The Tragedy of Bill Cosby

By the time The Cosby Show premiered in 1984, I was already a huge fan of Bill Cosby from his comedy albums. I don't remember when I was introduced to those records, but I remember that I had a cassette with some of his most famous bits so I might have been ten or eleven. The timing of my fandom doesn't matter; what matters is the fact that my parents saw Cosby as being "safe" for their young son.

There is a conversation (still ongoing) in our culture about what can and what can't be said, and it's an important conversation. What makes it important is that it revolves around a Great Truth. Neils Bohr is credited with saying, "The opposite of a truth is a lie; the opposite of a Great Truth is also true." Bill Cosby's side of that Great Truth - articulated by Eddie Murphy years later in this clip which is full of "filth, flarn, filth" - was informed by the point of view of a man who was deeply invested in educating and lifting up children.



It was Cosby's pedigree as an educator, and his attitude as a parent, and his aversion to "blue" language in his comedy that made my parents determine that it was safe for me, as their pre-teen son, to listen to his records and watch his TV show.

Of course, there were a lot of other things about Cosby and his show that made my parents feel safe. There was a minimum of what they might think of as activism in Cosby's world. There were plenty of those moments where Cosby's TV wife, Claire Huxtable, would give The Look to someone - but the targets were easy TV-villains. (And woe to the TV-villain who drew the Claire Huxtable side-eye!)

Claire Huxtable Phylicia Rashad GIF from Clairehuxtable GIFs

On the positive side of Cosby's ledger, his work and his "safeness" gave me an entry point to a lot of things I still love and appreciate; jazz, smart black women, and "safe" comedy about families. (I have to admit that I see a lot of Cosby's approach in the way I told the stories in my own book.)

Tragically, though, his conviction on sexual assualt charges last year throws a lot of cold water over the positive side of his legacy. While it would be a lie to say his crimes undo the good work he did over the years, it would be a Great Truth to point out that his story illustrates the flaw in the way we all approach the cultural conversation about what is and isn't "safe."

For me, the realization that Cosby wasn't perfect came years ago; and along with it came the realization that my family (myself included) treating him as "one of the good ones" was born out of the racism we did not want to admit to. In fact, the incident that precipitated that realization was the so-called "pound cake speech" he gave in 2004; the same year that the sexual assault Cosby was convicted of took place.

I'm not going to re-litigate the fallout from that speech here, but I came away from it with an understanding that the values that made this man seem "safe" to my white, middle-class family in the 1980s did not translate to the kind of respect and compassion that actually makes someone respectable. Finding out fifteen years later that the man giving that speech was drugging and raping women at the same time just drives home the point: we weren't judging him on the content of his character; we were judging him on his ability to perform his role as one of the good ones.

And of course, one of the good ones means one of us.
Just dwell for a minute on who "us" includes and why.
Which brings us back around to the conversation about what can and what can't be said.

Bill Cosby's old comedy routines still feel important and relevant to me, because, as a kid, I felt like they conveyed my father's humanity to me in a way that I might have otherwise missed. By the time I became a truly rebellious teenager, Cosby's caricatures of himself and of his own father had permeated my psyche, allowing me to realize that my father felt just as lost and clueless in the world as I did. We weren't adversaries when he was trying to steer me into adulthood - we were traveling companions, lost on the same road.

Cosby's "safeness," though, created a gateway from which I could understand the edgier, dirtier comedians, like Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. If you didn't watch the Eddie Murphy clip above, he does a pretty decent impersonation of both Cosby and Pryor, rather brilliantly highlighting (and mocking) his own style along the way. My parents would probably disapprove of my taking advantage of that gateway, but I learned some important things from comparing these three comedians.

