Bill Cosby, Extraordinary Evidence, and the Art Versus the Artist
NOTE: This essay was originally published in 2014 amidst the renewed attention put to Bill Cosby’s sexual misconduct allegations. The essay since been heavily edited and revised since its original publication for grammatical errors, spelling errors, and clarity.
Nearly every weeknight of elementary school for me ended with Different Strokes, The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, and The Cosby Show. I had come to know “America’s Dad” through that show, and boy, what a show it was. I found it funnier than Different Strokes, but not quite as funny as Fresh Prince. Sure, The Cosby Show was clean, like Full House, but far more humorous and believable. Cosby as Dr. Cliff Huxtable brought such a warm, charismatic presence, who could tell a rousing story or be outright loony with his facial expressions. Of course, there were other strong performances, like that of Phylicia Rashad, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, or the young Raven-Symone. Much like Fresh Prince or Different Strokes, The Cosby Show dealt with growing up, education, childhood, and even celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ray Charles. It also didn’t hurt to see a black family portrayed with dignity and humanity. Indeed, The Cosby Show reruns will remain a treasured part of childhood memories, but they may be a part that I will now always fear to revisit.
Old rape allegations against Bill Cosby have resurfaced this year, thanks to Hannibal Buress and the power of viral media. Women are telling their stories, and America is listening. I have listened and reflected. It seems so clear, regrettably clear to me, that Bill Cosby, a man I once admired, is with little doubt in my mind, a serial rapist.
Extraordinary Claims, Extraordinary Evidence
The old maxim of rationality I’ve heard used by Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If you want to claim something, like aliens control the White House, then you need to show equally extraordinary evidence. However, to claim that one has been raped, unfortunately, is not extraordinary, but dreadfully quite common. So it shouldn’t take much to convince us of such a claim. There are those who say that we should “err in favor of the victim”, and while this is a justified belief, statistically anyways, I’d rather treat rape like any other crime. In other words, we should maintain a neutral position until persuaded otherwise, or “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. After all, weeding out liars from truth-tellers isn’t always as clear cut as it may seem, even when said liars are in low supply. In cases like these where there will usually be no trial, I would often argue for the slightly lower standard of “clear and convincing evidence”, in which “a party must prove that it is substantially more likely than not that it is true.” This seems a far more reasonable assertion to make than the “preponderance of evidence” standard, where one only prove that it is more likely than not that something occurred. This seems to me a petty standard with which to damnably brand someone a criminal, let alone a rapist. That standard seems to me not much better than a guess or a coin toss, and leaves far too much ambiguity.
However, the Cosby situation is an incredible outlier, in which we can safely discard the “clear and convincing evidence” standard, or even the exceedingly low “preponderance of evidence” standard and argue that it is “unreasonable” to doubt that Cosby is a rapist. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. We should not discard this maxim, even in cases of rape. Yet, rape, notwithstanding, can be reasonably proved within these standards if all the right questions are asked. Just keep in mind that these are educated guesses based on these incredible situations, where I only follow the most reasonable conclusions.
I first came across the allegations long before Hannibal Buress spoke up. I read them in Katie McDonough’s article for Salon, “A nation ruled by creeps: Woody, Cosby, and James Taranto’s demented “balance.”” From there, I read Tom Scocca’s article in Gawker “Who Wants to Remember Bill Cosby’s Multiple Sex-Assault Accusations?”, and Amanda Hess’s similarly titled “Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About the Sexual Assault Allegations Against Bill Cosby?” for Slate. When I first read these words, it reminded me of the time I had uncovered one of my Christmas presents early and figured out that Santa Claus didn’t exist. That an entire generation was raised on Bill Cosby without knowing a smidgen about these damning allegations is frightening. Cosby’s biographer Mark Whittaker, all but tried to erase them from history in his book. A move he later apologized for. I wasn’t completely sure at the time if they were true, but the accusations seemed credible, almost damning. At the time, it seemed more likely than not that Cosby did something wrong. What I hoped for was an investigation from the media for better clarification, but I wouldn’t get one until Hannibal Buress went viral.
