If the damning charges swirling around the comedian are true, then we lack a proper metric to detail the scale of the hypocrisy that he represents. It is one thing to wear one face in public and another in private, a dichotomy that we all practice to some degree or another, though usually not to cloak serial predation upon semi-conscious women. But it’s quite another to do so while stridently, consistently, angrily denouncing those who have failed to meet your own moral standards. Yet in the past month we’ve learned little about Cosby that was not already known, which is that more than a dozen women have accused him of sexual assault. More of these women’s names have been made public now, but enough of their stories were out there already. In 2006, Andrea Constand, who worked with the Temple University basketball program—Cosby is a Temple alumnus and, even now, a university trustee—filed a civil suit alleging that Cosby had sexually assaulted her, and that thirteen other women were prepared to testify on her behalf about their own similar experiences. Two of them, Tamara Green and Beth Ferrer, had already come forward. Cosby settled the suit. Barbara Bowman, one of the women who’d been prepared to testify, spoke out soon after, giving interviews under her full name to Philadelphia and People. She described how, when she was a young actress, Cosby drugged and raped her—a story similar in detail to those of other women. If we didn’t know this about Cosby it’s because we chose not to recall it, because the storyline was too appealing, the persona too charismatic. The hypocrisy in this situation is vast, but it does not solely belong to Cosby.
The accounts of these women have garnered outrage now thanks to the open commentary and social networks of the Internet, and the renewed attention to a routine, from October, in which the comedian Hannibal Buress referred to Cosby as a rapist. Bowman wrote, in the Washington Post, that her story had not been considered credible until a man repeated it onstage. But this is only part of what stirred a response to the Cosby allegations. Hannibal Buress, like Cosby, is a black man, a common heir to the body of stereotypes about sexual predation and the tormented history that accompany it. Cosby was insulated from the long trail of allegations not only by his wealth and power but by the lurid history of black men brought low by accusations, specious or not, of sexual contact with white women. African-Americans have cultivated an immune response to such matters, which is part of why the idea that this scandal is a digital lynching has gained traction in some sectors of black America. When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the damning nature of the charges and his regret for not having dug deeper into them when he profiled Cosby in 2008, the writer Ishmael Reed responded with a Facebook post declaring that Coates had joined a lynch mob. For his part, Buress saw the lurid stories around Cosby not as evidence of a prominent black man being brought low but as the exposing of a serial rapist who had masterfully manipulated both the white desire for an icon of post-racialism and the black desire for the type of dignified success that Cosby represented. And in publicly voicing this sentiment, Buress effectively made it safe for others, particularly white people, to do the same. In short, this is not the conversation we would be having if Bill Maher or Jimmy Kimmel had called Cosby a rapist.
