About a year before the pandemic entered the chat, I got an invitation to participate in a documentary. The email from the director, W. Kamau Bell, started along the lines of, “I totally understand if you do not want to do this.” I was intrigued.
Bell was hedging because of his subject matter. The documentary would be about Bill Cosby. At the time, Cosby was serving time in prison for the 2005 sexual assault of Andrea Constand, one of more than 60 women who have accused him of drugging, assaulting or harassing them over several decades.
I could guess why Bell asked me to participate. I have written about race, gender and sexual predation in Black women’s intimate lives. I had also written about race and sexual predation in public discourse as viewed through the infamous R. Kelly saga. I also knew why Bell gave me an out. I am a Black female academic and public intellectual who grew up on “Picture Pages,” “Fat Albert,” “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World.” For professional reasons, it could be dangerous to talk openly about Bill Cosby’s fall from grace. For personal reasons, it could be hard to talk about losing a formative cultural icon.
Those were also exactly the reasons I agreed to talk to Bell about Bill Cosby.
The documentary, “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” premiered at Sundance on Jan. 30. The four-part series airs on Showtime. The day before the premiere, I invited some close friends and family to watch the first two episodes. We gathered around the screen in the living room, some on the couch and others on chairs dragged in from around the house. We balanced plates and cups on our knees.
I sat just off the back of the crowd — my favored spot in any room — and it hit me that the room looked very much like a Thursday night in the 1980s in millions of homes across America. That is when, at 8 p.m., the world seemed to stand still for 30 minutes as Cliff and Clair Huxtable and their brood of kids were beamed into our homes.
“The Cosby Show” was a cultural landmark. There was not a lot of regular Black family programming on television in the 1980s. Certainly nothing like the lineup there is today. Kenya Barris’s “black-ish” is a bona fide hit (and very much indebted to the “Cosby Show” legacy). But you can also watch a Black family fight over a winery on “The Kings of Napa”; a Black family music dynasty on “Empire”; and a multigenerational Black Southern family on “Queen Sugar.” And those are just the scripted dramas on TV. Streaming platforms also open up a whole other world of Black-led dramas, comedies and reality programming.
“The Cosby Show” was also a cross-cultural smash hit. This particular Black family captured so many people’s imaginations. As the documentary points out, the highest-rated episode of the show drew in 65 million viewers — a quarter of the American population at the time. Jamilah King, an editor at BuzzFeed News, compares this with 2019’s biggest show, “The Big Bang Theory,” which at its height drew only 25 million.
But “The Cosby Show” was not just huge. It was singular.
I have thought a lot about why the show was singular. There are the creative reasons. The show is good television. It took all of the characteristics of a sitcom that make us feel warm and elevated them. It did that through great writing and the most important ingredient of a successful sitcom, which is amazing characters. The show’s characters subverted many sitcom tropes, like the stern but loving father and the wife who was somehow both a stay-at-home mom and a career woman, merely by being Black. As a result, “The Cosby Show” felt wholesome and subversive at the same time.
The show was also singular to Black audiences for other reasons. When it began airing in the 1980s, the civil rights movement felt like a fuzzy memory for a lot of the Black people in my orbit. Social progress had given way to a white conservative backlash (not unlike the one we are seeing today). The social institutions that had held together Black communities felt vulnerable. The quest for economic mobility replaced strong churches and community groups in Black people’s everyday lives. The go-go ’80s were not just a white America phenomenon. I met my first serious Black Republican in the 1980s. I remember him going on about how “The Cosby Show” was the template for Black progress.
“The Cosby Show,” though, was not just a template. It was also a fictional social space for Black people who were losing their real-life communities. In urban communities, the war on drugs ended up being a war on people that broke apart the civil bonds of Black life. As “The Cosby Show” eased into the 1990s, Black cities like the District of Columbia (often called Chocolate Cities) were so hostile to real Black families that many started migrating to suburbs. That migration came at a cost. You lose ties to the churches, social groups, playgrounds and kin networks that hand down traditions and provide identity guardrails.
On Thursday nights, “The Cosby Show” became the after-church social for millions of Black families cut adrift from their social institutions. It is where a whole generation of Black kids — especially middle class and aspirational — learned some of the rules of being Black. Where white audiences often heard punch lines, we heard callouts to our culture.
A joke about “taking you out of this world” or a guest appearance by Dizzy Gillespie was coded language that millions of Black American families understood. It said to us: “Do not let these degrees and money fool you. We come by way of Southern roots and Black social institutions. We see you.”
When the allegations about Bill Cosby broke from the not-so-secret undercurrent and into the mainstream conversation in the early 2000s, Cosby had built a deep well of good will. It was intergenerational as well as interracial. And for Black Americans, it was almost religious.
Bell honors that good will. This is what I needed to say about Bill Cosby: We were not foolish to enjoy “The Cosby Show” or to need what Bill Cosby was selling. Even if you did not live in Compton or New York or Chicago in the 1980s, the racist tropes used to legitimatize the war on drugs affected all Black Americans. We were not wrong to look for progress in culture as economic progress stalled and declined.
We were only human. What we wanted from Bill Cosby is what a child wants from a parent: an illusion of security. But as the Bible says, there is a time for putting away childish things. Bill Cosby’s carefully cultivated facade was always as much about what we needed from him as it was about anything he created for us. Adults have to face reality.
“We Need to Talk About Cosby” is a moment to start dealing with that reality. “America’s Dad” was a fiction. A lot of women paid a price for our believing in it. It is never too late to say that the price was too high.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.
