The Elephant in the Room in the Cosby Rape Accusations: There is One Issue in the Story No One Seems to Address

Let me start off by confessing my biases.  I fully admit I don’t want the Bill Cosby rape story to be true.  As I said on Twitter, I feel exactly the same way I would if I heard the accusation leveled against a beloved grandfather.

I will add that one of the problems with this story is that it doesn’t really fit into what we know about Cosby, or into questions hanging out there.  Let me give you a practical example of what I mean by that.  Take the allegations of pedophilia against Michael Jackson.  I don’t know about you, but when I first heard of them, my response wasn’t “this doesn’t make sense!”  It was to realize how much of Jackson’s odd behavior suddenly did make sense when you hypothesized that he was a pedophile, especially just about everything about Neverland Valley Ranch.  I still am not sure if he was a pedophile, but it’s not very hard for me to believe that about him.

By comparison, there is little that this Cosby story would fit into, so...  there is that problem.

But as much as I didn’t want to believe, I figured I was obligated to really look at it and, honestly, right now I don’t know what to think.  Particularly this morning I sat down and took the time to read this excellent piece in the Washington Post on the subject.  It is well researched and correctly leaves it to the reader to decide.

But here’s my major problem with it.  It is not talking about the elephant in the room: the touchy history of black men and white women.  Consider this your “trigger warning” if you are the type who needs that sort of thing.  If you don’t like discussions about some of the really screwed up problems with racism, put this piece down now.

Race and racism in general is the part of the story that is almost being also completely ignored in this case.  Some of that makes sense.  Cosby has been one of those people who transcended race.  I think to a real extent he did more to reduce racism than many civil rights marches and the way he did it was by his style of comedy.  I grew up listening to his standup routine, so I am familiar with it.  Particularly in Pennsylvania, we had a basement and my dad kept an old reel-to-real tape player attached to a larger stereo system (this technology was only slightly behind the times, dating the story).  Among his reels was a copy of a group of bits from Cosby’s standup.  I would sit in the basement, playing with Hot Wheels or something and would listen to the Chicken Heart That Ate New York, or the story of him and his friends Go-Carting, or whatever.  Here’s the Chicken Heart bit:

He isn’t like some comics, who just told jokes.  He told entire stories, and the humor came as much from the truth and familiarity of what he was saying as anything else.  And I have to think that for a lot of white people who were otherwise racist, he demystified black people: he made them seem to be just people, like anyone else.  Combined with the fact that he didn’t really talk too much about race and racism that I recall, you have a guy who was “post-racial” before that was a thing.  So I can understand the temptation to ignore racial issues when reporting on these allegations.

Which is not to say the issue is completely ignored.  Toward the beginning the Washington Post article says this:

The allegations are strung together by perceptible patterns that appear and reappear with remarkable consistency: mostly young, white women without family nearby; drugs offered as palliatives; resistance and pursuit; accusers worrying that no one would believe them; lifelong trauma.

(Emphasis added.)  So the race of his accusers is mentioned.  And the existence of racism is alluded to, when discussing the show I Spy:

Americans who sat in front of their television sets on Sept. 15, 1965, had never seen anything like Alexander Scott, the jet-setting international spy. Black stars had appeared on their screens before but never in a leading role, and this one happened to be a 28-year-old comic who just three years earlier had dropped out of Temple University.

The reaction to Cosby’s breakthrough as a co-star appearing on equal footing with a white actor, Robert Culp, reflected a nation still haltingly emerging from its segregationist past. Some Southern television stations banned the program because of Cosby’s prominent role, but much of the nation embraced it, making “I Spy” a hit.

“At Howard University, we used to go wild when we saw a soul brother with a gun allowed to shoot back,” Latham once said.

So it’s not ignored completely, but there is a big part of it all that is being ignored: the racists’ unique hang up with the idea of black men with white women.

To say that racists in general were hung up on this idea is an understatement.  For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s epic against racial equality Birth of a Nation, a black man (really, a white man in “blackface” makeup because most likely they couldn’t find a black actor willing to do this), tries to rape a white woman and she throws herself off a cliff rather than submit to his predations.  It’s ugly stuff, and I won’t blame you if you don’t watch, but you can, here:

In the movie this was a catalyst leading for the Klan (portrayed here as good guys) to rise up and rebel against racial equality.  Really, one of the ugliest movies ever made.

