(Akiit.com) Comedian Bill Cosby turned black morals pied piper has got to be beaming. His relentless pitch to blacks to get their act together, and stop blaming the white man for their failings almost certainly has done much to spur the radical reversal in black attitudes on race. A new Pew Research Center survey found that more blacks are willing to finger point themselves for bad grades, bad behavior, high unemployment, and poverty than they were a decade ago.

But there’s a kicker in the Pew survey. The ones that did the greatest finger pointing were middle class blacks and the ones that got the finger pointed at them were poor blacks. It’s no real surprise that blacks are rivers apart from each other in their view of who’s to blame for the dreary plight of poor blacks. To even think that they wouldn’t and couldn’t have different views, express divergent opinions, and ideas about race, politics and life issues, just as any other group, is to lock blacks into the tightest of tight racial boxes. There is, and never has been, anything that even faintly resembles a monolith of racial thinking among blacks.

For decades, two black Americas have co-existed uneasily side by side, yet hardly equal. In fact, a significant number of blacks told Pew researchers that blacks should not be viewed as a “single community.”

Despite a drastic economic backslide during the last decade in the incomes of black males, detailed in a Brookings Institution report released shortly before the Pew survey, the class fissure between the black haves and have nots has continued to widen in recent years.

Black executives still hold the top spots at three of America’s leading corporations. There’s Oprah and the legions of multi-millionaire black superstar athletes, celebrities, and professionals. There’s a bona fide black presidential candidate, Barack Obama that most whites applaud for being in the race. There’s been a big bump up in the number of black households that earn more than $50,000 annually. Black wealth, like white wealth, is now concentrated in fewer hands than ever. The top one fifth of black families earned nearly half of all black income.
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(Akiit.com) Call a woman the b-word, and most likely she’s offended. Or does it depend who’s using that little word that rhymes with witch?

And famously, during his sexual harassment trial, New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas was videotaped saying that a white man calling a black woman the name would be more offensive than a black man calling her that name. (He later clarified that he found the term unacceptable in any case; he also denied calling the plaintiff the word at all.)

History of the b-word

A bitch is a female dog.

But the term has been used to insult women since the 1400s, and, since the 1500s, sometimes men, too, said John Baugh, a linguist at Washington University in St. Louis. The word was “the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore,” according to the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

By the 1700s, it was also a verb meaning “to complain,” said Grant Barrett, co-host of the radio program, A Way with Words, and editor of Double-Tongued Dictionary.

And by the 1920s it had worked its way into prison culture, to refer to a sexually submissive male.

That’s also about the time when it began to lose some power to offend, with phrases such as “riding bitch,” meaning the passenger seat, came into use. (Although when Barbara Bush deemed Geraldine Ferraro something that “rhymes with rich” in 1984 there was plenty of chatter, even after Bush apologized for calling her a “witch.”)
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(Akiit.com) The problem of black male enrollment in college starts with the lack of black males in high school and junior high.

Every year, I visit more than a dozen black college campuses giving graduation speeches and helping them raise money. It makes me feel good to see all those students’ smiling faces, but there’s something missing. As much as I like to see all the African-American women graduating from historically black colleges and universities and enjoy getting all those hugs, I’d like to get more firm handshakes from young brothers in caps and gowns. In other words, I’m not seeing enough black males’ faces at these graduations, and that’s got me worried.

In fact, I’m so worried, my foundation started a scholarship fund – “Brothers on the Move” — to make sure more black men stay in school — and graduate. Already, I’ve given $2,500 scholarships to young black men at Tougaloo College, Cheney University of Pennsylvania and Tennessee State University. Before the end of the year, young men at Edward Waters College and Savannah State University will be recognized. I had to do something to at least level the playing field for these brothers and make sure they have every chance they can to get a college degree. The reality is that the statistics tell the story.
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