Listening to Richard Pryor made me extremely uncomfortable--it still does. That didn't come from his frequent cursing or his absurd and psychedelic storytelling as much as it came from his approach to describing his own dark view of the world. The sublime discomfort I experienced hearing Richard Pryor forced me to use critical thinking to sort out why the things he was saying were the opposite of Great Truths. That habit of critical thinking made me more selective about Cosby's work than I had been, so by the time his tragic flaws came to light, I had already stopped viewing him as a heroic figure.

And I have to say that while listening to Eddie Murphy made me giggle...his work ultimately didn't hold any long term value for me. If anything demonstrates the emptiness of deriving cheap laughs from curse words, gross jokes, and debasing those around you (thinking of his "bush bitch" routine for one example), it's the career of Eddie Murphy.

So where does that put me in this great national conversation? I don't think it makes sense to tell anyone to simply stop talking. I look at the things that they say, and how the superficially "dirty" things are rarely as damaging or long-lasting as the underlying bad ideas. I look at how events have panned out (how heroes are built up and fall) and I also don't think it makes sense to keep repeating the bad ideas.

I guess the answer is to be open to listening, seek out a diversity of voices, be critical in how you deal with what you hear, and be flexible enough to allow that you will probably have to change your mind and admit you were wrong somewhere along the line.

Of course, after reading this, if you feel like you need a few minutes with a good comedian, I can recommend W. Kamau Bell - I can't guarantee he's "safe" for you, but he'll challenge you.

Now I Know Her Name

Her name was Ruby Bridges.

I didn't know her name when I was a kid, but I can't count how many times I saw the stock footage of her walking down the steps of that New Orleans schoolhouse when I was growing up.

found on the
Forum of the American Journal of Education

Being a white kid growing up in an almost all-white school in suburban Phoenix, I had no idea how to process what I saw in that clip. I really couldn't grasp the anger that would drive outwardly normal people to scream and threaten a school girl. Of course, I also struggled to understand why a kid would fight so hard to be allowed to go to school.

But as crass and as dumb as I was, the lesson still sank in: you, Tad, don't have to fight and struggle for what other people have to fight and struggle for. Years later, when the viral image illustrating the difference between "equality" and "equity" was circulating, I already understood that there was a third, unpictured frame in which the biggest kid is attacking the littlest kid and knocking him off his boxes.

I had seen that happening to Ruby Bridges.

Listening to Malcolm Gladwell tell the Revisionist History version of the story behind Brown vs. Board of Education, I realized for the first time that not only did the little girl in that footage take on a burden that I had never been asked to carry, but if we were wise, she wouldn't have had to carry it, either. When it came time to desegregate our schools, the teachers should have been first - not the students. Putting them through that ordeal would have still been awful, and it would have still been a powerful image to see public servants being attacked by that same crowd, but history demanded that a child suffer through the experience instead.

But now I know her name.

Ruby is featured on Card #45 of Vol. 2: Women, from Urban Intellectuals. awesome sets of educational Black History Flashcards.

Follow that link, and you can help arm educators with these tools, and support my writing on this blog.

Me and Levar Burton

When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, I was a happy boy.

My first contact with Trek had come when my parents took me to see the third movie, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock. That was an odd choice for an entry point, in retrospect, but they knew I was a Star Wars fanatic, and they figured (correctly) that I might enjoy the other significant science fiction franchise while waiting for the next Star Wars movie to come out. And since our local TV station played Star Trek and Twilight Zone reruns in syndication all the time, I was able to quickly catch up on the original series... sorry, The Original Series... stories I had been missing.

By the time the Enterprise 1701-D finished its first dance across my TV screen, I was pretty firmly hooked on the new show. Of course, I didn't quite know what to make of some of those characters. The bald French guy as captain was nothing like James T. Kirk, and I didn't know quite how I felt about that android. For some reason, among all of these new characters (the fish-out-of-water Klingon; the cold-fish security officer; the geeky kid from Stand By Me), the one that seemed hardest to accept was the guy from Reading Rainbow.

Considering the fact that I was a 15-year-old band geek/sci-fi misfit myself, it's hard to explain how I could scorn Levar Burton for coming across as a nerd, but there you go. To my teen-aged way of judging things, he was someone from a "baby show" on PBS that I only watched when I was sick. He read his lines with the same intensity he brought to reading Shel Silverstein, and because his costume design hid his eyes, it felt like he had to overact to make any impression on the audience.

It seems counter-intuitive now that I would have disliked him then, but I think that 15-year-old me was responding to seeing someone on the screen who reminded me of myself: someone earnest, and awkward, and deeply, deeply excited by the idea of taking a starship to another part of the galaxy. He made me uncomfortable, in part because I had been taught not to expect those things for myself, and I blamed him for that discomfort.

Life happened, though, and Star Trek and I went through a lot of changes over the years. The show got better and my tastes matured. By the time the finale aired in 1994, Geordi La Forge had become an essential part of what Star Trek was to me. In the years since, along with the TNG movies, I came to appreciate all of the other work Levar Burton had done.

The 15-year-old me who dismissed Reading Rainbow as a "baby show" couldn't have foreseen how profoundly grateful I would be to have Levar Burton read to my own babies. Back then, I was about ten years away from caring about genealogy and family history, and from being so profoundly moved by reading Alex Haley's Roots (the mini-series version of which starred one Levar Burton). And the miracle of podcasts had yet to deliver him reading grown-up stories to me in the car on my commute.

Looking back at ST:TNG from the context of our modern times, there are a lot of things that I know now that I didn't know then. I didn't know about the backlash against "political correctness" that would come; I didn't know that the show was criticized for its "forced diversity" back then. The few whispers of that kind of talk that I did hear seemed silly, and I took for granted that a flagship TV show on a start-up network would have two black actors in lead roles. I took for granted that seeing him listed as director on subsequent series was normal.

These days, I often hear people argue about representation - on TV, in fiction, in the STEM fields - and this is frequently framed as something that is only for people who belong to marginalized groups. As if the only people who benefit from seeing black people on TV are other black people. But I find that my own experience of seeing Levar Burton in Star Trek benefited me. Without him, I don't know that I would have had a role model as passionate about the things I love and as open about his passion for those things.

When my own kids grew old enough to be interested in watching Next Generation, I discovered something else that I hadn't recognized back in the early 1990s: Geordi La Forge was kind of a badass! And that Reading Rainbow nerd is planted firmly in my podcatcher, and I can't wait for the next season of Levar Burton Reads.

Who knew?

Badass Abolitionists

When I was a kid, I had the whole set of ValueTales books - a series that paired up historical figures with a cartoon sidekick and told their life story in a way that emphasized values, like "Determination" or "Respect."

The figure they chose to highlight the value of "Helping" was Harriet Tubman. If you don't already know her story, she was an escaped slave who became a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. After serving as a soldier, spy, cook, and nurse in the Union Army during the Civil War, she continued to fight for equal rights and for women's suffrage until her death in 1913.

Tubman, c. 1855
(Wikipedia)

Because I knew Harriet's story at an early age, I was proud and excited to learn about my own family's connection to the Underground Railroad - even though Great-Uncle George's farm was nowhere near where the famous "Moses" led her people out of the South.

Of course, I also noticed from an early age how wrong it sounded whenever someone would talk about Abraham Lincoln "giving the slaves their freedom." Nobody gave freedom to Harriet Tubman - she fought for it. As did thousands of others. Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas - enough amazing people to keep a blog like this going for centuries, if we wanted to tell every individual story.

The truth was that Lincoln himself was a reluctant late-comer when it came to the ending of slavery. And without the decades of hard work and resistance of people like Harriet Tubman, before and after his famous proclamation, who knows how long it would have been perpetuated?


Harriet Tubman is featured on Black History Flashcard #22, from Vol. 2: Women of Urban Intellectuals' series of educational flashcards. You can help support my writing AND the mission to give educators better tools for teaching kids about these important people from our history if you visit Urban Intellectuals and get a set (or four) of flashcards for yourself!

