Preachy Cosby did himself in
Bill Cosby’s first “offense” occurred many years before his female accusers began to amass their forces ominously on the horizon.
Long before his fall, the phenomenally successful, fabulously wealthy comedian had begun sounding a message that was more welcomed among whites of conservative disposition than among liberals and many of his fellow African Americans. He had indulged himself in “blaming the victim,” to use a favorite, formulaic indictment of certain mediadesignated “black leaders” and self-designated “progressives.”
Cosby criticized young black males for impregnating young black females and criticized females for allowing them to. He took to speaking out in a preachy, fingerwagging way against what the harrumphing social scientists classify as the dysfunctional socio-economic milieus of the disadvantaged. Except that Cosby’s observations were not leavened with high-falutin’ academic politesse. His tended to have a jagged cutting edge. He lampooned the swaggering young brothers for their foul mouths and their trousers worn low to reveal the top half of their glutei maximi. The man on whom universities had bestowed honorary degrees and product manufacturers had lavished endorsements ridiculed the African American patois. He mocked blacks for supposedly saying such things as — according to Cosby — “Where is you?” and “Why you ain’t?”
“They can’t read, they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling and they’re going nowhere,” said Cosby in one of his non-comedy routines.
Whites lapped it up. They had already elevated “The Cosby Show” to No. 1 in the TV ratings. The show preached the positive propaganda of black success. Cosby played the comfortably middle-class, white-acting physician, “Dr.Heathcliff Huxtable.”
Perhaps taking the Huxtable success story too much to heart, Cosby made his moralizing lectures a routine event, almost replacing his comedy shtick. He went around exhorting blacks to start taking responsibility for their own lives, to stop offering slavery and Jim Crow as excuses for personal failings. It was easy enough for him to say, in the opinion of detractors. In their view, he’d hit the jackpot in life’s lottery. He’d amassed a fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He was now looking down on the less fortunate from a privileged perch.
Cosby’s lecturings were his extended “Sister Souljah Moment.” In 1992, Bill Clinton had deployed a putdown of the hip-hop celebrity that gave birth to that term. Remember? Clinton’s remarks were carefully calculated and calibrated to appease the demographic his spouse would later identify as Deplorables. The savvy Clinton knew, however, to make his Sister Souljah Moment a onenight stand, not a city-bycity road show. To Cosby’s seething critics, it looked like Cosby, in contrast to Clinton, just couldn’t resist further ingratiating himself with his huge, white fan base.
Those in the business of exploiting racial resentment — “civil rights” hustlers like Jesse Jackson — squirmed but at first stuck with the wildly popular Cosby. “Bill is saying let’s fight the right fight,” Jackson alibied for him. Increasingly, though, objections were voiced that Cosby’s jeremiads were merely updated scripts for the old Acuncular Thomas role, that they were merely Booker T. leftovers.
Up until a certain point, the allegations of Cosby’s predatory sexual activities went on simmering quietly on back burners, where they’d been since the mid-1960s without attracting much attention. Would the allegations ever have boiled over, as they at last finally did, had Cosby himself not turned up the heat underneath them with his preachy views — preachy views discordant to sensitive ears among vocal minority and progressive factions of the Democratic Party?
Very doubtful. Not even Cosby’s comedian colleague, Hannibal Buress, had dared to unload on Cosby until 2014. That was the year Buress famously did his routine acknowledging long-standing ugly rumors against the Jello pitchman and Nielsen ratings colossus. By then, to his critics, Cosby’s nettlesome, moralistic social commentaries had already reached the 212 degree Fahrenheit mark. And the sexual allegations, not coincidentally, were heading toward that critical high mark, too.
The case against him came to a boil only after Cosby had persisted with remarks viewed in certain quarters as giving aid and comfort to the David Duke set. Or, even more menacingly, viewed as undermining lucrative Sharptonite and Farrakhanian agendas of Mau-Mauing Mister Charlie.
The jury that heard his case found Cosby guilty of counts of aggravated indecent assault, a verdict that could amount to a life sentence for Cosby, who’ll soon turn 81. Much of the coverage of his comeuppance left the impression, intended or not, that Cosby was one of those conservative charlatans in the familiar mold of the Revs. Jimmy Swaggart and Bobby Bakker. As his accusers (some of them herded by the prominent
plaintiff’s attorney, Gloria Allred) marched on the grand jury room, Cosby was given a media makeover. No longer “America’s beloved dad,” he was one of those hypocritical, sanctimonious phonies who, rather than practice what they preach, instead indulge themselves in what they sermonize against. But that characterization is a little bit wide of the mark.
Cosby was never really an evangelizing rightwinger type, even at the height of his caustic homilies for the homeys. He was a Democrat through and through and outspoken about it. His liberal proclivities prompted him at every opportunity to berate insidious influences he identified as “neo-conservative.” He publicly endorsed the presidential candidacies of Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, and Barack Obama (twice), and he campaigned throughout New York for Hillary Clinton’s successful U.S. Senate bid. He made generous donations to the Clinton Foundation. He denounced Republicans for not applauding a President Obama State of the Nation speech with sufficient enthusiasm, likening them to hard-core bigot segregationists of the old South.
As for Cosby’s social commentaries on African American sociology, there’s a better than even chance he fully believed them himself, that he had convinced himself of the truthfulness of his message. His preachments were hardly the sole cause of his undoing. But it’s difficult to dispute that they were the catalyst. At the very least, it might be said in his behalf, he played an unwitting role in bringing belated justice to those he preyed upon using his privileged status.
Cosby’s downfall is a tragedy in the classical Greek sense of the term. His own flawed, arrogant character led inexorably to his undoing. His saga also is a tragedy in discrediting a vital message Cosby imparted in a way that was sometimes ham-handed and overbearing.
At one point he scolded black mothers over names they confer on their babies. “We are not Africans,” he said.
He sneered at “names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammad and all that crap — and all of them are in jail.”
Unless he can stretch out an appeal to the end of his days, Bill Cosby very likely will be, too.