Will the black community support Bill Cosby the way they supported O.J. Simpson?
You may have noticed that Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable has his hands full right now. Numerous allegations that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted, drugged and raped women are either coming to light or resurfacing after years of being ignored and going under the radar.
The latest allegation comes from former supermodel Janice Dickinson, who claims the actor and comedian assaulted her in 1982, but she did not report the incident and kept it a secret.
This comes after Barbara Bowman wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about her accusations Cosby drugged and raped her. Bowman testified ten years ago as part of a lawsuit against Cosby in which 13 other women made similar claims against him.
That’s a lot of women who say he violated them, and his silence on the issue is a recent NPR interview made quite a bit of noise in the media, suggesting he has not come correct and needs to say something, anything, in light of the barrage.
And yet, some in the black community are increasingly coming to Cosby’s defense. Call it the O.J. effect. When the former NFL star O.J. Simpson was accused and tried for the murder of his ex-wife and her companion — both of whom were white — many black folks thought he was framed.
And they felt this way because of the historical context, of black men who were falsely accused of raping white women over the years.
The white fear of black bucks raping white women was present throughout slavery and Jim Crow segregation. And such allegations, typically fabricated, led to the lynching of black men from trees, if not imprisonment, and massacres of black communities in places such as Rosewood, Florida, and Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
That is not to say Bill Cosby is innocent. But it is an attempt to explain why some African-Americans will come to his defense and have done so already and why there is a growing divide over whether people believe he — like O.J. — did or did not do it.
Aside from the racial explanation for pro-Cosby support, there is also a gender factor. The allegations of these women are by no means new, and yet it took a joke from Hannibal Buress, a male comedian, for the allegations to resurface and reenter the public domain in a serious way.
CNN’s Don Lemon was lambasted in the Twitterverse for telling Cosby rape accuser Joan Tarshis there were ways she could have avoided being raped. “You know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn’t want to do it,” Lemon told Tarshis earlier this week.
Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg is supporting the comedian and coming to his defense, saying she has “a lot of questions,” particularly about why Bowman did not report the alleged incident to the police.
The resurfacing of the sexual allegations against Cosby comes at a time of increased public consciousness about sexual assault, especially on college campuses, and the sense that some may want to downplay the problem and sweep it under the rug.
For example, Lincoln University president Robert R. Jennings came under fire for lecturing an auditorium of women students about making false rape allegations and how that can ruin a young man’s life.
Jennings — who apologized for the remarks, which are now being investigated by the university — believed he was offering fatherly advice to these young women. Cosby has been known to offer fatherly advice to the black community for years, telling young black men to pull up their pants, instructing parents on how to raise their kids.
And reactions to his lecturing black people on personal responsibility reflect fault lines among African-Americans over political ideology and class. Cosby’s rhetoric of tough love speaks to a strain of black conservatism that has been longstanding and appealing to swaths of the community. Those who have appreciated his instruction to poorer black folks might be inclined to give him a pass and believe he did, or can do, no wrong.
Yet, those who have found his lectures condescending, demeaning and grumpy might be more inclined to believe he is guilty. They may also cite him for hypocrisy for airing black America’s dirty laundry while having personal failings, flaws and missteps of his own.
This brings us to the celebrity persona Bill Cosby has built over the years, as the face of Jell-O pudding, and as a solid family man, respected doctor and esteemed Hillman alum he portrayed on The Cosby Show. The Cosby Show spinoff about life on a black college campus, A Different World, entertained and impacted a younger generation of viewers. Plus, who can forget the lessons we learned about life and growing up from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, for all of the jive talk prominently featured in the old-school Saturday morning cartoon.
Adding to Cosby’s allure is not only his decision to position himself as an educator but his philanthropic support for institutions of higher learning. Bill and Camille Cosby are among the leading black philanthropists in the nation, with $20 million to Spelman College and $1.3 million to Fisk University, both HBCUs, and support to his alma mater Temple University in Philadelphia, of which he is a trustee. Certainly, all of these investments have earned Bill Cosby good will in the community and could influence their opinion of the man and the allegations hanging over his head.
In the meantime, the debate over Bill Cosby is not over and apparently not going away anytime soon.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove
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