Vol. 2: Women also features Sojourner Truth (Flashcard #47) and 50 other amazing women of color. I'll be featuring more of my personal favorites during the month of February.

Me and Black History

In 1974, when I was barely two years old, my mother bought a record: the soundtrack to the motion picture The Sting. I grew up hearing that music, particularly the movie's theme song, The Entertainer, by Scott Joplin. I would argue that with the possible exception of B.J. Thomas's Oscar-winning recording of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head* (from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), The Entertainer was my "first song."

When you're a kid, you don't know how significant the things in your life really are, because to a kid, every new thing is significant. I didn't know that my foundational musical experiences were being shaped by Paul Newman/Robert Redford buddy-movie soundtracks. I just knew I liked these songs, and it made my mom happy when I sang them and tried to play them on a plastic toy guitar.

As I grew up, of course, I learned what "ragtime" was. I began to study music and the history of music, and of course, I picked up on the ways the music I loved most was based on traditions and ideas that came from black people. I remember learning about the ways that black musicians - particularly blues musicians - found their music being borrowed, "sanitized," and turned into the multi-billion-dollar juggernaut that is Rock-n-Roll without getting anywhere near the recognition or financial reward that their white imitators got. I suppose that pattern came up often enough that when people talked about ragtime and the music of Scott Joplin, I just assumed that his was that same kind of story.

Since his music was associated in my mind with Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and B.J. Thomas, it was easy for me to assume that Scott Joplin had taken black music and popularized it, as others have done time and again. It just never occurred to be to be curious about who Scott Joplin was or what his story was, because his name and his music had been in my head for as long as language and memory could take root.

So last year, when the subject of Ragtime came up in my History of Music in the U.S. class, it was an odd sort of shock to see a picture of Scott Joplin for the first time:

Until I was in my forties, I did not know that Scott Joplin was black.

Knowing this changes nothing about how I feel about the music. In a world that was as egalitarian and democratic as ours claims to be, this demographic note would probably not register as an important detail. But for me, the fact that I made it through more than forty-five years without knowing this plain fact about one of the first composers I was exposed to was a revelation about representation and visibility.

The concept of erasure - or, as the New York Times Magazine defines it, "the practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible" - is something I've always been half-aware of. It's that indifference that keeps people from speaking up when some guy at a party claims that the reason there aren't more female comedians is because women aren't funny. It's that indifference that allows an elected official who thinks that only white people should be credited with the success of Western civilization to be re-elected.

Countering that kind of claim is not hard to do, assuming you have the least amount of curiosity in the subject being spouted off about. If someone tried to claim that black people have made no contribution to Western Culture it wouldn't be hard for me to poke huge holes in that claim even without citing Scott Joplin, but it says something about the larger trend of our cultural experience that even someone like me - a very curious person with a history of scholarly inquiry into these matters - can fall victim to that collective indifference.

The shock I felt upon learning Joplin's ethnicity came from realizing that I had been so incurious about Scott Joplin, I effectively rendered one of my earliest cultural influences invisible. I want to reverse that trend.

To that end, I've planned out a small series of posts like this one that will talk about specific people from marginalized groups who have been important to me, personally. I'm launching this during Black History Month because this past holiday break was the first time I had a chance to work on this, and this seemed like the kind of thing that Black History Month was created for! (I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the tradition is about the same age as me.)

Some of these stories will be about people who, like Scott Joplin, affected me in my childhood; some will be about people I've only discovered because I'm actively seeking them out now. Some will be heroes, some will be villains, and some will be people I don't like. (The Venn diagram of those three groups may be different for you than they are for me.)

My agenda here is not to call anyone out or make anyone feel bad about not knowing these things. Quite the opposite: it's to show how flawed I am, and to make a public attempt to address the flaws.

More than anything else, my hope is to introduce you to something that gives me joy - the joy of being curious.