Saturday, September 13, 2014

Can fathers tell the truth?

In a famous exchange from the pilot episode of The Cosby Show,
Theo, the recalcitrant teen-age son, earnestly explained his poor grades by telling Cliff that he just wanted to be a “regular person” with a “regular life”—not a doctor or a lawyer. “Maybe you can just accept who I am and love me anyway, because I’m your son,” he said. Cosby waited for the studio audience to stop applauding before responding. “Theo,” he began, softly. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” This was a reprimand delivered both to Theo and to the audience, and Whitaker describes how the audience members reacted: “They hooted and hollered and jumped to their feet to give him a standing ovation. The applause was thunderous, and it went on for several minutes.” They liked knowing that Cliff was in charge—and that Cosby was, too.

Kelefa Sanneh points out that The Cosby Show brought us
the ideal of black self-sufficiency—the notion that, with enough time and effort, African-Americans could build their own communities, fix their own problems. Depending on the emphasis, this can seem like either a very conservative dream or a very radical one, and both interpretations help explain why “The Cosby Show” made some racial liberals uncomfortable.

Cosby’s anguish and anger found expression in 2004, in a monologue that he delivered during an N.A.A.C.P. banquet held to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. It became known as the “pound cake” speech, because of its shocking central anecdote, which portrayed the hypothetical killing of an unarmed young black man in a skeptical light:

These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. 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.”

Cosby’s comedy is a celebration of the inevitable. The birth of a baby, the rebellion of a teen-ager, the irritation of a spouse: these are things to be endured and, if at all possible, enjoyed. But with the “pound cake” affair Cosby was calling for change, for a black cultural revolution, and in the process he inadvertently proved just how little influence he had, even—or especially—among African-Americans. For many who had been following his career, the dream of Cosby as the nation’s wise paterfamilias began to fade in 1989, when he gave a startling interview to the Los Angeles Times in which he discussed his daughter Erinn, then twenty-three, whose time at a drug-rehabilitation clinic had recently been uncovered by the National Enquirer. The news of her struggles was surely less damaging than Cosby’s intemperate reaction: he described her as “really very selfish,” adding that she “uses her boyfriends” and that she had the emotional maturity of an eleven-year-old.

What? Fathers can't tell the truth?

Sanneh chronicles Cosby's career and some aspects of his personal life that I did not know. Read the whole thing here.

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