Mrs. Cosby Correct In Faulting Biased Media Treatment of Blacks

Bill Cosby’s friends and public defenders at the major media outlets are numbered few and far between. In fact, they are nowhere to be found.

In the meantime, many high profile African Americans have weighed in on the media’s treatment of Bill Cosby. They include some serious, credible people like Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Vereen and, most recently, Phylicia Rashad — his wife on television for more than a decade — who expressed her full support for him as he confronts accusations of sexual abuse made by white women who may have been friends with Bill Cosby in the past.

When did these sexual abuses occur? Some thirty years ago or so they claim. And why is this a scandal?

Even if we cared to impugn the integrity of these women, the concomitant Cosby bashing in the media which is happening at the back of their spurious allegations is more than enough to put us on edge about the integrity of these women. Further, the special disregard for common law statutes, which puts a limit on the amount of time available to accusers to continue harassing a defendant, accorded these women in discussions about Cosby now borders on profanity.

This media behavior is not new.

In this case, it seems rather odd and counterproductive when people, who know all too well that these accusations can only damage Bill Cosby’s character since such a case would never be allowed in court and the defendant would never have his chance to clear his name, continue in a bid to draw confrontation with Bill Cosby and his family. That these women are only intent on defaming the Cosbys and will continue in their media harassment of Bill Cosby is not farfetched.

It has been aided, supported and provoked. What’s in it for them?

It is unbelievable that any man with a reputation for such evil, as Bill Cosby has been branded by the popular white media, would with conscious awareness, only sexually abuse women he knows are only capable of waking up and vividly recalling events at least some thirty years later.

How did he choose his victims? What dose and what chemical for brain alteration has Bill Cosby cooked up without the express knowledge of the entire scientific community? Thirty years of complete amnesia and a rude awakening sounds more like a conspiracy if you asked any sane person.

The reason that the statute of limitations are important is exactly because of this. It is not called common law to look fancy, it is especially to prevent harassers from accusing innocent people in perpetuity. The statute of limitations on all of Cosby’s accusers so far have rather conveniently amply passed.

But white media will not let sleeping dogs lie.

Baring common sense, let’s delve into the absurdity of the media’s claims. If these white women now accusing Bill Cosby had any iota of credibility at all, it still begs the question that many in the Black community now wonder, ‘what could have discouraged them from filing claims right after the alleged crimes?’

They are white women for god’s sakes. During Jim Crow, a Black man needed only to look in their direction to be lynched in broad day light amidst packed jubilation, while white men raped and abused Black women at will. Times haven’t changed much since then.

So, many African Americans still ask, ‘what could have discouraged them from filing claims right after these alleged crimes against the “holy virgin Marys”?’

Critics of Bill Cosby on the one hand insist on litigation no matter what the statute of limitations stipulate. They are calling for Bill Cosby’s head to roll down the guillotine. Only, such a call brings to the fore events that occurred so far in the past that witnesses, and the white women themselves, could not be counted upon to tell the truth. How are they to remember what happened some thirty years ago when they couldn’t remember it just ten years ago? How can we rely on any evidence?

Whatever the case the harm to Bill Cosby and his wife are complete. White media, like it has always done, seems to have found a way to do away with Bill Cosby too.

But we told him. We warned him bitterly. Mrs. Cosby did warn her husband that the people he was pandering to by insulting the integrity and work ethic of young Black men in his speeches across the country, would soon turn on him!

And they did, like they always do when you look in that god forsaken direction!

Bill Cosby, like the many Black men before him, is being prepared to be lynched before a packed and jubilant white media circus in full attendance.

The greatest harm to Bill Cosby until such a time arrives is that he now lives a life full of a perpetual fear of a lawsuit where new potential accusers, or any white woman he’s ever known for that matter, may rise from the dust at the beck and call of the bloody racist media that has called for his head.

Until then the statutes of limitations is what is holding him and his family together. For now.

So, as we continue to dirty our fingers in the well-funded media character assignation of Bill Cosby with vivid discussions of how he, a Black man, could have dragged several white women into his lair some thirty years ago, chemically altering their brain functions first of course, with hideous pollutants, tearing off their clothes while salivating over their angelic virgin bodies and impressing his Big Black Body on them, we do it knowing all too well that no court has a jurisdiction to file any one of those allegations as cases.

And Bill Cosby cannot have a chance to clear his name neither. So why start the fuss in the first place?

In an online interview on Jan. 6, Ms. Rashad, Bill Cosby’s TV wife, made a point of mentioning that her faith in Mr. Cosby was bolstered by the unflinching loyalty of his actual wife, Camille O. Cosby.

“This is a tough woman, a smart woman,” she said. “She’s no pushover.”

As Mr. Cosby continued his comedy tour last weekend in Colorado and California, he has begun to amass many important character witnesses, including his wife, plus a whole lot more hitherto laissez-faire fans like myself who have now quickly become awoken to the fully-funded white media avalanche of a character-assassination storming in Bill Cosby’s direction for absolutely no law enforcement reason.

When Mrs. Cosby spoke out last month in his defense, she said her support was based on the integrity of her husband, with whom she will celebrate a 51st wedding anniversary this weekend and with whom she has shared multiple triumphs and the pain of a child’s (Ennis William Cosby’s) mysterious death at the hands of a white supremacist gang member!

But it was also clear from her statement that Mrs. Cosby’s reaction to the allegations was coming from her experiences with the longstanding practices in white mass media – the incessant and routine scrutiny of African American lives, which is wrong, and even dishonest at times, in their most vapid portrayal of tribal extremism against Black men in America.

