What Shielded Bill Cosby?

Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty

Two weeks ago, Anita Hill, following an address that she delivered to a packed auditorium at the University of Connecticut, was asked how it made her feel to know that, despite her testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, a solid majority of African-Americans still supported his confirmation. She dodged for a moment and then pointed out what she saw as one of the most egregious elements of the entire affair: Thomas’s deployment of the language of lynching to discredit her claims. The debacle of Thomas’s hearing—already suffused with stereotypes of black male sexuality and with questioning that teetered among sexism, voyeurism, and the kind of disingenuous tokenism that led to Thomas’s nomination in the first place—did not reach its nadir until the embattled nominee declared the proceedings a “high-tech lynching.” Twenty-three years later, we know better than to be bamboozled so willingly by a powerful black man claiming racism, or at least we believe we do. Yet nothing better illustrates the enduring morass in these matters than the case of Bill Cosby.

If the damning charges swirling around the comedian are true, then we lack a proper metric to detail the scale of the hypocrisy that he represents. It is one thing to wear one face in public and another in private, a dichotomy that we all practice to some degree or another, though usually not to cloak serial predation upon semi-conscious women. But it’s quite another to do so while stridently, consistently, angrily denouncing those who have failed to meet your own moral standards. Yet in the past month we’ve learned little about Cosby that was not already known, which is that more than a dozen women have accused him of sexual assault. More of these women’s names have been made public now, but enough of their stories were out there already. In 2006, Andrea Constand, who worked with the Temple University basketball program—Cosby is a Temple alumnus and, even now, a university trustee—filed a civil suit alleging that Cosby had sexually assaulted her, and that thirteen other women were prepared to testify on her behalf about their own similar experiences. Two of them, Tamara Green and Beth Ferrer, had already come forward. Cosby settled the suit. Barbara Bowman, one of the women who’d been prepared to testify, spoke out soon after, giving interviews under her full name to Philadelphia and People. She described how, when she was a young actress, Cosby drugged and raped her—a story similar in detail to those of other women. If we didn’t know this about Cosby it’s because we chose not to recall it, because the storyline was too appealing, the persona too charismatic. The hypocrisy in this situation is vast, but it does not solely belong to Cosby.

The accounts of these women have garnered outrage now thanks to the open commentary and social networks of the Internet, and the renewed attention to a routine, from October, in which the comedian Hannibal Buress referred to Cosby as a rapist. Bowman wrote, in the Washington Post, that her story had not been considered credible until a man repeated it onstage. But this is only part of what stirred a response to the Cosby allegations. Hannibal Buress, like Cosby, is a black man, a common heir to the body of stereotypes about sexual predation and the tormented history that accompany it. Cosby was insulated from the long trail of allegations not only by his wealth and power but by the lurid history of black men brought low by accusations, specious or not, of sexual contact with white women. African-Americans have cultivated an immune response to such matters, which is part of why the idea that this scandal is a digital lynching has gained traction in some sectors of black America. When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the damning nature of the charges and his regret for not having dug deeper into them when he profiled Cosby in 2008, the writer Ishmael Reed responded with a Facebook post declaring that Coates had joined a lynch mob. For his part, Buress saw the lurid stories around Cosby not as evidence of a prominent black man being brought low but as the exposing of a serial rapist who had masterfully manipulated both the white desire for an icon of post-racialism and the black desire for the type of dignified success that Cosby represented. And in publicly voicing this sentiment, Buress effectively made it safe for others, particularly white people, to do the same. In short, this is not the conversation we would be having if Bill Maher or Jimmy Kimmel had called Cosby a rapist.

For the past decade, Cosby has operated less as a comedian or a product pitchman than as a freelance scold of the black poor. The vitriol he heaped upon the perceived moral failures of the black underclass meshed with his role as television’s iconic father figure. But decades before “The Cosby Show” made mainstream a reality that had been visible to black people but veiled from the rest of the country—the existence of functional, intact, and affluent black families—Cosby was already mining accessible, crossover, happen-to-be-black themes in his comedy. It’s impossible to overstate how essential this was in allowing him to achieve his nearly unimpeachable status in American culture. Burned early on by charges that his humor was racially neutral compared to his peer Dick Gregory, Cosby eventually came to be seen, and adored, as the embodiment of black dignity, a walking refutation of the worst ideas about us. The benefits were not merely symbolic. His twenty-million-dollar gift to Spelman College, still the largest sum any African-American has bestowed upon a historically black college, was an example of self-help on an epic scale. For the first ten years of my career as a professor, I taught at Spelman on the top floor of Cosby Hall, a building named for his wife, Camille.

His emergence as a comedian came at the precise point when the civil-rights movement was popularly perceived by whites in power as a kind of brief for full admission into American society. If Motown offered a soundtrack for integration, Cosby was its comedy equivalent. As David and Joe Henry wrote of Cosby in “Furious Cool,” their biography of Richard Pryor,

Although Cosby’s material was clean and nonthreatening, he made the medium the message. The very notion of a cuddly, color-blind black comic in the sixties was radical in and of itself, said critic Gerald Nachman. “He made folks feel good about America. The humor was just the icing on the cake; Cosby was the cake.”

The ripple effect was immediate. Richard Pryor, then a relative unknown, refashioned his own standup to more closely mirror Cosby’s deracinated style of observational humor. Cosby’s shadow loomed so large that it took years for Pryor to début his own politically tinged, unapologetically black style of comedy. Decades later, as Kelefa Sanneh wrote in a recent piece for The New Yorker, Cosby’s influence remained formidable enough that a young Eddie Murphy felt compelled to call Pryor for advice when he learned that Cosby didn’t like his use of profanity onstage.

Cosby used this nonthreatening comedy to build his impregnable celebrity persona. We have become accustomed, even inured, to the hypocrisies of powerful men who issue moral injunctions in public, yet among Cosby’s many deft manipulations has been his ability to seem, at least to many people, like more of a curmudgeonly truth-teller than a rich bully. Clarence Thomas declaring that he was figuratively being lynched was a masterpiece of cynicism, and it came in the wake of his own denunciations of laziness and welfare dependence among impoverished black people. (He went so far as to cite his own sister as an example of the race’s failings.) During the 2012 G.O.P. primaries, Herman Cain echoed Clarence Thomas’s language about high-tech lynching in a futile attempt to redirect attention from the charges of serial sexual harassment against him. In both cases, the tacit assumption was that the complaint of racism should never be used as a crutch for the poor, but can certainly be used as shield for the powerful.

In the case of Cosby, a statement like Cain or Thomas’s was unnecessary. The lynching language was implied. For nearly fifty years now, Cosby has been selling us a vision of America as a place where a man like him—ostensibly benign, successful, unencumbered by the shackles of history—could exist. There is a reason why people so frequently cite “The Cosby Show” as a necessary prerequisite for the tidal change of the 2008 Presidential election. The irony is that Cosby’s career validates a different and less salutary American ideal, one that we only dimly recognized as transcending racial barriers: the entitlements of wealth. A century ago, when Booker T. Washington, the country’s prominent and powerful proponent of black moral uplift, was assaulted outside a brothel in New York City, the effect upon his political standing was catastrophic. The horrendous allegations about Cosby elicited, at first, an insouciant shrug.

Whether or not Cosby is guilty of the monstrous deeds attributed to him, he has been insulated from the stigma of those charges for a decade, putting him in the company of men like Roman Polanski—men we’ve opted to value more for their art than for their character. In the most bitter way imaginable, Cosby has allowed us to recognize that what we share, despite the confines of our demographic silos, is our common capacity for denial.