How ‘The Cosby Show’ Fooled America: The Sitcom That Reveals Our Ugliest Reagan-Era Fantasies
As a child, I loved eating dinner in the kitchen, sitting alone at the family table and watching monster movies, “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “The Cosby Show.” .” My mother often washed the dishes, leaning against the air conditioner on humid summer days; our dog, a black-and-white mutt, would lie on the linoleum floor, waiting intently to see which one of them was one of the first evenings, when I had finished my homework, before going back to playing Nintendo, I was shouting about the wonders of “The Cosby Show”, that Huxtables were America’s greatest family, everyone should have a father like Bill Cosby.
My mother threw the dog a piece of bread and pulled up the sleeves of her winter coat to keep from catching fire in the oven, poured tea and threw a few verbal darts. “You don’t have to look at TV to find a role model or a father figure. He is here, in this house, right now.”
I remembered that moment the other day when I saw on the news that Cosby had admitted in a previously sealed trial to drugging women to rape them. It’s very possible that Cosby is a serial sex offender. Thus, the public scolding of the black ghetto underclass may in fact commit worse “crimes” than wearing low-cut pants or giving their children names that reflect their inferiority. There is an unfortunate lack of economic and social capital. As Salon’s own Brittney Cooper explained, much of the Anger at Bill Cosby stems from the fact that he betrayed the special trust that Black Americans placed in him. His most notable enterprise, “The Cosby Show,” is a shining example of upward mobility, dignity and a well-functioning black family. Now Cosby’s legacy has been called into question.
Americans on both sides of the color line were upset by Cosby’s behavior not only because of the horrific nature of his crimes but also because his failures robbed people of their innocence and positivity. the youth of many of them. Forgetting childhood nostalgia is one of the most painful parts of becoming (and remaining) an adult. But perhaps the focus should now be on the origins of that nostalgia, and how the politics and value of “The Cosby Show,” which was so appealing to so many people and for so long as such, relies on a distorted and inaccurate representation of the black community, a community that has allowed a dangerous type of right-wing “colorblind” racism to flourish.
Television provides a distorted image of reality. It—and other types of mass media—are the primary means through which the public can understand unrealistic and misleading images of human social relationships. Family films and sitcoms are both good examples of this phenomenon.
“The Cosby Show” follows the struggles and daily experiences of a wealthy New York black family called the Huxtables. Cosby’s father is a successful obstetrician, and his wife, Claire, is a partner at a law firm. They have one son and four daughters. They come from a long line of successful African Americans who have graduated from historically black colleges. The show was a response to the white imagination, which largely viewed black and brown Americans as poor, as members of the lower class, as criminals, or as beaten down by racism – and therefore lack autonomy, freedom or upward mobility.
In many ways, “The Cosby Show” was a counter-report to the “Moynihan Report”—a misunderstood and distorted exploration of “black ghetto poverty” and “disintegration The breakdown of the black family” was written by the Department of Labor in the 1960s. “The Cosby Show” is also a rebuttal to television producer Norman Lear’s famous shows in the 70s — “Good Times ,” “Sanford and Son,” and “The Jeffersons” — where the humanity and suffering of black people living in poverty ( and escaping such conditions) are the main themes.
Popular culture is inherently political and ideological. While its depiction of a wealthy and “well-functioning” black family may seem transgressive on the surface, “The Cosby Show” conveys a specific understanding of race, capitalism, “success” and “middle class” identities often do not reinforce dominant American cultural norms. and the rules are essentially consistent with the Horatio Alger legend; it offers viewers a kind of harmless “diversity” in which blackness and the “black experience” are softened into an immediate reference to the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or the fight to end racism, or simply guest appearances for musicians,
s a tumultuous time of protest activity, anti-black and brown police harassment, extensive and killings, tensions between African-Americans and Koreans, anxieties about black “super predators,” “wilding,” the Central Park Five, the Crown Heights riots, and the racist murders and assaults on black youth by white racists in the neighborhood of Howard Beach.
In that context, consider the following:
