I went to a funeral this weekend. It was the wife of my father's first cousin in Fort Worth. Her name is Mildred. She was 65 and very accomplishhed. She was one of the first blacks to graduate from TCU. She was was the math administrator for the entire school district of Ft Worth. She was a founding member of her sorority's chapter on TCU's campus. To me she represented the black eighties, the cosby show, the NAACP awards, etc. Mildred was married to the brother of a very accomplished individual. All three men, the brothers and my dad were very close, my dad was the oldest growing up in Sherman TX. Mildred's husband was also a teacher, and his brother and his brother's wife are pharmacists owning their own drug store in FT Worth. I used to spend a couple of weeks in the summer between the two brothers houses when my dad would go to a state convention for the black Masons in Ft Worth, the masons headquarters in the state. anyway this was always m favorite part of the summer. these family members lived like the cosbys especially the pharmacists couple. sidenote, the pharmacists graduated from TSU which has a very good pharmacy program. anyway both couples dressed very well, drove fancy cars, and had lavish homes. the eldest child of the pharmacists is also a pharmacist, his name is Theopholus Jr and people started calling him Theo after the cosby show came out. i swear when i visited i was in the cosbys. why i am i posting this, well a lot of blacks consider the eighties the peak of black culture. you've gone from the cosby show to gangster rap. i however don't consider that period all that great, because i think blacks lost focus during that period and not because of the emergance of gangsta culture during the nineties. i think there was a false sense of "we've made it". mildred basically had a three hour memorial service, and i was very upset after driving up from houston to sit in church for three hrs to listen to a bunch of people from her various organizations. i guess i should have known better. i go to funerals like that to say last goodbyes and see family i don't get to see as much as i used to. however i felt i was in the naacp awards from 1984. and it was sad to see these older blacks reliving those glorious years during mildred's funeral. to me it represented all that was right and wrong in the eighties.
Even though I am not black I think you are looking back with rose colored glasses regarding black culture in the 80's. While there was the Cosby 80's the crack epidemic was also ravaging black communities at the same time. Gangsta Rap might not have yet gained popularity but the gang problems and rage behind were certainly there during the 80's. As far as the Cosby ideal I would say that has actually happened with the Presidency of Barack Obama. A well educated black man with strong family values, married to a black professional woman, and while embracing black culture also transcends race in his wider appeal. If you are lamenting the deaths of black achievement as envisioned by the Cosby Show in the 1980's I think the 2000's have actually been much better for that than the 80's. Consider that part of what made the Cosby show groundbreaking was showing a successful professional black family unlike shows like Good Times that showed a poor black family or The Jeffersons where part of the joke was they were a rich black family. The idea of a successful professional black family no longer seems revolutionary now since one is sitting in the White House.
i think if you talk to a lot of blacks around mildred's age, they will tell you that blacks have declined since the eighties. the crack epidemic didn't reach full throttle until the late eighties which coincided with the emergance of gangsta rap. believe me, when i reference the naacp awards with michael jackson doing the moonwalk, a lot of black people know exactly what i mean specifically the show and the ideal of black culture at its peak. and i'm not looking at it with rose colored glasses if you read carefully. i think one of the problems of that period is that blacks have been lax on progression because of the sense that we made it. the neighborhood where my cousin's pharmacy is located was a thriving neighborhood, now its the ghetto.
Sounds like they had made it and had it made... Successful lives. Families with love. What is wrong with that and, conversely, what is right about anything gangsta? Someone post a picture of Diahann Carroll.
I always thought it was the 70's that we the last "great time" for blacks in America. The ugliness of the 60's was over and blacks were feeling like they we going to start "moving up". Black shows, black films, black business ownerrs, etc all start coming out in the 70s. The 80's brought some mainstream-ing of some segments of black culture but it also brought huge Reagan program cuts that disproportionally hurt blacks, crack explosion plus the war on drugs, huge jumps in incarceration rates, and a lack of continued focus for civil rights. I guess unlike feminism there was never a real second or third wave for black civil rights that were so desperately needed. And now here we are and some things are better but some things have never recovered or corrected from the 80's and 90's.
