COSBY SPEAKS OUT ABOUT AFRICAN-AMERICAN YOUTH CULTURE

"Let me tell you something," Cosby, one of America's most admired men, told the group. "Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other [the N-word] as they're walking up and down the street. They think they're hip. They can't read. They can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."
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Cosby, 66, seemed to disagree [with comments that whites and slavery are partly to blame for the modern culture] in his remarks on Thursday, saying that blacks cannot simply blame whites for problems such as high rates of teen pregnancy and school dropout. "For me there is a time . . . when we have to turn the mirror around," he said. "Because for me it's almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us. And it keeps a person frozen in their seat. It keeps you frozen in your hole you're sitting in."

In an interview yesterday, Cosby said he is speaking out because dropout, illiteracy and teen pregnancy rates are at "epidemic" levels among less-affluent African Americans. "You can't get me to soften my message," he said. "If I had said [it] nicely, then people wouldn't have listened."
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Cosby may be oversimplifying a problem that defies easy solution, said Mario Beatty, a history professor at Bowie State University. "We have to confront these social problems, but the solution is not as simple as having someone change their behavior," he said. ". . . One has to clearly understand the causes of the problem."

See more of this article at the WashPost.