Learning to Hate Bill Cosby

  

I believe each of the women who have accused Bill Cosby. I feel their rage, and their disgust and their betrayal and even their fear because that is what I feel for anyone who has been sexually assaulted. But there is disbelief, not in them, never in them. It is disbelief that the Bill Cosby in my mind is the same man that violated these women. I want them to be wrong. I want him to be who he was in my mind. My disbelief vacillates between denial and dismay. It is not logical and, mostly, it is not conscious. The evidence is overwhelming, dozens of women with the same story. And yet when I listen to his voice on NPR just before he refuses to address the allegations, or when I see his impish grin in some Cosby Show era headshot, I have a Pavlovian response. I trust Bill Cosby. In my subconscious his voice and persona is totally married to the image of an affable father figure, as it is for most of us. What shocks me is not that connection, but the fact that I seem unable to break that connection.

I was born into the Cosby generation, just old enough to watch the shows when they originally aired. I reveled in Theo’s trip to the “real world” when the family decided to turn their home into a miniature neighborhood, his bedroom an apartment, his father the slow uncooperative landlord. I was old enough to wonder about the sudden appearance of a new daughter, totally absent from the first season. I was old enough to question why Lisa Bonet was shunned from the Cosby universe due to “creative differences,” (read: her desire to do more than just play Cosby’s angelic, if kooky kid). In those eight years, I was taught, in fact we were all convinced, of Cosby’s metal. His moral fortitude. His vulnerability. He was Magnum PI without the sex appeal, he was Hawkeye Pierce without the bitterness, he was Steven Keaton with a spine. Did I know if he was representing the True Black Experience? I knew he represented at least one.

Some might say he was bigger than his blackness, some might say his approach to race was simplistic and insulting. But we are still in a sad place in our culture where every black man who “makes it” is tangible proof that maybe this country won’t be sick forever, maybe we can move past the atrocities of slavery and segregation, maybe smart funny people, no matter their race, can succeed.  So Cosby’s fall, his steep, kamikaze style decent into the fiery lake of sex offenders, is a betrayal of his fans, of black men everywhere, of anyone who wants the fearful and uneducated people of this world to wake up even if it’s just one movie star at a time.

And now this former pillar of morality is just another man who thinks women are animals, objects to be used and disposed of as he sees fit. How many people in his inner circle learned that lesson from him? How many people turned to the Oracle of Cosby and discovered, “oh chicks? You just make ‘em fuck you.” How many people (even if this number is minuscule it is horrific) felt justified in their own behavior because they heard through the grapevine that’s how Cosby does it? For someone who often spoke as a voice for an oppressed minority, to turn around and be the oppressor is tragic and disgusting.

I’m not sure how I will do it. How I can break this profound association. But I must. For each of those women, I will learn to hate Bill Cosby.