The Cosby Show an Artist Vision (op-ed)







After allegations surfaced against Bill Cosby, I knew fans that refused to believe Cosby would drug and “take advantage” of women. (They couldn’t even use the word rape.) I reminded these Cosby Show fans that they knew the sitcom character Dr. Cliff Huxtable not Bill Cosby.

That’s the power of television, images instilled in childhood remain influential, and when The Cosby Show aired from 1984-1992 Cliff Huxtable was the most influential character made for television, but Cliff Huxtable’s influence wasn’t based solely on the sitcom’s success it stemmed from the artistic vision of his creators.

Before television there were two Harlem Renaissance figures with contrasting artistic visions. Countee Cullen expressed his desire to be a writer not a black writer. Cullen believed in a universal art that could stretch the imagination beyond superficial differences and depict the essence of humanity. Langston Hughes’s art was fueled by dual consciousness. (A concept suggesting Blacks couldn’t have allegiance to both race and nationality.) Hughes felt he was responsible to the audience to write from a black perspective.

But the literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance was a book called Cane, a work Hughes praised for it’s depiction of black life in the rural south, written by Jean Toomer, a lesser known figure with an artistic vision of his own.

Toomer’s thesis was that “America had given birth to a new race which subsumed all the old identities.” Toomer believed he was a member of this new race and wanted to pursue art from this new perspective. But Cane was the only work Toomer got published. Toomer stated Cane was an end “and why no one had seen and felt that, why people expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth Cane is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life.”

Decades later Richard Wright emerged with his own artistic vision. Wright believed all art was propaganda, and Bigger Thomas was the character Wright promoted in his novel Native son, Bigger Thomas was the product of a poor environment, a victim of systematic racial oppression, not responsible for his decisions because they were reactions to racism. (Politically the Black community is still divided between Bigger Thomas on the left and Uncle Tom on the right.) Wright’s other books were titled Black Boy, Black Power, The Color Curtin, and White Man Listen.

Race was the central theme of most art created by Blacks during these decades which provoked novelist Ralph Ellison to state that Blacks sacrificed art because they were afraid to leave the comfort of race. When Ellison made his controversial remark a young Bill Cosby was developing a race neutral comedy routine that centered on universal themes.

Decades later Cosby’s artistic vision was turned into The Cosby Show. A sitcom featuring an upper class Black family living the American dream. The show single handedly combated all the negative stereotypes projected about Blacks since silent films. The show embodied Cullen’s universal essence, Hughes’s celebration of Black culture, and Toomer’s belief in oneness, and demonstrated the possibility of a different world to all Americans. (The spin off wasn’t called A Different World just because Denise went to college.)

Recently Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played Cosby’s son on the sitcom, commented about the re-runs of The Cosby Show being removed from the air. He said, “My biggest concern is when it comes to [negative] images of people of color … We’ve always had The Cosby Show to hold up against that and the fact that we no longer have that … Saddens me the most because in a few generation the Huxtables will have been just a fairy tale.”

But Warner’s time length is inaccurate.

The Cosby Show went off the air in 1992.

In 1993 a popular black book was called Monster: The autobiography of an LA gang member, and a popular black movie was called Menace II Society. 


First published by the Pittsburgh Courier 10/21/15