Bill Cosby Calls Out Black Folks

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Bill Cosby, the self-appointed Daddy of all Black people, gave some tough love to the crowd at the 2010 Essence Festival. Bill dropped some jewels of wisdom and offered harsh criticism of the black community. Pop it to hear what he had to say.

Bill Cosby kept it 100 at his keynote address during the African-American Education Summit at the 2010 Essence Music Festival in New Orleans on Saturday. He publicly admonished black parents and children for failing to assume responsibility for their families and futures. Here are some highlights:

“We’ve got to lay it out for them,” Cosby said when asked about how to help cut the rate of teen pregnancies in America. “Let’s tell them about life. You’re 14 and having sex. OK. So, what kind of job do you have?”

Cosby, who received a standing ovation when he walked on stage, said the African-American community must get involved if change is going to occur in any area.

“Apathy is strangling you to death,” he said, to rousing applause and a few ‘Amens’ from the crowd.

“Get up. Stay on the scene. Be a studying machine,” he said, drawing from soul singer James Brown’s lyrics.

“We need to start getting into people’s business. We need to say, ‘Hey, I’m your cousin man, I’m your brother, I’m your sister and I don’t care if you don’t talk to me anymore but your teenage daughter ain’t got no business dressing like that!’ Tell them.”

“How long do we wait? When are you going to wake up? We can’t keep blaming people and expecting people to fix it. This has to stop.”

The moderator asked Cosby how to keep children out of harm’s way after reeling off a string of statistics, such as the thousands of young people killed by gun violence.

“Look under the mattress,” he said of hiding places for guns. “He don’t pay rent. Treat them as a child and remind them that you’re the one raising them.”

He then told the story of how a woman asked her son one day where he had been. “The boy said ‘uh, uh, no where.’ She asked him again, where he’d been. Again, he said, ‘uh, uh, no where. I ain’t doing nothing.’ She said, boy, where you been? Finally, he told her he was on the corner, hanging out.

“The woman looked at him and told him, ‘If you’re not in the picture, you can’t be framed.”

Taken from Bossip.com