But in addition to what it had, there was what “The Cosby Show” lacked: Any suggestion that white people were culpable in the history of racism that the show addressed mostly through reference to mid-twentieth-century activism. White audiences were never made to feel bad about themselves or confront any hard questions about how they had benefitted from American systems from which black Americans had not benefitted. White fans never were forced to wrestle with the question of what made this brownstone-dwelling African American family so exceptional. Rather, we were consciously invited to consider them a new normal. It was its own purposeful message, and not inherently a bad one. But it did permit white Americans to buy into one of their fondest (and falsest) wishes: to consider the sins of the past as past and believe that true racial parity was not only possible but perhaps upon us.
In 1992, researchers Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis wrote a book, Enlightened Racism. After researching audience reaction, they argued that “The Cosby Show,” while ushering in “an era in which white audiences can accept TV programs with more than just an occasional ‘token’ black character,” was also part of a television culture “directly culpable for providing an endless slew of apocryphal stories that sustain a cultural refusal to deal with class inequalities and the racial character of those inequalities.”
These themes of Cosby’s work would become more explicit a decade after “The Cosby Show” went off the air, when the comedian embarked on a speaking tour in which he told black audiences that the kinds of hardships they faced were of their own making, that high rates of poverty, drug use and incarceration had nothing to do with policy or policing practices, but rather with failures of black culture and black parents. “Systemic racism, they call it,” Cosby said derisively, “it’s not what [the white man]’s doing to you; it’s what you’re not doing.”
Here was the white blamelessness that made his television such a balm to white audiences, writ all too real. It was an approach that earned him sharp criticism from some black critics like Dyson and Coates. But perhaps because this framing of race in America still served as a palliative to lots of Americans, it somehow never resulted in a mass reevaluation of Cosby’s work by white critics or by many African American leaders, some of whom, to Dyson’s dismay, stood uncritically onstage with Cosby as he chided New Orleans residents who’d been dislocated and disenfranchised after Katrina about their behaviors and moral failings from before the storm.
Over the course of the past decade, charges that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted more than a dozen women have been reported in plenty of splashy venues: in Newsweek and Gawker, on-camera on “The Today Show” in 2005; in People magazine in 2006. During the same years, esteemed journalists including Kevin Merida and Ta-Nehisi Coates have dissected the racial messages that Cosby has been delivering around the country. Scholar Michael Eric Dyson even wrote a book about it.
Yet much of this stuff has remained unacknowledged in the context of Cosby celebration. He’s received an NAACP Image Award and the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Award; a year ago, Jon Stewart concluded an interview with Cosby by noting “This man is the best,” and this year, upon presenting him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, Chris Rock called him “the greatest comedian to ever live.”
How, my students wondered, was it possible for such incendiary material to be both public and simultaneously hidden from view, as Tom Scocca put it earlier this year, “something walled off from our collective understanding of Bill Cosby”?
There are lots of answers to this question: that, as Scocca posited, “nobody wanted to live in a world where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator”; that, as Brittney Cooper recently suggested in Salon, “We are not a society given to slaying our patriarchs”; that as Newsweek reporter Katie Baker told Amanda Hess in February, Cosby’s accusers were “imperfect victims, as victims so often are.” There’s also the fact that Chris Rock’s superlatives aren’t so far off the mark: Bill Cosby is one of the greatest comedians, a man who 30 years ago, as Kelefa Sanneh recently wrote in The New Yorker, created “a great sitcom, perhaps a perfect sitcom.”
…What’s more, America’s terrible history of discrediting black men via charges of sexual misconduct was precisely the kind of thing that might lead white liberals to not want to engage such loaded allegations about a black man who had assuaged their guilt over precisely this kind of history. To wrestle with the merits of those charges—the kinds that have too often been deployed falsely to justify everything from lynching to stand your ground laws—would force America to acknowledge that deeply set, incredibly complicated patterns of injustice around race and sex and power are far from erased. It would also force us to concede that, in this case, they might not be false.