Thoughts on Cosby...

How can we reconcile the good The Cosby Show did by creating a (limited) productive space for future Black representations in media with Cosby as a human being? I’ve been wondering for a while if it’s possible to appreciate art (or media) if it’s created by an abuser or a perpetrator. In a university setting, I see countless known rapists and relationship abusers attempt to participate in campus activism and student leadership roles without reprimand simply because the majority of people don’t know about this other side of them. To some extent, this can’t be avoided, especially in the world of celebrity where “scandals” (read: crimes) are covered up in a variety of manners. 

So what happens after the general public finds out? Many people refuse to validate survivor’s stories or insist that they were rescinded of falsified. I’ve watched this happen again and again from Ivana Trump to Dylan Farrow to Nicole Brown Simpson. But while in those (highly sensationalized) stories some details have remained unclear, the 50+ women who have come forward (not including the possibility of others’ inability to yet) with accusations are completely straightforward: Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them and others enabled him to. 

But does this (combined with his misogynistic standup and refusal to address Black socioeconomic problems in his show) bankrupt the good that his work has done? Does it matter that while his show was crossing mainstream TV boundaries he was raping women? We can’t completely discount the effects that The Cosby Show has had, nor the fact that the huge increase in portrayal of Black consciousness we have seen since then was at least in part predicated on this sitcom’s successful existence. But it is important to remember that he was never a hero. Bill Cosby didn’t singlehandedly end racism in (Western/American/mainstream) media—that hasn’t been done, and what has been done was fueled by a whole range of work done by people of color and White accompliceship, from the industry to the grassroots. Although The Cosby Show is his namesake and often a frame for himself as an actor and a comic, it wasn’t created by him alone.

And what does all this have to do with the image/stereotype of the Black rapist? When Alice Walker’s The Color Purple came out, it was simultaneously heralded as an amazing novel (by an amazing, queer, womanist, Black woman) and criticized for its unapologetic portrayal of IPV in this specific Black community because of the way it could play into racist stereotyping of Black (American, in this case) people as violent, emotional, wild, and uncontrollable. In an episode of SVU (True Believers, I think) a White woman is raped at gunpoint by a Black man, and though the audience knows he's guilty, he isn't convicted, at part because of a defense focusing on the racial aspects of the case. While this is a difficult one to watch because of the lack of justice for the survivor, it does make the viewer consider the validity of rebalancing the long-weighted scales--Black men in America especially have always been more likely to be accused of criminal behavior, arrested or accosted more violently, and sentenced more harshly, especially when it comes to sexual violence (real, perceived, or fictionalized) against white women. This type of scenario brings us back to defense of Cosby's image, justified (not by all, of course) by attempts to combat this sort of hypersexual and violent stereotyping.