Bill Cosby calls for men to be fathers

  WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Entertainer Bill Cosby Sunday said many ills in U.S. black families can be traced to children raised without fathers, many of whom are incarcerated.
  Cosby appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" with Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor Alvin Poussaint -- with whom he co-authored the new book "Come On, People, on the Path from Victims to Victors." The Emmy-winning comedian said children in single-parent homes often don't get the guidance they need.
  "If you have this as generational, fatherless situation -- unwed father or whatever -- but the male is not there, then it registers on another person -- on the child -- as abandonment," Cosby said.
  One-quarter of black American males reportedly are under the supervision of the U.S. criminal justice system.
  Poussaint said many U.S. fathers "don't even know what to do as a father because many of them grew up in homes that were fatherless."
  "I think a lot of these males kind of have a father hunger, and actually grieve that they don't have a father," said Poussaint. "I think, later, a lot of that turns into anger -- why aren't you with me?"

For sake of kids, society, dads must step up
By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr.
P-I COLUMNIST

   VIOLENCE HIT HOME this summer -- teen thugs at Third and Pine, gunshots that claimed lives on city sidewalks, a barrage of bullets during a fracas near Pike Place Market.
  What was behind this wildness in Seattle?
  Angry, rootless young people who more than likely come from families in which their parents either failed to instill positive values -- or weren't around at all.
  But now, a group of Seattle scholars, justice officials and church leaders are addressing issues such as violence in the community by working to restore a fundamental unit of society -- the family.
  That explains why more than 100 people gathered this weekend at the First AME Church on Capitol Hill. It was a wake-up call with a tough-love title -- "SOS: Dad, Where Are You?"
  Bottom line: Fathers need to be a part of families, raise their children and provide emotional and financial support. Otherwise, the negative cycle of wayward kids falling to crime or becoming neglectful parents will go on.
  "There are ways you can come together and support your child, regardless of your circumstances," King County Juvenile Court Judge LeRoy McCullough, one of the speakers, told me during a break.
  Standing at his side was Margaret Spearmon, an associate dean at the University of Washington School of Social Work, who echoed the importance of role models at home. Saturday's gathering, she said, also was a way to show support for parents who are "doing the right thing."
  Their on-point perspectives came the day before entertainer Bill Cosby took to national airwaves. Continuing to keep the plight of young African Americans in the spotlight, Cosby just co-wrote, "Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors."
  "For the last generation or two, as our communities dissolved and our parenting skills broke down, no one has suffered more than our young black men," the book states.
  The book also points to a statistic that captures the bleakness: "In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today, that number is less than two out of six. ... There are whole blocks with scarcely a married couple, whole blocks without responsible males to watch out for wayward boys, whole neighborhoods in which little girls and boys come of age without seeing up close a committed partnership."
  Why is this significant?
  "Because children need the guidance," Cosby said in an interview Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Because the other parent needs help as well."
  His co-writer, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers in the United States each year, and studies show that the involvement of fathers with families is important for healthy child development.
  Which brings us back to Seattle's First AME on Saturday, where experts offered a dose of straight talk. Around several tables, the discussion centered on the need for parents to stay involved in their kids' lives even if the mother and father aren't together.
  Several men stressed the importance of an estranged couple not bad-mouthing each other around their children.
  "Boys see this," one man said. "That's where they learn how to treat women."
  And one woman had a reminder for other women to support the father's involvement: "My ex-husband is not an ex-father. He's still my children's father."
  At one table a linebacker- sized man broke down and cried, describing the challenge of being a good father and provider.
  Seattle has lifelines -- programs such as First AME's FRESH Start (Fatherhood Responsibility Engagement and Services in Head Start) offer parenting classes, job training referrals and counseling assistance. DADS (Divine Alternatives for Dads Services) supports fathers so they can support families.
  Cosby gets it right when he says the glorification of gang culture and anti-intellectualism have created a crisis, and now, dads are sliding away from personal responsibility.
  But Cosby gets it wrong by suggesting that people across the board don't care.
  They do -- just ask those who sacrificed a sunny fall Saturday to find a positive path and challenge the victim mentality.
P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. can be reached at 206-448-8125 or robertjamieson@seattlepi.com.



