I've put this off for too long. I try not to write much about hot button topics on this blog, because I don't have the resources and I'm frankly not well informed enough to talk about them the way they should be talked about. And when you don't have anything helpful or constructive to say, it's best just to stay out of the conversation and reduce the noise. Frankly, the sum total of my thoughts toward the Bill Cosby controversy that I feel comfortable sharing can be summed up as, Cosby's crimes are clearly very serious, and I wish he could have been brought to justice earlier.
The more complicated part of it, the one that we've all been skirting around these past few years, is what to do about Bill Cosby's legacy and body of work. As a non-white person who was a child in the U.S. in the 1980s, "The Cosby Show" had a major impact on my worldview. I am not willing to set aside my positive feelings for that series, even knowing that Bill Cosby was the major driving force behind it. However, I'm not African-American, I haven't been keeping up with the cases against Cosby, and I'm not remotely well versed enough in the discourse going on around him to articulate my position with any kind of confidence that I'm not treading on anyone's toes or being inconsiderate of anyone's feelings. It is a messy, upsetting situation all around, and I'm so grateful that W. Kamau Bell has decided to create a documentary series for Showtime, laying out all of the facts, and interviewing many, many people for "We Need to Talk About Cosby." It spans four hour-long episodes and it still doesn't feel like enough.
What Bell does so well is that he carefully lays out the context for why Bill Cosby is such a sensitive topic. "We Need to Talk About Cosby" is as much about Bill Cosby's successes as it is about calling him out on his terrible crimes, much like Ezra Edelman's "The People vs. O.J. Simpson." It charts Cosby's whole career from the beginning, and we don't get to "The Cosby Show" and the height of his popularity until the third episode. At the same time, Bell lays out that Bill Cosby was committing sexual assaults and rapes from his earliest days of doing comedy in the '60s, and covering them up using his celebrity and sterling reputation. There's a lot of time spent emphasizing his efforts at creating educational programs in the 1970s, like "Fat Albert," building up Cosby's image as a trustworthy figure of authority. This helps to explain why people of different generations have had such different responses to the scandal. Gen Xers and older millennials like me still can't help viewing Cosby as a paternal figure on the same level as someone like Fred Rogers.
The interviews in the series are conducted with Cosby's victims, his peers, many people who knew him, and also with various academics, writers, and media figures - mostly African American. And I so appreciate that Bell gives them a platform to really tackle the contradictions of Bill Cosby, and the impact that he's had on American popular culture. As one journalist points out, you can't talk about the African-American experience in the last half of the 20th century without talking about Bill Cosby. He broke a lot of barriers and changed the media landscape permanently, for the better. At the same time, dozens of first-hand accounts make it clear that he is an irredeemable monster who preyed on women and girls for decades. And those two sides of him, while he did his best to keep them separate, are linked. Some of his old comedy routines and running jokes are awfully inappropriate in hindsight. He only had the access to his victims that he did because of the stratospheric level of his success, and he was scrupulous about maintaining his wholesome image.
"We Need to Talk About Cosby" told me a lot of things I didn't know about Bill Cosby, but it didn't change my position on the scandal. I still love and value the man's work, and think the man himself should be in prison for the rest of his life. But what it did help with was that feeling of doubt and insecurity about my position. I'm not the only person who feels this way about Bill Cosby - not remotely, and there are many, many other people - smart, insightful, and moral people - who are still struggling with how to reconcile the dichotomy. And it's more than understandable that we'll all be struggling with it for a long time to come.
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