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‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Oct. 14, 2007
Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D.
MR. TIM RUSSERT: This is a special edition. For the last half century he has performed on television, in the movies and on stage. For the last three years he has traveled the country listening to and talking with the black community.
(Videotape)
MR. BILL COSBY: I want you to go back to parenting. You young men, when you get married and you have children, you’ve got to parent. You’ve got to be parents.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: In this new book, “Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” he tackles controversial and complicated issues such as the plight of the black family, black on black violence, high school dropout rates, the need for parental responsibility and more. With us, entertainer and activist Bill Cosby, and his co-author, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. Cosby and Poussaint, only on MEET THE PRESS.
But first this morning, we take a break from our coverage of political campaigns and focus on issues that are very important to this nation. As this book explains, “No matter your economic status, no matter your age, no matter your race, no matter your gender,” “no matter your religion. Many families in tight-knit communities are crumbling at an alarming rate. We need to see this as a reality, not something to just talk about” “to act on.” And that frames our conversation with Alvin Poussaint, Bill Cosby.
Welcome both.
MR. COSBY: Thank you.
DR. ALVIN F. POUSSAINT: Thank you.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me to right to the book. Your very first chapter, headline, “What’s Going On With Black Men?” And this is what you write: “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. There is one statistic that captures the bleakness. In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into” “two-parent home. Today, that number is less than two out of six. In poor communities, that number is lower still. 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 and perhaps never having attended a wedding.”
Bill Cosby, why is that so important?
MR. COSBY: Because children need the guidance. Because the other parent needs help as well. Because if a home is set with one parent, and then to other—an aunt, a caregiver—we’re in big trouble. But these families that we speak of are also included with homeless children, the number of homeless children we have.
DR. POUSSAINT: Homeless children and homeless fathers, that one-third of homeless people are black, black men. But I think, you know, right now that figure cited is 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers in the United States each year, and a lot of them are living in poverty because of that. And the boys and the girls don’t have fathers, and every study indicates that the involvement of fathers with their family, and particularly with their children, is very important to their good and healthy development. But that’s not happening. And many of these fathers don’t even know what to do as a father because many of them grew up in homes that were fatherless. So what’s the model for a, a two-parent home or for a family? They—many of them don’t have any.
MR. COSBY: Or what is the model for corrective behavior? If you have this generational, fatherless situation, unwed father or whatever, but the male is not there, then it, it registers on another person, on, on the child as abandonment.
DR. POUSSAINT: Mm. Mm-hmm. That’s...
MR. COSBY: “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly, I don’t know what the reason is.” And so there’s a great deal that a person has to put up with.
DR. POUSSAINT: Mm. That’s—I—that’s a good, good point. I think a lot of these males kind of have a, a father hunger and actually grieve that they don’t have a father. And I think later a lot of that turns into anger. “Why aren’t you with me? Why don’t you care about me?” And also affects their own feelings of, of self, self-worth, being—feeling abandoned in, in that way. So fathers have to see how critical and important they are in a society where they’re always talking about two-parent families and TV wherever—whatever you see there’s fathers there, and they don’t see these men.
MR. RUSSERT: What happened within the black community that we got to a point, since 1950, where 70 percent of the children are born with single parents? What happened?
DR. POUSSAINT: Well, I think all kinds of things. Some of it has to do with the fact that things changed for women with the women’s liberation movement. In the past, there was a stigma if you had—a big stigma if you had a child out of wedlock. That’s not true anymore for, for white women or black women. So a lot of the black women do not feel compelled to get married. And then the other issue is the availability of black men and whether they’re eligible to be married. You have so many black men incarcerated, so many black men unemployed, underemployed. In colleges now, black women outnumber black men two to one. And so the chances of hooking up in a marital relationship in the way our society works is more difficult. So I think that’s changed as well.
And then I think that a lot of supports for the family, changing values in the society and then the issue of black men being pulled out by going to jail. Let me just stress that. Right, right now, there are 2.2 million people in jail, and at last count about 910,000 were African-Americans. Now, the—at the time of Brown v. the Board of Education of 1954 there were 98,000 African-Americans in prison. So just from that period of time, there’s been a ninefold increase. And most of these prisoners, of course, are, are black men, 90 percent of them. And so they’re not available. They come out of jail, they can’t get jobs, they can’t get work. They can’t be fathers, they can’t build a family, they can’t make an income. And so the—all of these things that make...
MR. COSBY: They also don’t have diplomas.
DR. POUSSAINT: They also don’t have diplomas.
MR. COSBY: High school.
DR. POUSSAINT: And, and this is how—is one of the ways Bill got started on this, was that, you know, when traveling around in the callouts, you know, over 50 percent of, of black males were high school dropouts. And in some cities, one nearby, I think, Baltimore, the dropout rate was 75 percent for black males.
MR. RUSSERT: One of the things that you did in “Come On, People” were—was to compile statistics, very hard-headed numbers.
DR. POUSSAINT: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: And they are numbing when you read through them. You mentioned one. One out of three of homeless people are black. Blacks make up 12 percent of our population. And here’s a some—a few more that you cite which I think really does help us dramatize how critical this discussion is. And let’s read them through here.
“Homicide is the number one cause of death for black men between 15 and 29 years of age and has been for decades.
“Of the roughly 16,000 homicides in this country each year, more than half are committed by black men. A black man is seven times more likely to commit a murder than a white man, and six times more likely to be murdered.
“Ninety-four percent of all black people who are murdered are murdered by other black people.
“Although black people make up” “12 percent of the general population,” “make up nearly 44 percent of the prison population.
“At any given time, as many as one in four of all” black men, “young black men are in the criminal justice system—in prison or jail, on probation or on parole.”
Those are numbing numbers. They truly are. What can we do?
MR. COSBY: Let’s deal first with what people call the systemic—the, the racism that exists in this country, which is absolutely for real. But people just say it. They say, “Well, there’s systemic and institutional racism.” “What do you mean by that?” Well, what I mean is that the power structure can stop a person from getting a better education. It can stop them from living in better conditions. It can stop improvements from being made. For instance, if you have a slum landlord, if you’re lower, lower economic, to get that fixed, to bring the law in on this person, it, it just doesn’t happen. If police decide to ride in and arrest, if laws are made to go against you, I mean, this kind of thing is very, very hurtful. And then we move into areas of health, health care, where racism can stop a person from getting immediate attention...
DR. POUSSAINT: Hm.
MR. COSBY: ...in times of need, etc., etc. So when you look at education, it is my belief that it is there with a very ugly head. However, it is also my belief that this is not the first time my race has seen systemic or institutional racism. There were times, even worse times, when lynchings were acceptable. Sure, the newspapers wrote about it, but it happened. Juries were set and freed the, people who did the, the lynching. Therefore, we knew how to fight, we knew how to protect our children, protect our women. Today, in lower, lower economic areas, some people—not all—some people are not contributing to that protection. Therefore, when you see these numbers, you see, you see numbers and the character correction has not happened. Many times it’s the TV set, a BET or, or videos played, kids look at it and they admire it. It’s the proliferation of drugs into the neighborhood.
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