December 30, 2015
Bill Cosby
rape accusations
make it hard to
watch Cliff Huxtable:
Jarvis DeBerry
Comedian Bill Cosby stumbles as he arrives for a court appearance in Elkins Park, Pa., Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2015. Cosby was arrested and charged with drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home in January 2004. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) (Matt Rourke)
By
“White people are really losing it over the ‘new’ Atticus Finch,” I said to some friends in July. I told them about the woman who had called into an NPR show to argue that the character the world had grown to love in Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” wasn’t the racist critics of Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” claimed he was. He didn’t oppose black people voting, the caller said, sounding as if she were close to tears. He just didn’t think them ready.
Is there a fictional character that black people love so much that they’d make ridiculous defensive arguments? That’s the question I asked my friends. Then it struck me. “We’ve already got our answer!” I said, “Heathcliff Huxtable.”
On Wednesday, about five months after that conversation, Bill Cosby was arraigned on a sexual assault charge involving one of the several dozen women who’ve accused him of such a crime.
The idea of Cosby as a serial rapist is hard to accept in large part because his most famous character had such rectitude. Cosby wouldn’t have been called “America’s Dad” if he hadn’t played the dad of Sondra, Denise, Theo, Vanessa and Rudy. Cliff Huxtable isn’t the only reason Cosby was beloved, but he’s a big reason.
If Cosby is a bad man, can we continue to enjoy “The Cosby Show?” If Cosby is a bad man, are our innocent, nostalgic television moments permanently ruined? If we concede that Cosby drugged and raped dozens of women, does decency compel us to turn away from his sitcoms, stand-up routines and cartoons?
But what if we really like them?
At the risk of having you question the rigor of my college education, I’ll share that one of my favorite classes was a history of African-American comedy. When the instructor played for us Cosby’s routine “To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With” I fell out laughing. I don’t mean that figuratively. I was seated. I started laughing and ended up on the floor.
Till recently, I had a Cosby response to my wife’s chronic complaint that I’d drink up too much of the orange juice: “Well, who made you the big Jell-o sheriff (in our case, the orange juice sheriff) of the house?”
My regard for Cosby’s talent is high. And yet, I have tried to disconnect my respect for his talent from the rape allegations so many women have made.
Of his many accusers, Barbara Bowman’s story sticks out. She says Cosby sexually assaulted her in 1985 when she was 17. She went to a lawyer, she said, who “laughed me out of his office.”
For what it’s worth, 1985 was the year Cosby gave America one of the all-time best sitcom scenes. The Huxtables perform a lip-synched routine of Ray Charles’ “Night Time is the Right Time.” Cliff Huxtable gives facial expression to the bandleader’s most impassioned screams. And Rudy, with her missing front teeth, channels “Raelette” Margie Hendricks, bending at the knees as she pretends to scream, “Bae-baaaeee!”
Imagine the man who gave us that scene slipping a sedative into a teenager’s drink and raping her.
How proud we were as black people to see the Huxtables on our screens every Thursday night, to have something funny and memorable to talk about every Friday morning. I remember my 6th grade math teacher fussing at us to stop liking “Good Times” because, he said, J.J. was a clown and an embarrassment to black people. There were no embarrassments on “The Cosby Show.” Cliff and Claire and all the black people around them were what the old folks called credits to the race. And so was Cosby.
That term is now outdated. Today, many black people are right to oppose what’s called respectability politics, the idea that we’ve got to be better than average to get typically humane treatment. Yet, even if it’s an outdated concept, don’t we still have lingering memories of how warm and beautiful and proud “The Cosby Show” made us feel?
It’s just like that woman who got that beautiful feeling from “Mockingbird.” Atticus Finch was proof that a white man in the Jim Crow South could be honorable. She didn’t want her fictional hero replaced with a villain.
Cosby is a real-life person, but he can’t go down in scandal without it paining us to watch his most famous character.
Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com. Follow him at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry.
Brother DeBerry,
You raise excellent points, but, since I rarely care about the personal lives of the people who create art or who are great athletes, I’ve always been able to disconnect the person from what they do. I don’t ever recall asking about the personal ethics of my plumber, especially when my pipes had burst and my house was being flooded. But, I will admit that, since I try to patronize black businesses when I spend my money, I am, to a large degree, saying that I want to spend my money with someone who will make a positive investment or impact in my community. So, maybe I am being a bit hypocritical when I say that I’ve rarely considered an artist’s personal life when deciding if I like their art. With that said, I’ll continue to use the episode “Denise Gets a D” at the beginning of my freshman comp classes and with the summer advanced learning classes I teach to high school students because of it’s excellent message about how to write college papers and that students must learn to accept responsibility for their own success and failure, which brings me to my ultimate point. On the one hand, if Cosby committed these acts, he must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. But, on the other hand, many of the people in the black community that’s leading the charge against Cosby are those folks who hated his “responsibility politics” agenda. And, I call them on that when I realize that’s their biggest issue. Poor parenting is a major issue in the black community regardless of who says it. Now, we can ignore that issue because Cosby or anyone else we don’t like says it, but that doesn’t make the issue not exist. As it relates to the art, since I could care less about someone’s personal life, I only avoid art if the art, itself, is perpetuating a message that I find harming to me or my community. There is nothing about the Cosby Show that’s damaging to the community. However, the promotion of dysfunction by most reality television programing makes it difficult for me to watch reality television.
C. Liegh McInnis
Edited Comment
Brother DeBerry,
You are correct that it is difficult to separate Bill Cosby from Cliff Huxtable, but, since I rarely care about the personal lives of the people who create art or who are great athletes, I’ve always been able to disconnect the person from what they do. I don’t ever recall asking about the personal ethics of my plumber, especially when my pipes had burst and my house was being flooded. I will admit that, since I try to patronize black businesses when I spend my money, I am, to a large degree, saying that I want to spend my money with someone who will make a positive investment or impact in my community. So, maybe I am being a bit hypocritical when I say that I’ve rarely considered an artist’s personal life when deciding if I like their art. With that said, I’ll continue to use the episode “Denise Gets a D” at the beginning of my freshman comp classes and with the summer advanced learning classes I teach to high school students because of its excellent message about how to write college papers and that students must learn to accept responsibility for their own success and failure, which brings me to my ultimate point. On the one hand, if Cosby committed these acts, he must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. But, on the other hand, many of the people in the black community that are leading the charge against Cosby are those folks who hated his “responsibility politics” agenda. And, I call them on that when I realize that’s their biggest issue. Poor parenting is a major issue in the black community regardless of who says it. Now, we can ignore that issue because Cosby or anyone else we don’t like says it, but that doesn’t make the issue not exist. As it relates to the art, since I could care less about someone’s personal life, I only avoid art if the art, itself, is perpetuating a message that I find harming to me or my community. There is nothing about the Cosby Show that’s damaging to the community. However, the promotion of dysfunction by most reality television programing makes it difficult for me to watch reality television, or much television at all, and I rarely hear black folks bemoaning that.