“There appears to be no vetting of my husband’s accusers,” Mrs. Cosby, 70, said in her statement, “before stories are published or aired.”

To review Mrs. Cosby’s life and accomplishments — running a business, amassing a world-class art collection, producing films — is to see that perhaps nothing has motivated her more than her interest in addressing what has become America’s mantra – the glaring lapses in the media’s treatment of Blacks.

In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts, in a book she later published, in a series of newspaper opinion articles and in a range of other activities that stretch back two decades, Mrs. Cosby showed that the media, particularly television, has so distorted the image of African-Americans that it can taint the way young Black people even come to view themselves.

“I don’t want others outside our community to define us, because they are doing a horrible job of it,” Mrs. Cosby said in a 1994 interview. “And they are lying.”

Yes they are lying! Why the New York Times and many other white news organizations continue to feel the need to supplant Black narratives, even about Bill Cosby, with white perspectives baffles most in African American communities.

“When someone else tells your story, they have power over you. The story of African Americans in this country has always been told and forced upon us by slave owners and the sons and daughters of slave masters. Now we refuse their wrong and twisted narratives which if anything at all is only based in tribal extremism. We refute their stories about us. We can tell our own stories. And that’s the truth Ruth!”

Mrs. Cosby’s dismissal of the accounts of some two dozen white women who seem only bent on maligning her husband’s character is in part a true reflection of what most African Americans feel about the white-led media and how they have succeeded in bungling the African American narrative in the past.

More recently – Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, and Eric Garner, where white cops walked away free after murdering Black men in broad day light. Mrs. Cosby is correct when she characterized the allegations as a white media feeding frenzy, and not unlike those she has seen before about innocent Black men taken to the slaughter.

Jannette L. Dates, who with Mrs. Cosby wrote a 1992 newspaper op-ed article critical of the media, said Mrs. Cosby was “passionate” about trying to get network executives and others to be more responsible in their depictions of African-Americans.

“She wanted to shake things up,” Ms. Dates said. We observed that “those images are demeaning caricatures. That’s a thread that is still being woven today.”

But to no avail.

Her quest to create more positive images for blacks began decades ago and included efforts to convince her husband that Heathcliff Huxtable, the character who would evolve into America’s Dad during eight seasons of “The Cosby Show,” starting in 1984, should be a well-to-do doctor with a solid family, not a limousine driver, as Mr. Cosby had proposed.

In other settings, independent of her husband, Mrs. Cosby worked to preserve Black history because it had been ignored. In 1995, she co-produced a play, “Having Our Say,” about two pioneering centenarian sisters raised in the Jim Crow South who became successful after moving to New York. Nominated for three Tony Awards, it ran for almost nine months on Broadway.

More recently, in 2001, she helped found an organization, the National Visionary Leadership Project that videotapes interviews with accomplished African-Americans. Charles J. Hamilton Jr., a former board member, said Mrs. Cosby had been drawn to the project because “major institutions have relegated African-American history to the lower rung of the ladder.”

But white media neglect of African American narratives run far deeper than Mrs. Cosby could fathom. The media became particularly quiescent in the coverage of the murder of her son, Ennis, in 1997, when a white supremacist shot and killed him on a Los Angeles Highway.

Instead of trying to find her son’s killer, the media focused so much of its coverage on her husband’s admitted infidelity with a woman, Shawn Berkes, whose daughter, Ms. Jackson, claimed she was Bill Cosby’s child.

[quote_box_center]All old personal negative issues between Bill and me were resolved years ago,” Mrs. Cosby said in a statement she released in 1997. “We are a united couple. What occurred 23 years ago is not important to me except for the current issue of extortion. What is very important to me is the apprehension of the person or persons who killed our son. I appeal to all of you to help us find the murderer.[/quote_box_center]

Even the National Enquirer in retaliation to Mrs. Cosby’s statement published an article saying the death had pushed Mrs. Cosby to the edge of a nervous breakdown and that she was sedated.

Don’t we wish the Cosby’s sued. And Mrs. Cosby was spot one in her opinion article in USA Today with a headline that read “Don’t Believe the Tabs.”

In a 1998 letter to The New York Times, she and many other leaders in the African American community complained that the newspaper’s account of the killing of her son had depicted it as an attempted robbery and omitted a racial slur the killer had used, which minimized race as a motivation in the murder.

As always, like most well-funded white media organizations, Mrs. Cosby’s letter was never published.

Mrs. Cosby’s faith in her husband is no different from those of us who still buy tickets and still flock to Mr. Cosby’s shows. It is no different from many African Americans who deplore how Black men continue to be treated in America and its white media.

We still give Bill Cosby standing ovations and yes, we say that we are skeptical of accounts of abuse that took as much as 30 years to surface. Hell, we even think these allegations are fabrications, purposeful in their attempt to tarnish the image of a Black legend.

That proof is essential to any case is a well known scientific practice long passed down from the Ancient Kemetians as the central dogma of fact checking. Otherwise this character assassination of a Black man like Bill Cosby smacks of tribal extremism alone.

Mrs. Cosby, who last year wrote an op-ed article in which she related the trusted advice that her father, a research chemist, had drummed into her.

“The evidence,” she remembers him saying, “is the truth.”

And as of now, those parading white women or yet, the women so bought by the promise of fame in white media outlets, have no evidence. None whatsoever.

Let us put this nonsense to where it rightly belongs – to the garbage truck of white supremacist nonthinking.