You should all know the basic story at this point. Comedian Hannibal Buress slammed Cosby briefly in a comedy routine that caught the eye of the Internet, here is a transcript of the bit,
“Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom. Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches. I don’t curse on stage. Well, yeah, you’re a rapist, so, I’ll take you sayin’ lots of motherfuckers on Bill Cosby: Himself if you weren’t a rapist. …I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns. …I’ve done this bit on stage, and people don’t believe. People think I’m making it up. …That shit is upsetting. If you didn’t know about it, trust me. You leave here and Google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ It’s not funny. That shit has more results than Hannibal Buress.”
Since then, there has been great discussion on social media and in the news about the allegations. When I first heard of the bit, I knew exactly what Buress was talking about. Then, the women started coming forward about Bill Cosby.
So many women, in fact, have come out to accuse Cosby, that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Thankfully, Filipa Ioannou, Elliott Hannon, and Ben-Mathis Liley of Slate have a complete list of all the women who have publicly accused the comedian of sexual misconduct:
1. Lachele Covington — -An actress who alleged that Cosby put her hand near his penis on January 25, 2000 and filed a police report. The authorities decided that no crime was committed.
2. Andrea Constand — -A woman who worked at Temple University, Cosby’s alma mater, claimed in 2005 that when she went to Cosby’s home seeking advice, he gave her herbal pills for “anxiety” and Cosby then proceeded to sexually assault her. While a Pennsylvania prosecutor could not find enough evidence to charge, he found Constand “credible” and Cosby “evasive.” Constand opted to sue Cosby in a civil suit for $150 million, which cited, the now famous, 13 Jane Does who had personal testimonies with Cosby. The Jane Does never got a chance to testify, because Constand settled for an undisclosed amount.
3. Shawn Brown — -The National Enquirer reported in 2005 that Brown, who was in a consensual relationship with Cosby, was drugged and raped by him in 1973.
4. Tamara Green — -A retired trial attorney and one of the Jane Does cited earlier, Green took to the Today Show in 2005 to claim that Cosby drugged and assaulted her in the 1970's.
5. Beth Ferrier — -A model who had previously been in a consensual relationship with Cosby, told the Philadelphia Daily News in 2005, that Cosby drugged her coffee and sexually assaulted her. She was also a Jane Doe set to testify.
6. Barbara Bowman — -An aspiring actress and model, Bowman told Philadelphia Magazine that she was one of the Jane Does set to testify in the Constand case. In 2014, after Buress went viral, she told her story to the Daily Mail and The Washington Post alleging that Cosby drugged and raped her multiple times.
7. Joan Tarshis — -Also in 2014, after Bowman retold her story, Tarshis, a music industry publicist and journalist told Hollywood Elsewhere that Cosby drugged and raped her twice in 1969.
8. Linda Joy Traitz — -A former waitress at Cosby owned restaurant, Traitz alleged this year that Cosby tried to force her to take pills which would help her relax and when she refused, unsuccessfully tried to rape her.
9. Janice Dickinson — -Probably the most famous of the accused, TV personality and model, Dickinson told Entertainment Tonight this year that Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982.
10. Therese Serignese — -A Florida nurse who told The Huffington Post this year that in 1976, Cosby drugged and raped her when she was only 19.
11. Carla Ferrigno — -Actress and wife of The Incredible Hulk’s Lou Ferrigno, told Rumorflix this year that in 1967, Cosby forced a kiss on her while his wife, Camille, was in another room.
12. Louisa Moritz — -A lawyer and actress from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Moritz told TMZ this year that Cosby forced oral sex on her in 1971 during The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
13. Renita Chaney Hill — -A woman from Pittsburgh who alleged on CBS that Cosby drugged and raped her after their relationship started when she was 15.
14. Michelle Hurd — -An actress from Law and Order: SVU and Gossip Girl, wrote on her Facebook page that Cosby touched her inappropriately, and implied that Cosby drugged and raped another actress she knew.
15. Angela Leslie — -Another actress-model who told the New York Daily News that Cosby forced her to masturbate his hand at Las Vegas in 1992.
16. Kristina Ruehli — -Another Jane Doe in the Constand case who previously worked as a secretary for Cosby’s talent agency told Philadelphia Magazine that in 1965, Cosby drugged her and when she woke up, he was forcing her to do an oral sex act on him.
17. Victoria Valentino — -A former Playboy Playmate told the Washington Post that in 1970, Cosby gave them her and another actress, Meg Foster, red pills. She recalled trying to pull Cosby off of Foster as he attempted to rape her, and Cosby later coerced her into an oral sex act.
