You might recall last year that comedian Bill Cosby, while attending an NAACP Awards dinner, surprised the crowd and media by letting loose a barrage of harsh criticisms directed at the nation's poor black youths.

Cosby claimed that those in the lower economic group were not holding up their end in the advancements that civil rights leaders and protesters fought so hard to achieve during the '60s. He accused black parents of abdicating their responsibilities, noting that they would rather buy their kids $500 sneakers than spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.

As Cosby depicted black youths as foul-mouthed knuckleheads who wear their clothes backward and can't master literacy, he drew criticism from social critics such as author Michael Eric Dyson, a University of Pennsylvania professor and one of Cosby's most outspoken critics.

In Dyson's book, "Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has The Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?", the author focuses on Cosby's statements and stops just short of calling the beloved TV dad a race traitor.

In fact, Dyson says he defends Cosby's right to publicly speak his mind. However, Dyson charges that Cosby has clumsily failed to grasp the bigger issue - the social forces that make it difficult for many underprivileged parents to effectively parent their children.

Dyson notes that while Cosby is a beneficiary of the civil rights movement, he has constantly avoided mentioning race in his comedy routines. "It is ironic that Cosby has finally answered the call to racial leadership forty years after it might have made a constructive difference," Dyson writes. "But it is downright tragic that he should use his perch to lob rhetorical bombs at the poor."

Dyson paints Cosby as an Afristocrat - a member of the black elite - who is launching an attack against the Ghettocrat - the impoverished underclass black American. "Usually the bile that Cosby spilled is more expertly contained, or at least poured on its targets in ways that escape white notice," Dyson writes. "Cosby's remarks betray seething class warfare in black America that has finally boiled over to the general public."

Dyson claims Cosby overemphasizes personal responsibility, as in: If only the poor were willing to work harder, act better, get educated, stay out of jail and parent more effectively, their problems would go away. These all sound fine in principle, writes Dyson. But there are other factors involved, such as shifts in the economy, that Cosby chooses to ignore.

In addition, Dyson writes that Cosby is ignorant of poor black youths and the issues facing them. Expressing themselves through clothing, for example, helps shape their identities.

"Black urban youth can hardly help viewing their bodies as targets - of culture opposition and creative opportunity," Dyson writes. "Since they are so widely talked about and often feared, their flesh is a mobile laboratory of personal expression where style is both the hypothesis and the experiment."

Dyson claims that fashion in black urban circles often rises to performance art. He logically articulates how and why many social factors affect the actions of the underprivileged, noting Cosby's own failing as a parent, with a drug-addicted daughter and the comedian's much publicized womanizing, which resulted in an illegitimate child.

Many of the book's chapters begin with excerpts from Cosby's controversial comments such as:

"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 everyday, it's cursing and calling each other 'nigga' 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."

Dyson presents an interesting premise, but offers few solutions and a plenitude of excuses as to why young poor blacks can't or are unwilling to succeed or assimilate into the mainstream culture.

After awhile, Dyson's attacks, which are just as biting as Cosby's, come off as personal. And agree with Dyson or not, eventually Bill Cosby seems like a cardboard character - just a device to move the book along, enabling Dyson to explain the class conflict between Afristocrats and the Ghettocracy. The book probably wouldn't work if Cosby wasn't the foil.

Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has The Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? is a provocative book and will provide fodder for debate and discussion. But it should be read to spark thought, rather than stifle it. If only on that basis alone, Cosby's comments have done some good.

Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has The Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?

• By Michael Eric Dyson. Basic Civitas Books, 304 pages, $23.

• Grade: B-

Laurence Washington is the co-publisher/editor of Blackflix.com and teaches journalism at Metropolitan State College of Denver.