How, my students wondered, was it possible for such incendiary material to be both public and simultaneously hidden from view, as Tom Scocca put it earlier this year, “something walled off from our collective understanding of Bill Cosby”?
This spring, I taught a graduate seminar on magazine feature writing. One of the assignments was Robert Huber’s 2006 Philadelphia Magazine story, “Dr. Huxtable & Mr. Hyde,” a thorough run-down of several rape allegations against Bill Cosby, interwoven with the various charges Cosby himself was leveling at black communities across the nation.
Almost none of my students, a racially diverse group of women and men in their twenties and thirties, had ever heard about the sexual assault charges and only a few knew that Cosby had spent recent years trading in respectability politics, telling poor black audiences that their behaviors and culture—as opposed to systemic racism or structurally enforced inequality of opportunity—were to blame for the challenges they face. My students didn’t know any of this, despite the fact that both these stories had repeatedly been told in depth, and not just in the story I’d assigned them.
Over the course of the past decade, charges that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted more than a dozen women have been reported in plenty of splashy venues: in Newsweek and Gawker, on-camera on “The Today Show” in 2005; in People magazine in 2006. During the same years, esteemed journalists including Kevin Merida and Ta-Nehisi Coates have dissected the racial messages that Cosby has been delivering around the country. Scholar Michael Eric Dyson even wrote a book about it.
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