18. Joyce Emmons — -A former comedy club manager who told TMZ that in the 1970s, Cosby gave her a drug for a migraine and she later woke up nude next to a friend of Cosby’s she had rejected earlier. When she confronted Cosby, he laughed it off, saying it was “just a Quaalude.”
19. Jewel Allison — -A former model who told the New York Daily News that in the late 1980’s Cosby drugged her wine and raped her.
20. Donna Motsinger — -A Jane Doe who told The New York Post that Cosby drugged and raped her while she was a waitress at a California jazz club in 1971.
Reuters reports that Cosby was additionally accused by two new women, who testified along with Ferrier in a news conference led by lawyer Gloria Allred. One woman, Chelan, said that Cosby assaulted her when she was 17 in 1986. Another, Helen Hayes, said that Cosby groped her breast in 1973. Allred, seeking an end to the situation, asks that Cosby either end the statute of limitations, which would open him up for a lawsuit, or create a $100 million fund for his victims. Along with that, Judy Huth is suing Cosby of sexually assaulting her in 1973 when she was 15 years old. So 23 women have all accused Cosby of some sexual wrongdoing. Of these, only five were among the 13 Jane Does, which leaves 8 other unknowns to accuse Cosby, totaling at 32 women to accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct, and Lord knows how many more. It’s his word against all of theirs. I hope that these women get their day in court and that Bill Cosby rots in a prison cell.
Of course, there are still those who insist that these women could be lying or exaggerating, or that they need more evidence. Indeed, false allegations of rape do happen, but it is a pernicious myth to say that they are a common occurrence, especially on this scale. At least 30 women have accused Cosby of sexual misconduct in some manner consistent with the various other testimonies. This demonstrated a clear pattern of behavior.
I ask of you, what is the more extraordinary claim: Cosby’s innocence or his accusers allegations? The testimonies of these women are so consistent, credible, and in such sheer number, that they overwhelmingly warrant a response from Cosby. If one weighs the arguments for and against Cosby, it is clear that one just makes more sense than the other. Ta-Nehisi Coates bears this out clearly in his article for The Atlantic,
“A defense of Cosby requires that one believe that several women have decided to publicly accuse one of the most powerful men in recent Hollywood history of a crime they have no hope of seeing prosecuted, and for which they are seeking no damages. The alternative is to see one of the most celebrated public fathers of our time, and one of the great public scourges of black morality, revealed as a serial rapist.”
If the words of these women aren’t enough, then the smoking gun is in two interviews Cosby did for the most prestigious non-partisan news organizations in the country: National Public Radio and the Associated Press.
For a “Weekend Edition” interview on NPR with Scott Simon, Bill Cosby was asked about his loaning of 62 pieces of art to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. The display of this art was called “Conversations: African and African-American Artworks In Dialogue.” One such painting was “The Thankful Poor” painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1894. It features an old man and a little boy in prayer at a dinner table. Their meal is modest. Not long after talking about this collection, Simon brings up the allegations.
“This question gives me no pleasure, Mr. Cosby, but there have been serious allegations raised about you in recent days. You’re shaking your head no. I’m in the news business. I have to ask the question — do you have any response to those charges? Shaking your head no — there are people who love you who might like to hear from you about this. I want to give you the chance. All right…”
Usually, if one is innocent of an accusation, especially one as repulsive as rape, they would deny it loudly like there’s no tomorrow, or at least, I would. So Cosby’s silence, in my mind, betrays in him. By saying nothing, he gave more validation to the allegations than if he responded, even briefly. His silence implies that, perhaps, there’s something to these claims.
I’ve also thought about “The Thankful Poor” by Henry Ossawa Tanner, as well as Cosby’s tendency to berate the black middle-class in America. I won’t spend too much time on Cosby and race, but seeing that it’s relevant, I’ll address it briefly.
Cosby’s racial views are best expressed through his famous “pound cake” speech, for the NAACP that commemorated the 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education at Washington D.C. in May of 2004. Cosby took the event to criticize the black-middle class for their own failures. The “pound cake” part is here,
“Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. 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? (laughter and clapping). I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else (laughter). And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said if get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother. Not you’re going to get your butt kicked. No. You’re going to embarrass your mother. You’re going to embarrass your family.”
