Norman Kelley: The Afro-Culture Wars: Bill Cosby vs. Michael Eric Dyson Cultural Criticism as Pseudo-analysis, Pt. 1,

Cosby said unkind things about the poor, but what he said was forty years too late and didn’t include the black elite. Michael Eric Dyson, however, in his latest book—Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind (Perseus, 2005)—makes an issue of Cosby saying anything at all. Why? Cosby has never really dealt with race identity issues in his comedy. His error, according to Dyson, is that Cosby’s career has been built on the naïve avoidance of race in his comedy—i.e., the sin of “colorblindness.” Or put another way, Cosby is guilty of using his comedy as a mirror reflecting what King advocated, namely judging people by the contents of their character, or, in this matter, by the contents of one’s comedic sensibilities. Dyson, as a cultural critic, builds his case on an anemic intellectual scaffold. Since comedy is an aspect of culture, and since Cosby hasn’t given voice to his definition of “blackness,” Cosby, therefore, cannot speak in the public realm about black people, or at least the black poor. As an expert in blackness, Dyson views Cosby as not having “been practiced or articulate in matters of public negotiation with subtleties, nuances and complexities of racial rhetoric.” But Dyson, of course, is. If this isn’t elitist posturing, it doesn’t exist. After Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson is America’s foremost second-bench market intellectual. As a cynical new breed of so-called black public intellectual, he has made a career of marketing himself as a “public intellectual” while cranking out meretricious work that wouldn’t pass as serious scholarship (i.e., it has no depth of knowledge). West himself has touted Dyson as the academy’s “most talented rhetorical acrobat,” which could be interpreted as praise for a sophist (a.k.a. a bullshit artist). [more]