Black respectability figures can become chief producers of racist ideas

Evidence

And the anniversary of the Brown decision and discourse on Black education invariably brought out the racist ideas about what was wrong with Black parents. No one was better suited to that task than Bill Cosby, who had once been considered the model Black parent during the run of The Cosby Show. “The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting,” Cosby said in Washington, DC, after being honored at an NAACP gala in May 2004. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1189

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in respectability politics and ‘model minority’ dynamics — Cosby was once the emblematic ‘model Black parent,’ and his authority as a Black success story is what lent his racist ideas force. — connects to: Respectability discourse loaded black women with responsibility for the whole race; The politics of respectability required blacks to police their own behavior against racist stereotype — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 900; Respectability discourse blames victimized blacks, especially women, for their own discrimination — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 923
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘model parent’ archetype as a weapon — how embodying the assimilated ideal authorizes one to blame the less assimilated.