I think maybe part of what happened is a little of what's happened to all aspects of society in general. The internet and so many forms of media and communication split things and made them so diverse that there isn't as much of a unified subculture, or up and coming movement. There aren't really movements of any kind too much any more, and when there are, they usually are very brief. That's because with everyone having internet, youtube, hundreds of cable channels, hulu, satellite TV, Netflix, blogs, etc. it's very easy for things to become quickly diluted or replaced by the next thing. There's also so much exposure that the audience for each new movement, craze or whatever is smaller, because almost everyone has 50,000 of their own options to be distracted by, or interested in. As a result it's hard to capture a huge portion of any segment of the population. Back in the 80's the options were more limited for any sub culture, and so more of that sub culture would gravitate to whatever options were available to them, and then with that everyone who was interested in those options would share and spread ideas, and so those ideas had a fertile ground to grow as well. Now, it's just more spread out and diffused. I think there remarkable successes that blacks have made in the 2000's and 2010's but there isn't as much of concentrated awareness of it these days.
They are the group that is by far most responsible for alot of the ills of our community. They gave up rising as a group . .to say ***** it .. I'm going for self. The originators of Black Flight The formation of not only a black middle class but a black Elite. . . both of which doing everything they can to distance them selves from the rest They stop being a part of US . . and trying to be the ruling class of US That generation . . . SHM . . . alot of them . .esp the successful ones live in denial of the results of their decisions . .. on display everyday They got theirs . . . I won't hate on them . .or hate them for that but . . .this is america. . .and it came with a cost . . .. . Rocket River
Black Flight!!! Remember in 1992 .. .Hillary quoting a well known African Saying . . . It take a village to raise a child . . . Well That generation burned the village and said f*** those children . . only mine matter. . . Rocket River
a Fracturing of the black people in America Started in the 70s . .. and got realling rolling in the 80s. lost focus Rocket River
there's a lot to respond to but forgive me for going black conservative and saying that a decline in social welfare programs doesn't represent a decline in black culture. i know what you mean but that's a different subject.
i totally agree with everything in this post. the interent in general has ruined sub culture. another very much larger subject
sadly the lack of focus on education in the black community has crippled them and left them in the dust did gangster rap contribute to that? Well it probably didn't help, by having black youth idolize drug users, pimps and other degenerates. It probably also contributed to furthering racist opinions of blacks by scaring non-blacks with unflattering stereotypes of blacks. Then you have Obama, whose father was black, but hasn't done much for the black community.
a lot of brothers think they've "made it" because they have all the things that rich white people have. that's fool's gold, they have made it when they can go anywhere they want and not notice the color of other people's skin.
A lot of this still strikes me as nostalgia and similar to people talking about "back in my day" the world was a better place. I agree with you that many traditional black neighborhoods have gotten worse along with several things for blacks, such as the drug crisis and AIDS, but I still think things are overall better for blacks in America now than they were in the 80's. While racism lingers I think it is far better now than it was in the 1980's. The KKK and other White Power groups had far more prominence then than they do now including having prominent demonstrations like at Forsysthe County in Georgia and in Kimah where they burned Vietnamese fishing boats. I remember growing up in the 1980's with a lot of casual and open racism. I frequently heard the n-word used in Houston by whites (not in the gangsta rap association it has since then). I even remembered it being used against me by some whites in high school even though I am not black. Things like that are not tolerated anymore. The Cosby Show image was one that gave a face to a new black elite, that while it existed in the 80's was still considered ground breaking for the time. The idea that blacks could be successful doctors, lawyers, architects and etc.. and even have well to do white clients wasn't something that was widespread at the time but now is accepted. Someone like Neil De Grasse Tyson isn't noted for being a black scientist but for being a scientist. That is something that I doubt would've happened in the '80's.