Now, are there problems in the black community? Yes, of course. Every community probably has its own issues they need to confront, but one glaring omission Cosby makes is that he refuses to acknowledge the socioeconomic impact that institutional racism. He ignores that the justice system is disproportionate in its targeting of blacks, which may explain why you have so many in prison, and with often longer sentences. Cosby also makes some rather rude assumptions about these blacks simply because of the way they look and talk. Every subculture, from hippies to goths, have been judged by their clothes more than by their ideas. If Cosby can’t see the poetry or the rhythm in gangstas and thug life, then he is intellectually poorer for it. By the way, most of the people who work to fix issues in the black community are, in fact, black. Had Cosby not heard the song “Self-Destruction”, or of the good work done against urban crime by “Cure Violence”?
“The Thankful Poor” is painting that I think is quite poignant now. I say this for two reasons. One, it depicts, what I interpret to be, a father and son. Two, they are poor. For many people, including myself, Cosby was a father figure, but in the end, that’s all he was, a figure. To me, the old man in the painting represents how we saw Cosby, and what we expected of him. Yet that old man is stuck in the painting, an ideal. Moving on to the poverty aspect of “The Thankful Poor”, Cosby clearly has little empathy for the poor black middle class. That he can enshrine a painting examining poverty in America, and yet fail to properly engage in it in real life, shows his empathy deficit. Yes, Cosby has done philanthropy, but philanthropy is easy, and by itself won’t save the poor. Cosby can appreciate this painting. He just can’t understand it. Does he not know that the poor, the black poor today, still try to be grateful and still suffer?
In his Associated Press interview, Cosby verbally bullies the AP like a Mafia gangster who “has friends in high places.” Here, we saw him naked, the real “Bill Cosby”, a far more disgusting and vile creature than we were led to believe, a drooling Jabba The Hut, thriving in rot. Shortly after being asked about the allegations, to which his response was, well, no response, Cosby, thinking that he was off camera, began to coerce.
Cosby: “Now can I get something from you?”
AP Reporter: “What’s that?”
Cosby: “That none of that will be shown?”
AP Reporter: “I can’t promise that, myself, but you didn’t say anything…”
Cosby: “I know I didn’t say anything, but I’m asking your integrity that since I didn’t want to say anything, but I did answer you in terms of ‘I don’t want to say anything, of what value will it have?’”
AP Reporter: “I don’t think it will have…”
Cosby: (Speaking to off-camera publicist) “Mam? What’d you say?”
AP Reporter: “Sorry?”
Cosby: “What did you say?”
Off-camera publicist: “I don’t think it has any value either.”
Cosby: “And I would appreciate it if it was scuttled.”
AP Reporter: “I hear you. I will tell that to my editors and I think that they will understand…”
Cosby: “I think if you want to consider yourself to be serious that it will not appear anywhere.”
AP Reporter: “OK. I appreciate what you’ve asked.”
Cosby: “Thank you. And we thought, by the way, because it was AP, that it wouldn’t be necessary to go over that question with you.”
AP Reporter: “I know. And we haven’t written about this at all in the past two months, but they want, my bosses wanted me to ask…”
Cosby: “If you will just tell your boss the reason why we didn’t say that upfront was because we thought that AP had the integrity to not ask.”
Off camera publicist: “One other point on that: One of the three major TV writers for the AP in Los Angeles called me up and asked me — Lynn Elber — and I said we’re not addressing it. So she said fine and she just closed it off.”
AP Reporter: “OK.”
Cosby: (to publicist) “And I think you need to get on the phone with his person immediately.”
Off camera publicist: “I will, OK.”
Cosby: “OK, thank you.”
This is the moment, for me, when the loving “Cliff Huxtable” truly died, and the decaying, greedy, self-centered low-life known as “Bill Cosby”, reared his ugly head. Not only did Cosby again refuse to respond to serious allegations, but he also wanted to cover up this dialogue from the world. Look closely during the interview, far behind Cosby, and you can see “The Thankful Poor.” What a contradictory scene.
