The persons “we” choose to believe, the persons we don’t… Jelani Cobb, in the New Yorker:
Two weeks ago, Anita Hill, following an address that she delivered to a packed auditorium at the University of Connecticut, was asked how it made her feel to know that, despite her testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, a solid majority of African-Americans still supported his confirmation. She dodged for a moment and then pointed out what she saw as one of the most egregious elements of the entire affair: Thomas’s deployment of the language of lynching to discredit her claims. The debacle of Thomas’s hearing—already suffused with stereotypes of black male sexuality and with questioning that teetered among sexism, voyeurism, and the kind of disingenuous tokenism that led to Thomas’s nomination in the first place—did not reach its nadir until the embattled nominee declared the proceedings a “hi-tech lynching.” Twenty-three years later, we know better than to be bamboozled so willingly by a powerful black man claiming racism, or at least we believe we do. Yet nothing better illustrates the enduring morass in these matters than the case of Bill Cosby…
For the past decade, Cosby has operated less as a comedian or a product pitchman than as a freelance scold of the black poor. The vitriol he heaped upon the perceived moral failures of the black underclass meshed with his role as television’s iconic father figure… Cosby eventually came to be seen, and adored, as the embodiment of black dignity, a walking refutation of the worst ideas about us. The benefits were not merely symbolic. His twenty-million-dollar gift to Spelman College, still the largest sum any African-American has bestowed upon a historically black college, was an example of self-help on an epic scale. For the first ten years of my career as a professor, I taught at Spelman on the top floor of Cosby Hall, a building named for his wife, Camille…
… For nearly fifty years now, Cosby has been selling us a vision of America as a place where a man like him—ostensibly benign, successful, unencumbered by the shackles of history—could exist…
Late Night Open Thread: “What Shielded Bill Cosby?”Post + Comments (36)