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Cosby’s conviction proves a misogynist in a bow tie is still a misogynist
He used class as a shield and projected his worst qualities onto poor black people
12:30 PMBill Cosby’s self-righteous moralizing finally did him in.
In 2009, some five years after he’d delivered his now-notorious “Pound Cake Speech,” Cosby released a rap album: Bill Cosby Presents the Cosnarati: State of Emergency. The purpose of the album was, in Cosby’s words, to “tackle such social issues as self-respect, peer pressure, abuse and education … that doesn’t rely on profanity, misogyny, materialism or ego exercise.” “Pound Cake” with a backbeat, if you will.
Well looky here: Kendrick Lamar has a Pulitzer Prize and Bill Cosby will soon have a prison sentence. At this point (Drake beef notwithstanding), Meek Mill is more of a hero in Philadelphia than Cosby is.
Cosby, who was convicted Thursday of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004, had long been guilty of shaming black people. Especially poor black people, and especially those darn hip-hoppers, with their cursing and their insistence on using the N-word and their baggy pants and their drug-dealing and their hatred of women. To Cosby, this culture was the real problem with black people, not mass incarceration, or racist policing, or discrimination in housing and education, or racist discrepancies in prison sentencing, or the drug war.
No, it was black people not taking enough personal responsibility.
“Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola,” Cosby said in 2004. “People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.’ Not ‘You’re going to get your butt kicked.’ No. ‘You’re going to embarrass your family.’ ”
Slipping Quaaludes into women’s drinks is totes better than slinging crack on the corner, right?
His conviction came in part because, in 2015, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno unsealed a 2005 deposition from the civil suit Constand filed against Cosby. The judge’s reasoning? Cosby “has donned the mantle of public moralist and mounted the proverbial electronic or print soap box to volunteer his views on, among other things, child rearing, family life, education and crime. To the extent that defendant has freely entered the public square and ‘thrust himself into the vortex of [these public issues],’ he has voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim.”
Or, in the far less legalistic words of comedian Hannibal Buress: “Bill Cosby has the f—ing smuggest old black man persona that I hate. He gets on TV: ‘Pull your pants up, black people! I was on TV in the ’80s! I can talk down to you ’cause I had a successful sitcom!’ ”
The conviction came after approximately 60 women had publicly accused Cosby of sexual abuse that spanned decades. It was Constand whose case could be heard, though, because it was one of the few that remained within the statute of limitations. And so this case was not just about her.
It was clear from the way he refused to entertain the questions about the sexual assault allegations against him from an Associated Press reporter in 2014: “No, no. We don’t answer that,” he said, as though the reporter’s question was some gross violation of politesse. Cosby thought he’d ascended to the point that he could rely on the shield of aristocracy: that outward dignity and gentility was — and, perhaps more significantly, should be — enough to deflect attention from internal ugliness. After all, it worked for the Kennedys — just ask Mary Jo Kopechne. Oh wait, we can’t.
At some point, we must acknowledge that the ideas that informed Cosby’s black conservatism and attendant hypocrisy are what uphold a culture of silence around rape and sexual assault on historically black college and university (HBCU) campuses such as Morehouse and Spelman (where Cosby donated so much money he funded a professorship and put his wife’s name on a building). Cosby condescended to poor black people and advanced the idea that higher education — and the education in class and decorum that presumably accompanied it, especially at HBCUs — was the answer to black people’s problems. He never understood that a misogynist in a bow tie is still a misogynist.
When we debated whether it was appropriate for the Smithsonian Institution to display Cosby’s art collection in the National Museum of African Art, what we were really debating was whether it was ethical for an institution to be complicit in upholding this aristocratic contract. That’s why it was significant when colleges and universities began rescinding their honorary degrees and removing Cosby’s name from their edifices. This wasn’t about erasing a man or a legacy. It was about clawing back the cloak of legitimacy he’d used not only to denigrate poor black people but also to win the trust of so many of his victims. After all, Constand met Cosby when she was director of women’s basketball operations at Temple University and Cosby was one of its favored sons.
Cosby is hardly the only self-styled race man with a woman problem. See also: Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and pre-MAGA Kanye West (yes, that would be the same Kanye who tweeted, “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” in 2016.)
This week, a different sort of survivor came forward. In an interview with Hollywood Unlocked, singer Kelis alleged that her former husband, Nas, the same man who wrote “I Can,” had been physically and emotionally abusive. For decades, Cosby has been trying, with varying degrees of success, to suggest that misogyny is a problem of less educated, less well-mannered black people. Well guess what, Bill, now you’re in the same boat as R. Kelly and a host of other abusers you’d prefer to sniff at. Happy paddling.
Cosby’s conviction offers some measure of vindication for the five dozen women who have accused him of drugging and/or sexually assaulting them. Finally, a woman got to tell her story to a jury. And finally, she was believed.
But I’m hoping that this week delivers another lesson too. True justice and equality do not mean that wealthy men of color get to behave with the same cavalier disregard for women as their wealthy white counterparts do. True equality is when all abusers, regardless of race, are held to account for their actions and they’re no longer allowed to use class as a shield.