Cos: Parents at fault

COMEDIAN BILL COSBY has placed the blame for the high rate of incarceration, illiteracy and dropouts among youth squarely on parents.

Cosby declined to be interviewed for our story. But here are excerpts from the 2004 speech he delivered during a commemoration of the 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision.

* "In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father . . ."

"Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are [not] holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on."

* "I'm talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit."

"Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18, and how come you don't know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don't you know where he is? And why doesn't the father show up to talk to this boy?"

* "The church is only open on Sunday. And you can't keep asking Jesus to . . . do things for you. You can't keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you. . . ."

* "We cannot blame white people. White people . . . don't live over there. They close up the shop early . . . "

* Women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse, I want somebody to love me, and as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is "gimme, gimme, gimme."

* 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 [I] get caught with it you're going to embarrass your mother."

* In the old days, a girl getting pregnant had to go down South, and then her mother would go down to get her. But the mother had the baby. I said the mother had the baby. The girl didn't have a baby. The mother had the baby in two weeks."