Paying the Cos more than lip service
CLARENCE PAGE: June 4, 2004

  WASHINGTON - Had Bill Cosby chosen milder, more genteel language for his recent controversial critique of bad habits that keep poor black folks poor, we wouldn't still be talking about it.
  Instead, an unusually large number of people, most of them black, have stopped me on the street and elsewhere with a pronounced sense of urgency just to ask, "What do you think about what Bill Cosby said?"
  Of course, what they really want to do is tell me what they think about what Bill Cosby said at the recent Howard University fundraiser in Washington's Constitution Hall to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
  "The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," Cosby said. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics."'
  Remarks like that have been reported out of context and misinterpreted so widely that Cosby took the unusual step of releasing a statement to the media and appearing on Tavis Smiley's PBS program May 26 to clarify what he meant.
  "The mistake I made was not in clarifying that I wasn't talking about 'all' (poor people)," he said, according to the broadcast transcript on Smiley's Web site.
  Yes, as any preacher or pundit can tell you, that little word "some" enables you to make all sorts of generalities about people. After all, there are "some" people who will fit into just about any category.
  But if Cosby had moderated his language with such qualifiers his speech would not have been news. News breeds on conflict and it is not news in the mainstream media that a black person is admonishing other black people to be more self-reliant.
  So, to paraphrase a mayoral press secretary I used to know, don't report what Cosby said; report what he means.
  He is justifiably frustrated. He is an iconic superstar who has used his millions, along with hundreds of hours of donated time, to help black colleges and numerous other self-help causes, including an educational foundation named after his own slain son, Ennis Cosby, himself a crime victim. Yet, he had not received nearly as much publicity for all of that as he received for his Constitution Hall outburst.
  He blamed absentee parenting as the root cause of alarming black crime and dropout rates, and for that he was not apologetic. "You can't just blame white people for this, man; you can't," he told Smiley "Whether I'm rightwing or left, some people are not parenting."
  I was particularly delighted to see Cosby dismiss the widely-heard concern that he was giving white conservatives ammunition to trash the black liberal agenda: "I don't give me a blank about those. right-wing white people," he told Smiley. "They can't do any more to us than they've already started with. . .But by the same token, for God's sake, turn around and let's have some meetings and say, 'Brother, um, let me explain to you. You’re the father of so-forth and so-on. Brother, you gotta rein them in, man. You gotta go talk to 'em."
  Indeed, we do need "some meetings." We also need action. We who happen to be African American parents, in particular, need to stop worrying about what white conservative talk show hosts, for example, think of us and. start talking about what we are doing to ourselves.
  But, then what? What, I hear readers ask, is to be done? I received one answer on the evening following Cosby's clarifying PBS interview: the year--end ceremonies of a wonderful little 13-year-old volunteer program called College Bound, Inc. It pairs underprivileged but promising District of Columbia high school students with college-educated adult volunteers who mentor the kids through SAT preparation, scholarship applications and all of the other in's and out's of college preparation.
  You can find mentoring programs like this in just about every city. We need more. They also need more volunteers. As Kpakpundu Ezeze, board chairman of College Bound, said, "We could serve more kids if we had some more adult volunteers."
  That's right. You don't need Cosby's millions to help the next generation  grow up with the right values. A little time, attention and advice from a mentor can go a long way, especially when a young person is not receiving enough of it from anyone else.
  I'm glad Cosby realizes that his critics were right about one thing: It's not just the 'lower economic people" who are failing parent their children properly and steer them, as Jesse Jackson says, away from dope and toward hope. As the old West African proverb says, it takes a whole village.

Clarence Page is a columnist with the Chicago Tribune. Copyright 2004 Tribune Media Services. E-mail: cptime@aol.com