Pound Cake at 20 Years

Twenty years ago today, at an NAACP event commemorating the golden anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Bill Cosby gave a speech that has come to be known as the Pound Cake Speech. Cosby was a towering figure at the time, a major star in the entertainment industry. He triggered an earthquake by delivering a message that a great many people did not want to hear.

Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged: “The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said if you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.” Not, “You’re going to get your butt kicked.” No. “You’re going to embarrass your mother.” “You’re going to embarrass your family.”

Cosby turned out to be a horribly inappropriate messenger, but his message was spot on then and remains true today. His downfall was fully justified, but a tragic side-effect was that no one with the stature that he had then has picked up the baton.

Excessive force by police is certainly a serious problem in those cases where it genuinely is excessive (far less often than is commonly believed). But an obsessive focus on it distracts from the more fundamental problem. Why is the person breaking the law in the first place?

Poverty, as such, is not the root cause of crime, as we so often hear, particularly in a country with an extensive social safety net. People don’t go down the path of crime because they must steal loaves of bread to feed starving children as in Les Miserables. Poverty is correlated with crime, but the causation is complex. To some extent, the collection of attitudes that makes people criminals also makes them poor. Law-abidingness and work ethic are key ingredients in upward mobility. Those who lack them are more likely to be poor and more likely to go to jail, but the platitude of “poverty causes crime” is too simplistic to be of any real value. Different groups of immigrants who are comparably poor and discriminated against have had different rates of crime and upward mobility, as Barry Latzer has documented.

The true root cause of crime is the cultural influences that cause children and teens to internalize anti-social attitudes as they develop. Why are so many young people led down the wrong path by such influences? Why is the portion who are so misled so different in different groups within our society? Why are these questions getting so much less attention than they deserve?

Yelling “Charge!” and leading your followers into battle against an external enemy is a much easier way of becoming a big leader than facing people and asking them to improve themselves. If there is no external enemy, one can be created.

Once Cosby was on the way down, Juan Williams tried to pick up the baton in a book titled Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It. Regrettably, the effort did not get the traction that it should have. The phony leaders are still prominent.

In 2020, a single video of a single event led massive numbers of people to focus on the relatively smaller problem, ignoring and aggravating the larger one. Insanely destructive proposals such as “defund the police” actually gained traction for a while. The country has moved back in the direction of sanity in the four years since, but it still has a long way to go.

We still see obsessive focus on “disparities” comparing the ethnic makeup of people in prison versus the irrelevant statistic of the percentages in the general population. Those disparities are not caused by “systemic racism” in our law enforcement structure. They are caused by disparities in the cultural influences that cause young people to internalize pro-social or anti-social attitudes. They will disappear when and only when that situation changes.

Where are the leaders who can and will lead the movement to make that change? I hope they emerge soon.