Angela P. Dodson
Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors
by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint, $25.99, Hardcover, Thomas Nelson (October 2007), ISBN-10: 1595550925 ISBN-13: 978-1595550927, 288 pp.
Remember the hilarious, kid-friendly father figure who made us beg for Jell-O pudding and run to the television set to see a normal, upper-middle-class couple loving each other and raising strong Black children? He does not seem himself these days.
For this book, Bill Cosby has joined forces with one of the nation’s most respected and often-quoted psychiatrists. Their message is simple, Black people need to get it together. No argument here. The premise seems sound: Our people need to take personal responsibility for their lives.
The execution of this work, however, is troubling. Its tone is often angry, and it offers vague data without comparisons and without citing the sources, while telling us “the numbers speak for themselves.” The authors have had a blitz of television appearances, and the book quickly achieved best-seller status (#14 on The New York Times hardcover advice list in mid-November). The work also has attracted no small measure of controversy.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an author, political analyst and blogger, wrote, “While Cosby is entitled to publicly air Black America’s alleged dirty laundry, there’s more myth than dirt in that laundry.”
