“A case study in the costs of hypocrisy.” That’s how Justin Wm. Moyer of the Washington Post described Bill Cosby’s damning deposition in a 2005 employee harassment suit being made public by a U.S. district judge. In this deposition, Cosby admits to giving Quaaludes to young women he “wanted to have sex with,” in the phrase used by the lawyer conducting the deposition. Though this suit was settled, Cosby denied wrongdoing and no criminal charges were filed, this admission under oath makes it all but impossible for anyone to continue to believe Cosby’s denial of all claims – made by more than 30 women – that he forced himself on them sexually after drugging them.
These are the “costs” to Cosby – starting with the shredding of his last vestige of plausible deniability for those who continued to believe the once-beloved comic and actor. Worse costs may yet come. In his memorandum, Judge Eduardo C. Robreno wrote that Cosby is “the subject of serious allegations concerning improper (and perhaps criminal) conduct.” A federal judge making the parenthetical note that Cosby’s conduct was “perhaps criminal” could be taken as an open invitation for prosecutors to take a fresh look at Cosby.
As for the “hypocrisy” that cost him here, his shameful admission in the deposition was made public by the judge precisely because Cosby had publicly called out others for their allegedly shameful behavior. Cosby lost the right to privacy, in this case, because he “donned the mantle of public moralist and mounted the proverbial electronic or print soap box to volunteer his views on, among other things, childrearing, family life, education and crime,” Robreno wrote. Among Cosby’s acts of public moralizing the judge cites was his notorious rant at a 2004 NAACP awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., just a year before the Quaaludes deposition.
This rant has become known – well enough for the judge to use the phrase – as Cosby’s “pound cake speech” because of an image he used when talking about police-involved shootings. “Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals,” Cosby said at the NAACP event in 2004. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! 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?”
This outrageous and insulting apology for the police killings of unarmed civilians earned Cosby many black enemies – and many conservative friends – long before August 9 of last year, but it’s particularly infuriating to read in light of the Ferguson movement. Cosby described the kind of black community uprising we saw in Ferguson that can lead to positive change – “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him’” – only to dismiss it with the most ridiculous of rhetorical questions, as if shoplifting a pound cake (or, to update the image, some cigarillos) were an offense punishable by death.
In Cosby’s anecdote, as the judge must have remembered, he is the moral exemplar. He doesn’t get shot by a cop because he doesn’t steal any pound cake, and he doesn’t steal any pound cake because – unlike so many black people nowadays, he claims – he was raised right. “Something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother,’” Cosby said. Now Cosby has been “caught with it,” all right, but it’s not stolen pound cake – it’s a fistful of Quaaludes to put young women he “wanted to have sex with” asleep.
In addition to these horrendous acts, we also take strong exception to his various harsh, sweeping put-downs of young African Americans. There are problems in our community, there needs to be change and we ourselves can do better, but Cosby fails to consider the structural and institutional problems in Black America today. These problems are complex and deeply rooted in generations of racial and socioeconomic oppression of African Americans. Given the complexity and entrenchment of these problems, Cosby’s condescending advice about personal responsibility – without an equal demand to reform our society – is counterproductive. Challenging the black community to improve is valid, but there is no justification for a successful black elder like Cosby to belittle and attack the less fortunate in our community. His invective statements amount to a craven assault on the defenseless – a tactic widely recognized all too well.
