Listening and Speaking Up

Last week, one of my favorite rappers, Joey Bada$$, joined the ranks of other celebrities by coming to the aid of the disgraced Bill Cosby on his Twitter. Throughout his admittedly engaging lecture about his journey through the music industry, I could not help but wonder how he reconciles his positions on positivity and community uplift with his stance of the Cosby case. While Joey stops short of declaring Cosby innocent as Kanye West did, Joey equally fails to see the real issue at hand in the Cosby case. Put plainly, the way the media chooses to cover the Cosby case in no way absolves him of his actions and most certainly does not warrant the black community or any other to come to his aid.

In many ways, I fully understand the desire to defend Bill Cosby at all costs, especially for members of the black community. Few celebrities have played as pivotal a role in shaping black culture as Bill Cosby. At a time when the black community had little, if any, hope of seeing people that looked like them on TV, Cosby gave the entire world a window into the black community. Arguably for the first time in history, a show featured a predominately black cast in a sitcom that wasn’t explicitly about blackness. The Cosbys were unapologetically black, as every lip sync performance of Ray Charles and James Brown classics captures. But that was only part of the show rather than the central focus, showing that black people had regular families with normal problems and everyday triumphs.

For those that have so many fond memories of the show, abandoning Cosby tarnishes everything the show did for us. Sure, the impact of the show remains. Without it, there likely would never have been a “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” or “Family Matters,” all shows critically important to me in my adolescence. But personally, I can’t re-watch those videos now without wondering whether Cosby attacked a woman immediately following the filming of the scene.

Admittedly, some of this has to do with his own stance on the state and faults of the black community. In his later years, Cosby continually levels a critique of the black community steeped in respectability politics. Focusing on sagging pants and poor parenting, Cosby fails to acknowledge the true causes of the plight of the black community. At no point did this line of logic seem compelling in light of the numerous institutional barriers to success for the black community, but now it rings even more hollow. The entire premise of his argument rested upon the assumption that he held the moral high ground in every part of his life, the Platonic form of the family man. A man accused—and probably guilty—of perpetrating scores of rapes and sexual assaults has less than zero ground to complain about how black men wear their pants.

Despite exhaustion and mental strain, Kanye does not get a pass for proclaiming Cosby’s innocence. Similarly, when someone like Joey says the media has brainwashed us, implying his own innocence, I cringe. Searching for Cosby’s innocence in light of stories from over 50 women not only makes little sense but, more importantly, devalues the voice of women everywhere. For every Rolling Stone cover story, there are multiple women ignored by the powers that be because there is little physical evidence, their skirt was too short, or any number of other horror story scenarios.

The black community has every right to question how the media portrays our people, especially in the news. Regular character assassination of slain, unarmed black men has made the black community rightfully wary of the motives of the media.

But Cosby’s case is in no way a media issue. It is not character assassination. We are watching the public unreasonably slowly come to terms with the dark reality of a formerly beloved public figure. In reality, placing the blame on the media or the omnipresent “They” rather than simply considering the preponderance of evidence against Cosby is much closer to character assassination.

Cosby is still worthy of the Constitutional protection of presumed innocence until a jury of his peers convicts him for his transgressions. However, his legal protections do not come with comparable moral protections. At this point, claims of some grand conspiracy against this fallen hero sound more like the first topic of discussion at the semi-annual Illuminati meeting. When someone brings up Bill Cosby, taking a wait-and-see attitude is the same as saying Darren Wilson is innocent because a grand jury failed to indict him. When scores of women share similar stories of abuse, attack, and subsequent erasure, we need to listen to their stories and accept reality.

Jaime A. Cobham ’17, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.