Given all of these factors, it would seem very implausible to deny Cosby’s crimes, but still, there are those that do. Aside from the longtime fans, too starstruck for the truth, you have those who are simply hesitant to point the finger at Cosby, despite how glaringly obvious it all is. They act as if the truth is unknowable, as if all rape cases should be weighed in the exact same way. This is ridiculous. The Cosby situation is vastly different from the sexual assault allegations against Woody Allen, Julian Assange, or even the late Michael Jackson. I won’t go into the details of these difficult, but serious cases, however, it seems fairly reasonable to me, that cohesive arguments could be made by either side of those issues. Believe what you will, but I think that in those cases, agnosticism isn’t an unreasonable position. However, the degrees of which you hold that agnosticism can differ. It may seem more probable to some that Woody Allen is guilty of wrongdoing that Julian Assange, and vice-versa, but there still remains uncertainty significant enough to refrain from labeling the accused as “rapists.” At the same time, the media should be more responsible in investigating these various claims. I would like to see a re-examination of the Michael Jackson case, myself, given the new accusations against him by Wade Robeson and James Safechuck, and while I don’t think that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick, that issue could certainly benefit from a another look.
So if you are to accept my argument that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist, then what can be done about The Cosby Show? Is it ethical to watch, or to even laugh at?
The Art Versus The Artist
I enjoy the art of many artists whose moral values I find, well, lacking, to say the least. Ender’s Game is one of the finest science-fiction books I’ve ever read, but its author, Orson Scott Card, is a raging homophobe. Rosemary’s Baby and The Pianist are excellent films, but their director, Roman Polanski, is, like Cosby, a rapist. Ezra Pound was a magnificent poet, but also a fascist supporter of Mussolini. All three of these talented people produced controversies that forced this conflict of art versus artist on the public.
When filmed adaptation of Ender’s Game up for release in 2013, clearly among the first to capitalize on the young adult dystopian craze started by the Hunger Games, many saw reason to boycott it. I even know friends of mine who did. Regardless of how good the film was, they didn’t want to contribute a cent to Orson Scott Card. Let’s recall that he once wrote an article in Deseret News lambasting the legality of same-sex marriage and swore to rebel against it:
“Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.”
Pretty stupid stuff, right? Well, as soon as Lionsgate adapted the film for release, LGBT activists saw boycotting the Ender’s Game film as a way to damage Card. The movie opened to mixed reviews and a mediocre box office return. This may, in fact, have to do with the negative reception around Card, but there were those who suggested that boycotting was the wrong move. One such person was Mack Rawden of CinemaBlend. He seemed to say that it was unfair to condemn the entire cast and crew of Ender’s Game, since not a cent of the money earned would return to Card. He also argued in favor of separating art from artist,
“Movies have to be judged by their content, not by who created them. Your average film is organized and executed by hundreds of people of different races and genders who boast different sexual orientations, different religions and different political leanings. The only thing they have in common is their shared desire to make the final product as brilliant and moving as possible, and if you separate the group and start looking at each one of these creators individually and their perceived motivations, you’re almost always going to find some horrific and unseemly things beneath the surface. Why? Because a high percentage of us suck.”
I agree with much of what Rawden says here. It’s only inevitable that our cherished works of art will have contributions from idiots, but art should stand on its own, regardless of its creators. Yet, it’s very easy to say that when the creator isn’t an intimate player in their work. After all, Card was very detached from Ender’s Game, in the story he doesn’t appear. For those who subscribe to “Death of the Author”, Card doesn’t even exist. Yet bigotry is not as awful as rape. Enter Roman Polanski.
Polanski, as we all know, raped Samantha Geimer by use of drugs when she was 13 years old in 1977. For that crime, he has not been able to return to the United States, should he be jailed. In 2009, when going to Switzerland for the Zurich Film Festival, he was jailed over his arrest warrant at the pressure of American officials. Whoopi Goldberg defended Polanski’s actions as not “rape-rape”, and Hollywood followed suit. They signed a petition calling for Polanski’s release, among the signatories included were Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese along with 100 other filmmakers and actors. Here, art was not separated from artist. Is not possible to celebrate The Pianist, Chinatown, and Rosemary’s Baby, while holding Polanski accountable for his crimes against women? I would think so. Like Card, Polanski doesn’t exist within the universes of these films. He is detached. While both Chinatown and The Pianist came from intimate places in Polanski’s lifetime (the death of Sharon Tate and escaping the Holocaust) none of them advocate or apologize for rape. Besides, films are collaborative efforts. Why should Polanski get all the honor for them? Hollywood made the mistake of assuming a director is as good as his films. They left the rape victims behind.
