Fallen

I cried the day Michael Jackson died. Of course I didn’t know him personally but I knew him through his music. I grew up with him. We went through puberty together, high school and for me college. I felt a kinship as if he was in fact my real life brother. So when he died I felt a loss like a really close relative had passed and I mourned. I feel the same way about Bill Cosby. I didn’t think of him as just “America’s Dad” I knew him long before Cliff Huxtable existed. I remember I Spy and how proud African-Americans were to welcome a positive Black character into their homes weekly. As a kid I listened to his comedy albums over and over again until I knew the routines by heart. I remember Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids and The Bill Cosby Show. I remember it all, so the news of the sexual allegations hit hard and I quite honestly refused to believe any of it. It just couldn’t be true of the Bill Cosby I knew.

But that’s exactly the problem. Because we allow ourselves to develop this distant yet personal kinship with celebrities, we think we know them. We take them into our homes through music, television and movies and we create a persona of who we think they are or more importantly who we want them to be, when in fact we don’t know them at all. Actors are just that, performers who create characters. Fictional characters who may be based on real life or real life events but fictional just the same. America’s Dad was never any more real than Santa Claus yet we have no problem separating fat & jolly from real life. I suggest we need to do that with Mr. Cosby. I don’t know if he did it or not but I refuse to defend him because quite simply I don’t know him. I never really knew Bill Cosby despite the character I had allowed my mind to manufacture, so I refuse to support him any further.

However, whether the allegations are true or not it shouldn’t devalue the characters Bill Cosby created. It is not for me to forgive or condemn the man for what he’s accused. I continue to hold a kinship to those characters and I’m happy to do so. Perhaps I’m wrong but it shouldn’t diminish the charities and scholarships he created or any of his philanthropy. But I’m sure it will. Yes he’s a hypocrite, he’s talked down to the African-American community on many occasions and it’s become increasingly evident that he has done horrible things that have hurt countless people. What he’s accused of is unconscionable and absolutely unforgivable and no one should apologize or speak for the man. Even Whoopee Goldberg has finally within drawn her support after hanging in there even after he admitted in released court documents that he had given drugs to women in order to have sex with them.  But I gotta be honest, it would give me more comfort to go back to dismissing the allegations as lies and embrace the Bill Cosby character I knew and loved. The one I created. I won’t support him and I hope this post doesn’t come off as some Cosby apologist but serial rapist or not, I just can’t bring myself to let his arrogance diminish the memories or the love I have for the characters he created.