The Legacy of Bill Cosby

The Legacy of Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby may be the reason I understand how people can maintain historical heros in the face of history. This is probably more true for artists, whose sins from our perspective seem easier to forgive. I don’t know how much Cosby meant to black people. From what I remember towards the end of the Cosby Show run he seemed to have more than his fair share of detractors. But I know what he meant to me.

This is certainly my earliest memories of Bill Cosby, watching the Picture Pages segment on Captain Kangaroo.

He had a kind of warmth and gentleness in the way he interacted with children, like a black Mr. Rogers. Before the Cosby Show he was known for that kind of programming, and were it not for his trial and sentencing he likely would have received, and deserved, several lifetime achievement awards for his work in children’s programming alone. He was truly one of the greats.

Fat Albert was one of my faves growing up. We still watch the Halloween and Christmas specials on YouTube as a family to this day. And I think one of the things I appreciate most about it is how the kids, based I suppose on Bill Cosby’s real life friends, were so unmistakably, unapologetically, and un-selfconsciously black. In a way that would get them taken off the cereal box if they existed as a corporate mascot today. The characters, and maybe more so the animators, didn’t try to hide the blackness of these kids. They gave life to it. And in a weird, maybe paradoxical way, that authenticity made them easier to relate to for me. It opened a little window into the world of people whose lives and experiences were so different from my own, but who nevertheless dealt with most of the same stuff. And guiding you through it all was Bill Cosby appearing in live action as himself, giving you solid fatherly advice about what could sometimes be, in typical 70s/80s fashion, serious traumatic shit.

I can’t say I was a huge fan of The Cosby Show, though I did of course watch it regularly. There was nothing special about that, you watched a lot of stuff back in those days just because it was on and because everybody else watched it. I do remember it as presenting at the time a different picture of black families than I’d ever seen on television before. It wasn’t out of character for what I felt I knew about Bill Cosby — the show seemed to fit his character, his persona, exactly. But I was used to Good Times and Sanford and Son and What’s Happening, and those were all considered positive portrayals of black people. But what Cosby did was different, by putting blacks not just on a level with how whites were portrayed on television, but actually above the average daily lived experience of any white people I knew. And not just in a material sense, but in a moral, intellectual, and cultural sense as well. The show acted as an ambassador for a more refined black culture that had been maturing for decades, the luminaries of which he often featured on the show and knew personally. And I can’t discount the possibility that the Cosby Show may have influenced my taste for jazz in later years, as stupid as that sounds. One, perhaps, of several factors, but it does come to mind, in the same way that Bugs Bunny influenced my taste for classical music in my late teens.

So what are we to make of his crimes? I don’t have an answer for that. Absolutely there are theoretical things he could have done that would make me feel differently about him. I’m not sure what that says about me, exactly, or the weight I place on what he was actually charged with, but it’s true enough. I do think things like this are incredibly creepy in retrospect, though.

People are complicated, and oftimes disappointing. And sometimes they have a dark side. But does that invalidate all the good they did in their lives? It might. In this case, I don’t know. And I suppose, I don’t really want to know. I want to live in that world of Fat Albert and his life lessons.