Nor is this dilemma a new phenomenon. A Little Treasury In Modern Poetry records a moment when Ezra Pound won the Bollingen Prize of $1000 for his Pisan Cantos in 1949. The poetry was controversial because it reflected Pound’s admiration for Mussolini’s Italy, as well as his own antisemitism. The jury that awarded him was not unanimous and included W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Karl Shapiro, Robert Lowell, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Penn Warren, among others. In response to the controversy, the jury released this statement:
“The fellows are aware that objections may be made to awarding a prize to a man situated as is Mr. Pound. In their view, however, the possibility of such objection did not alter the responsibility assumed by the Jury of Selection. This was to make a choice for the award among eligible books, provided anyone merited such recognition, according to the stated terms of the Bollingen Prize. To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest,” (879–880)
The responses among poets, and indeed, those of that jury, were decidedly mixed. One of voted for Pound, Robert Lowell, said in his defense that:
“I thought it was the very simple problem of voting for the best book of the year; and it seemed to me that Pound’s was. I thought the Pisan Cantos was the best writing Pound had ever done, though it included some of his worst. It is a very mixed book: that was the question. But the consequences of not giving the best book of the year a prize for extraneous reasons, even terrible ones in a sense — -I think that’s the death of art,” (880).
Conversely, Karl Shapiro, who voted against Pound, did so for more personal reasons:
“I voted against Pound in the balloting for the Bollingen Prize. My first and more crucial reason was that I am a Jew and cannot honor antisemites. My second reason, I stated in a report which was circulated among the Fellows: “I voted against Pound in the belief that the poet’s political and moral philosophy ultimately vitiates his poetry and lowers its standards as literary work,” (880).
At moments, I feel just stuck in the middle of these two sides in the whole “art versus artist” debate. One the one hand, I don’t believe that whether or not the creator of an art was morally righteous should sink or swim its value. Yet on the other hand, it can be damaging. Joseph Conrad’s apparent racism in Heart of Darkness was unhelpful to its portrayal of the Congolese. Yes, Heart of Darkness is a great novel, but, as far as Chinua Achebe was concerned, racism damaged its effectiveness as art.
You could argue that since the Bill Cosby persona is different than Cosby himself, that it’s okay to laugh at his jokes, but is it really? Woody Allen has also insisted that his persona on film is different than who he is in real life (take that for what you will). Unlike Polanski or Card, Allen, like Cosby, does exist within his works. I suppose I feel more comfortable watching Woody Allen films because the case against him is decidedly less definitive than Cosby’s. So it’s admittedly easier for me to disassociate his character from the allegations. Yet any time I want to watch The Cosby Show, I feel as if I’d be laughing at a serial rapist, giving him credit. It’s a shame too, because so many other talented people contributed to that show, and now, their legacies have been sullied, obstructed even.
As much as I would like to, I can’t erase Cosby’s impact from history. One of his stand-up albums was preserved by the National Recording Registry. Not to mention that The Cosby Show itself was an important show for the visibility of blacks in America. Yes, the show may not have dealt with race as often as Fresh Prince, but I for one, thought it was nice to see blacks portrayed as living regular lives like whites, instead of always being a part of race polemics. Not that that’s a bad thing, or anything, it’s desperately needed, but I believe that there should also be a spectrum of black portrayals. By the end of the day, I don’t know what the right answer is. You’ll have to decide this for yourself. I really don’t think I’ll be able to watch or hear anything of Cosby’s for a very long time.
Let me end by saying that the Cosby case is both extraordinary and ordinary. I say this because it is absolutely extraordinary to have such a grand number of women all accuse a rapist of the same or similar crimes, even Jian Ghomeshi had fewer. It also ordinary, however, in the sense that most rapists are serial rapists, and as such, they have a long list of victims that they’ve hurt. This is why we have such a great number of women who have been raped, and yet a low number of men who are rapists. Feminist Jessica Valenti said provocatively in The Nation, “Rape is as American as apple pie — -until we own that, nothing will change.”
At the time, I felt that the statement was a little obtuse, but now, I admit, I was wrong. Rape has infected our schools, our military, our clergy, our prisons, our sports teams, and now, our televisions. When even “America’s Dad”, of all people, is a rapist, that tells us that rape has become a major part of the American experience. To deny this is to deny reality.
Bibliography
Williams, Oscar, ed. A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry. 3rd ed. 879–880. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. Print.
Originally published at http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com.
