Cosby's ire is focused at the African-American community: its rates of juvenile delinquency, its parenting, the coarse language of its youth. You can do better, he exhorts his audiences. Don't let yourself be victims, and especially don't let the poorest in the community let themselves be victims.
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And he doesn't care who knows it. Some of his critics have attacked him for airing what they see as the black community's dirty laundry in public. Others said that Cosby should also be condemning establishment institutions that, in their view, helped create the situation.
"Judgment of the people in the situation is not helpful. How can you help them is the question," said hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records and the Phat Farm clothing line.
Let 'em rant, Cosby says.
"Let them stay mad as long as they don't have good sense," he told Zahn. "I don't care what right-wing white people are thinking. ... How long you gonna whisper about a smallpox epidemic in your apartment building when bodies are coming out under the sheets?"
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"People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around. ... The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting," he said, addressing an audience of Washington VIPs.
"Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. ... They are standing on the corner and they can't speak English."