Gregory Kane
2008-08-03 07:00:00.0
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Bill Cosby was in the ’hood Thursday, and he didn’t even invite me to the shindig he was having down at St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church.

I ain’t mad at the brother, though.

St. Ambrose is eight to 10 blocks from my Pimlico house, so it would have been a nice little walk for me to head down and see what the Cos had to say. But I got no invitation. Mayor Sheila Dixon was on hand at St. Ambrose, and Big Sheil didn’t invite me either.

Well, maybe my invitation got lost in the mail. But I still ain’t mad at Bill.

Mind you, I should be REAL mad at Bill. When he made his now — let’s see, what’s the word I’m looking for here? Notorious? Infamous? Scandalous?

OK, how about “renowned”?

When the Cos made his renowned comments in 2004 suggesting that some — he didn’t say all and didn’t mean all — poor black folks could do more to help improve their own condition, a number of black columnists took Bill to task. They were really mad at him.

One of them was Eugene Kane, a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Kane and I are members of the Trotter Group, an organization of black columnists named for the civil rights activist and columnist who gave President Wilson headaches. (And no, we’re not related. At least we don’t think we are.)

Kane wrote a scathing column about the Cos’ remarks. When Bill visited Milwaukee for the first of one of his many town meetings, he made it a point to call Kane and invite him to the meeting. Kane attended. From what Kane told me, the two spent quite some time together in Milwaukee, as if they were old buddies.

I, on the other hand, had Bill’s back from the old get-go. I said that No. 1, the Cos was right, and that No. 2, he’d only said what I and other black conservatives had been saying for years.

Bill came to Baltimore for one of those town meetings. I didn’t get an invitation then. Didn’t get a call. Didn’t get a call or invitation this time either. The Cos went out of his way to butter up and try to appease black columnists who dissed him, and gave the back of his hand to the ones who supported him.

Yeah, I got plenty of reason to be mad at Bill. But I’m not.

You see, there are already plenty of people in the land mad at Bill for what he said. Most of them are black. When I was in Greensboro, N.C., earlier this year for a symposium about the 40th anniversary of the release of the Kerner Commission Report, a group of black female journalists got together at a lunch break to talk about Bill.

Believe me, they were really ticked at the Cos.

But as I sat there listening to the tar-and-feather-Cosby-now tirade, several thoughts occurred to me. One was that nearly 70 percent of black households are fatherless. Another was that the Cos ain’t the daddy of any children who live in those households.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, numero uno on the list of black guys black folks are mad at, isn’t the daddy of any of those kids either. Is it possible that maybe, just MAYBE, if some of that black anger were directed at those missing daddies, then maybe there’d be more of them in the home?

I’m thoroughly convinced that if black Americans would channel the anger we’ve wasted for the last 17 years on Thomas and the last four on the Cos at black criminals, there’d be crime-free black communities throughout the land.

So while I SHOULD be angry with Bill, I won’t be. There’s enough misplaced anger among black Americans as it is. If I’m going to be mad at somebody black, believe me, it’ll be somebody worth the rise in blood pressure. Like those poster kids for retroactive abortion who raped a Haitian woman in West Palm Beach, Fla., and then committed other acts this paper can’t and won’t print.

No, I ain’t mad at Bill. But he really needs to holler at a brother sometime.

Gregory Kane is columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. This is his first column for The Baltimore Examiner. His columns will be on the Editorial Page every Thursday and Sunday.