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Depending on you and your life experiences, Bill Cosby is both an abuser or the newest Black man to fall prey to being unjustly accused.
In the case of the 83-year-old actor, it’s truly dozens of girls – the majority of them White – over a number of years who alleged sexual misconduct by Cosby relationship again a long time. (Cosby has persistently denied the allegations.)
Which is why when his longtime good friend and costar Phylicia Rashad celebrated the overturning of the verdict in opposition to Cosby on Wednesday, it set off debate involving race, misogyny and the #MeToo motion.
Well earlier than Cosby was convicted and sentenced in 2018 to 3 to 10 years in a state jail for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his dwelling in 2004, there was a lot debate over his guilt and innocence.
But no the place extra so than in the Black community, the place Cosby had meant a lot as each an entertainer and an advocate for training.
“The Cosby Show” was groundbreaking tv.
Running from 1984 to 1992 on NBC, the sitcom depicted an higher center class Black household devoid of the typical stereotypes typically assigned to Black characters in Hollywood.
Cosby portrayed Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, an obstetrician and patriarch of 5 youngsters. Rashad performed the matriarch, lawyer Clair Huxtable.
Their loving household dynamic – and Cosby’s affable portrayal as the comical and sometimes beleaguered father – discovered him steadily topping polls as America’s favorite TV dad.
He embodied the mum or dad that many who grew up in the tumultuous 1980s as latchkey youngsters, or these with extra absent fathers than Huxtable, wished that they had.
“The Cosby Show debuted during the Reagan era, when the plagues of crack, AIDS and spiraling homicide were ravaging African-Americans,” writer, professor and culture critic Jelani Cobb told Ebony Magazine in 2015. “[The show was] huge among Black people because it was a counterpoint to the stream of negativity that we heard and saw about ourselves so frequently during those years.”
As beloved as Cosby’s Dr. Huxtable was, Rashad’s Clair was as nicely. A deeply loving spouse, she modeled excellence for the Huxtable youngsters (performed by Sabrina Le Beauf, Lisa Bonet, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Tempestt Bledsoe and Keshia Knight Pulliam) and portrayed a powerful, Black feminist in a tv panorama with few.
That picture appeared in stark distinction to some when Rashad tweeted “FINALLY!!!! A terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!” after the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania vacated Cosby’s conviction on Wednesday.
#ByePhylicia (a reference to the catch phrase “Bye Felicia” made in style by the hit 1995 movie “Friday) started trending and one other well-known TV mother even weighed in.
“Phylicia what are you thinking!!!,” actress Janet Hubert, who played the original Aunt Viv on “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” tweeted. “I don’t know you but to say this was terribly wrong.”
It was difficult by the undeniable fact that Rashad is the newly appointed dean of the reestablished College of Fine Arts at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, DC.
“I love @PhyliciaRashad but Howard need to remove her cause how safe would you feel if your dean is defending a man who ADMITTED he drugged and raped women,” Evelyn Atieno, editor-in-chief of Affinity, tweeted.
Rashad sought to make clear her stance amid the backlash, tweeting “I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward.”
“My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth,” she wrote.”Personally, I do know from family and friends that such abuse has lifelong residual results. My heartfelt want is for therapeutic.”
But not everybody disagreed with Rashad’s support for Cosby.
When Howard University posted a statement on their verified Instagram acount disavowing Rahad’s original tweet – writing that it “lacked sensitivity towards survivors of sexual assault” – a number of folks defended Rashad.
“She spoke Truth!” one individual commented.
“Dean Rashad has done nothing wrong!” one other defender wrote.
It’s indicative of the division that has existed since allegations in opposition to Cosby first went mainstream in 2014, when a video of comic Hannibal Buress speaking about Cosby went viral.
From the onset, there was utter disbelief inside the Black community {that a} man of Cosby’s stature might have carried out something so heinous.
Misinformation was rampant. It was stated that Cosby was focused as a result of he was in the course of of shopping for NBC, when in actuality he had explored such a sale in 1992. And, like so many elements of our tradition in current years, the allegations have been politicized. (In 2016, then aspiring presidential candidate Donald Trump had been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, which he denied.)
Therere was additionally dialogue about misogyny after Barbara Bowman, one of Cosby’s accusers, penned an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which she famous “only after a man … called Bill Cosby a rapist in a comedy act… did the public outcry begin in earnest.”
Black male celebrities like Cosby are sometimes rallied round when accused of wrongdoing as they develop into proxies for the many Black males unjustly accused and prosecuted in this nation.
“History tells me that black men who are accused of raping white women have often been lynched. History tells me that black men who face the American justice system are disproportionately incarcerated,” Solomon Jones wrote in a piece for WHYY radio in 2018. “History tells me that Cosby – a black man – had little likelihood of strolling away from the accusations of dozens of principally white girls.
History additionally tells us that whereas the momentum of #MeToo might have helped grease the wheels that led to Cosby’s conviction, the overturning of that conviction has reminded some of the 1995 trial of OJ Simpson, who was in the end acquitted in the murders of his ex spouse Nicole Brown Simpson and her good friend Ron Goldman.
That is that wealthy and highly effective Black males might have extra profitable outcomes in the authorized system – a undeniable fact that appears much less up for debate than their precise guilt or innocence.