An unseemly ruckus next door
I don’t know much about Nikki Giovanni, the poet/professor who was in town to address the Triangle Association of Black Journalists this past weekend. I haven’t read her work, nor ever encountered her on the book circuit. Furthermore, I’m hesitant to get involved when black Americans discuss (and argue about) how to confront the ailments in their families and communities. It feels like a family debate, and I’ve got no business joining in.
In short, I’m stepping gingerly here. But Giovanni, in her remarks to the journalists, had astonishingly harsh words for other high-profile African-Americans — specifically, Bill Cosby and Condoleezza Rice. “Bill Cosby’s crazy,” she said. “Somebody needs to put him in the hospital.” Rice was called a “bitch” (or so it seems; the actual word wasn’t fully spelled out in the article) and an “embarrassment” as a black American.
Their sins are that Cosby has become a scold about what he perceives as the shortcomings among his fellow blacks when it comes to parenting. And Rice’s sin, although it wasn’t explicitly detailed in the article, probably is that she’s a Republican.
It’s strange to me that of all the black people in America Giovanni would wish to hold up for public excoriation, she chooses these two. You’d think they might be lower on the list. It’s one thing to read Cosby’s newest book on the perceived failures of black family life and decide his thesis as flawed, as this critic did. At least Cosby is treated as somebody who is a legitimate part of the discussion, even if he gets things wrong. Giovanni apparently only thinks he’s so whacked out that he needs hospitalization. And Rice comes in for even more contemptuous treatment, being reduced to someone who has disgraced the uniform.
And that’s the disturbing, unhappily common theme underlying Giovanni’s casual dismissals of two accomplished people: The idea that there’s a narrowly defined black position on social and political issues, with no room for deviance.
I may be just the next-door neighbor, but that seems like a sorry way to treat family members.