I Didn’t Realize I Needed to Talk about Bill Cosby

I had no idea how invested I was in the persona Bill Cosby built up for himself over the years, particularly during the years of The Bill Cosby Show. Watching We Need to Talk about Cosby, the brilliant 4-part documentary series by Kamau Bell now on Showtime, was a personal reckoning for me.

The series follows Bill Cosby’s career, paying attention at each stage to the major contributions he made in terms of advancing Black culture and opportunity. One story I had no knowledge of at all was that he was the first to insist on a Black stunt double, during his I, Spy years, which opened that role to Black people for the first time. Today it is crazy to think they were using white stunt doubles in black face, but there you have it. Cosby did the same in promoting Black folks behind the scenes in roles throughout the industry.

Running parallel to these stories — his contributions to education especially — is a timeline of women telling their stories of being given pills and alcohol and being raped by Bill Cosby. The stories we didn’t know, the man we didn’t know. Going all the way back to the beginning.

As a kid, I watched Fat Albert. For me personally, Saturday morning cartoons went on too long, and I was ready to move on by the time Fat Albert came on, around 11 am as I remember it. But my best friend Michael, who was Black and lived down the block, was not ready to go out until Fat Albert was over. So most Saturdays I watched it. And I liked it. We sang the theme song and would talk like Mushmouth: “I-buh-buh-buh don’t-buh-know-buh-buh buh.” Michael also had strong opinions about Captain America and other cartoons which I was indifferent to.

It wasn’t until episode three of Bell’s documentary, however, that I had to face what I was doing. Episode three is about The Bill Cosby Show. Like most of America, I loved that show. I loved everything about it. My brother was so much like Theo. My father had an extensive collection of Ray Charles albums, and we danced together in the living room when the dinner dishes were through. I wanted to see my family in that family and for that family to be my family.

I also felt privileged to be let in on this celebration of Black culture. I grew up in an interracial neighborhood where, starting in high school, my interactions with Black people diminished or significantly changed. I was in plays with them in a summer program at the local community college, but I did not go to parties with them. I worked with them at Ponderosa Steakhouse, but I did not see them socially. There was not a mix of Black and white students in my “honor’s” classes, although there was a mix in my school. The Bill Cosby Show was in some ways a vision of the promise of my middle-class, interracial neighborhood made good. And yes, I know the Huxtable experience was uncommon for Black families, was an elitist vision, but I adored it. In later years, homesick, I would watch the reruns in syndication.

And as the story of what was going on at the Cosby show(s) unfolded, I was devastated. I wanted to yell back, “No, no, no!” And I realized I’d been buffering myself through the first two episodes. I had been, in my way, making excuses. “Well, he was a stand-up comic and it was in hotels…. it is very seedy and bad, unforgivable really, but it took place in this sort of ‘second life’ he had.” It was Las Vegas and Reno. It was hotels. It was the ’60s and ’70s. Yes, he had a split reality — he is still claiming he didn’t do anything wrong! But the split was real, and he could maybe still be Bill Cosby as we knew him and a monster. I didn’t blame the victims and I 100% believed his actions were criminal. But all the while I was trying to preserve this piece of art, which was, as the documentary shows, consciously constructed to blur the line between Cliff Huxtable (and his family) and Bill Cosby (and his family), which was marketed and sold to us as the real Bill Cosby.

Bill Cosby was drugging and raping women in his “office,” in his dressing room, on set. Then he was walking out and greeting the live audience, and performing the show, America’s dad. It was a lie. It was a betrayal of all of us. He was a criminal. And people covered up for him, and his power and money but mostly our collective investment in the persona he had created was such, that the women couldn’t come forward and were left to deal with this violation and violence on their own.

It was just impossible for Bill Cosby to be a rapist. In our collective consciousness, it was impossible. Just like it is impossible for fathers, for grandfathers, for pastors and priests, for bosses, for our college friends, for trusted men whose trustworthiness is central to our own sense of ourselves to be violent predators and rapists.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and I kept the secret for fifteen years, until the principals were dead, because I wanted desperately to maintain the sense of myself as not being violated and the sense of the perpetrator, the rapist, as a beloved adult in my life. So I know how this works. And I understood how it worked on a specific and on a general level with Bill Cosby. Among the more powerful moments in the documentary are when two men who knew Cosby and worked with him closely said they just couldn’t believe the women until they heard accounts from women they knew. One heard the story from a woman who was not even one of the 63 who eventually came forward publicly. And then he had to choose between believing this woman or Bill Cosby, and he saw her pain and believed her.

I won’t be able to watch those reruns again. I thought I could separate the “art” and “artist,” but I can’t. Because he set us all up. He groomed us all. He blurred the line and now I know Cliff Huxtable was living a double life. He was upstairs with his family, and downstairs in his OB/GYN office, treating those places like they were on separate planets. In some ways, those sets did feel like they were on different planets, even watching the show. He disappeared through a door we never really noticed and reappeared in a doctor’s white coat. And knowing what went on in Bill Cosby’s office/dressing room, I can’t welcome the version who then shows up in the house. I won’t do it. And unlike those folks who are mad at the women for ruining our illusion, I am mad as hell at him for what he did, to the women of course, but also to me.