Bill Cosby's I Have Been To The Mountain Top

In Washington, D.C. on May 17, 2004, at a dinner sponsored by the NAACP, Bill Cosby spewed out words of judgment, criticism and condemnation against poor blacks. I was outraged by his words that indicated that poor blacks had betrayed the Civil Rights Movement by failing to do their part. Hearing Cosby’s words provoked my memory of the love spoken through the words of Dr. Martin Luther King in his final speech, I Have Been to the Mountain Top: I would say millions of people in the Negro community who are poverty-stricken – not because they are not working, but because they receive wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the main stream of the economic life of our nation. Most of the poverty-stricken people of America are persons …show more content…
King attempted to connect the world to the suffering of the poor working class in America with the highest hope of provoking social justice. The comments made by Bill Cosby against lower social economic blacks in America, the poor class, has led me to pose this question: Does social class nullify blackness in America? In this paper I will address this question by defining Ghettocracy and Afristocracy, discussing how blackness is defined in the United States and whether these two social classes within the African American race nullifies blackness in America. Cosby’s attack on poor black Americans at a public event aired the dirty laundry within the African American race by clearly dividing blacks into class categories and plotting one against the other. According to Dyson (2005), his comments are not isolated, but are held by “some black poor and working-class members themselves” and are consistent with a class war in black America that consists of Afristocracy and Ghettocracy. According to