How Bill Cosby’s image shielded him from claims of rape
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Version 0 of 1. Bill Cosby was the first black comedian to break into the US mainstream and, doubtless to his bewilderment, he has had a rocky relationship with many of the prominent black comedians who followed in his footsteps. Richard Pryor initially copied him and then reacted against Cosby’s cosy persona, rejecting it as phoney and safe. Eddie Murphy famously ridiculed Cosby in his legendary 1989 live show Raw. More recently, Chris Rock took issue with Cosby after the older comic suggested that Trayvon Martin’s death was more to do with guns than race, a claim that’s all the more puzzling considering Cosby’s own son, Ennis, was shot and killed by a racist in 1997. And now Cosby has been brought down by another black comedian. Hannibal Buress did a skit in his act last month that has since brought both him and Cosby an enormous amount of attention: “It’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate,” Buress said. “He gets on TV: ‘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 rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.” Some have claimed that people started paying attention to allegations of Cosby assaulting women only when men spoke up about it, Buress included. But this isn’t entirely true. Even back in 2005 these stories were being covered by the national press in America. Tamara Green, interviewed on NBC’s The Today Show, said that in the 1970s Cosby plied her with pills and molested her. Later that year, the Philadelphia Daily News covered Beth Ferrier’s story in which she alleged that Cosby drugged and assaulted her in the 1980s. The year after that, People magazine interviewed Barbara Bowman, who alleged that Cosby assaulted her in the 1980s. During all this, Cosby settled a lawsuit brought by another accuser, Andrea Constand, who alleged that he drugged and molested her in 2004. Earlier this year, Newsweek interviewed Barbara Bowman and Tamara Green about their allegations. These stories have been around for a while, and if it’s taken a decade for them to affect Cosby’s career – Netflix is cancelling his comedy special, and Cosby himself has cancelled talkshow appearances – then that is a reflection of a growing intolerance among the public for bad behaviour (for want of a better term) from men in the public eye, coupled with the brave tenacity of the women making allegations in the face of plenty of initial doubt. At the moment 15 women have made allegations against Cosby, including the actor Janice Dickinson. An equally important factor is the position Cosby has held in America, and especially black America, for 50 years – and this, in many respects, is the most revealing factor as we face what looks increasingly like the end of his career. The reason so many black comedians have reacted against the man who arguably paved the way for them is that Cosby has always been the archetypal conservative, with a small c. His early stand-up routines focused on cosy, race-free anecdotes about childhood because he felt – not entirely incorrectly – that this was the way to break into the white mainstream. As Cosby became more successful in the 70s, he grew increasingly sensitive about the portrayals of black Americans in the media, and how much he believed that black Americans encouraged these negative portrayals. This is why he criticised Murphy for swearing and it’s why he created The Cosby Show – a show that was, for five of its eight years, the most watched show in the United States. Here Cosby presented a view of black American family life that was unfamiliar to American TV, based on stability, wealth and happiness, and not defined by race – indeed, race was absent from the show to an extent that at times defied credulity. Nevertheless, the show reflected Cosby’s vision of life for black Americans, and it was one that “gestured at the ideal of black self-sufficiency – the notion that, with enough time and effort, African-Americans could fix their own problems,” as the New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh put it. This attitude lay behind Cosby’s speech in 2004 when he expressed, at some length, his exasperation with black Americans blaming white people for their problems. Cosby set himself up as the image of conservative paternalistic morality in black America, whether black people liked it or not – and plenty didn’t – but he was still the one who broke through first. His success as a pioneer and, more crucially, his self-fashioned image for a long time protected him from the allegations. Now they make the crimes he is accused of committing feel even more cruel and repulsive than they already are. One of the most interesting aspects of Cosby’s career has been his tenaciously loud voice arguing for young, black men to take responsibility for themselves and improve their self-image. And yet, when Cosby himself was asked on American radio last weekend about the allegations of rape against him, all the old man could offer was silence. |