And then there is the story of the “Scottsboro Boys” (which I don’t believe were actually boys, but back then even a grown black man was frequently called “boy” out of racism).  You can watch a pretty good documentary about that situation, here, but the gist of the story was partially summed up by the Supreme Court:

The record shows that on the day when the offense is said to have been committed, these defendants, together with a number of other negroes, were upon a freight train on its way through Alabama. On the same train were seven white boys and the two white girls. A fight took place between the negroes and the white boys, in the course of which the white boys, with the exception of one named Gilley, were thrown off the train. A message was sent ahead, reporting the fight and asking that every negro be gotten off the train. The participants in the fight, and the two girls, were in an open gondola car. The two girls testified that each of them was [sexually] assaulted by six different negroes in turn, and they identified the seven defendants as having been among the number. None of the white boys was called to testify, with the exception of Gilley, who was called in rebuttal.

Before the train reached Scottsboro, Alabama, a sheriff's posse seized the defendants and two other negroes. Both girls and the negroes then were taken to Scottsboro, the county seat. Word of their coming and of the alleged assault had preceded them, and they were met at Scottsboro by a large crowd. It does not sufficiently appear that the defendants were seriously threatened with, or that they were actually in danger of mob violence; but it does appear that the attitude of the community was one of great hostility. The sheriff thought it necessary to call for the militia to assist in safeguarding the prisoners. Chief Justice Anderson pointed out in his opinion that every step taken from the arrest and arraignment to the sentence was accompanied by the military. Soldiers took the defendants to Gadsden for safekeeping, brought them back to Scottsboro for arraignment, returned them to Gadsden for safekeeping while awaiting trial, escorted them to Scottsboro for trial a few days later, and guarded the court house and grounds at every stage of the proceedings. It is perfectly apparent that the proceedings, from beginning to end, took place in an atmosphere of tense, hostile and excited public sentiment. During the entire time, the defendants were closely confined or were under military guard. The record does not disclose their ages, except that one of them was nineteen; but the record clearly indicates that most, if not all, of them were youthful, and they are constantly referred to as "the boys."

That is from Powell v. Alabama, which stood for the otherwise uncontroversial principle that the right to counsel—not to a free state-provided lawyer like we have today, but merely the right to a lawyer you have convinced to represent you for pay or for free—is incorporated to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.  And since these defendants were denied access to a lawyer ready to represent them, from there the case was a slam dunk.  And it is worth noting that the accusations of rape were subsequently completely discredited and indeed one of the accusers went on to be one of the biggest advocates for the accused.  And it is worth nothing that despite all of that, these accusations ruined these men’s lives.

And then there is Emmitt Till.  You have heard a lot about him due to idiotic comparisons between him and Trayvon Martin.  Here’s a picture of the young man (Till):

And here’s a reasonable summary of the story:

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black kid born and raised in Chicago, went down in August 1955 to visit some relatives in the hamlet of Money, Miss. One day, he walked into a country store there, Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, and, on a dare, said something fresh to the white woman behind the counter -- 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the owner's wife -- or asked her for a date, or maybe wolf-whistled at her. A few nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, yanked young Till out of bed and off into the dark Delta, where they beat, tortured and, ultimately, shot him in the head and pushed him into the Tallahatchie River. His body, though tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, surfaced a few days later, whereupon Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with murder.

Bryant and Milam were later acquitted in what probably was racist jury nullification.  Later, when they couldn’t be tried for the murder again, they admitted they did kill him.

That was 1955, about a decade before Cosby’s alleged rapes.  Times had improved by the time the first of Cosby’s alleged victims claims he assaulted them, but not that much.  And that raises two points for me.

First, back in that day, a black guy had to know it was dangerous to even look court a white woman, let alone attempt rape.  I am not saying it never happened, just that it had to be a deterrent, right?

And second, over and over in the Washington Post account, these white women say that they didn’t think anyone would believe them.  It is laced throughout the piece, and here’s an early example of it:

If his accusers are to be believed, the earliest allegations against Cosby remained hidden for decades, private artifacts of an era when women were less likely to publicly accuse men they knew of sexual misdeeds and society was less likely to believe them.

That may be true of society in general, but are they really going to say no one would believe that a black man raped them?  I mean just a moment ago, I quoted a passage that noted that I Spy was banned from several stations in the South.  Did those stations have news divisions?  Why couldn’t these accusers have gone to them?

That being said, I have helped women in abusive situations and I have dealt with women who I was firmly convinced had been raped, and let’s just say that behavior after a thing like that is not always what you think of as rational.  They often believe things that are not logical, and they behave in ways that are not consistent with what you might mistakenly imagine a victim would do.  So if you can’t expect a victim of rape to act logically, then illogical behavior doesn’t discredit an alleged victim.

But still, the issue of race is the elephant in the room.  Unless I am missing something it is empirically ridiculous to think that no one would believe a white woman accusing a black man of rape in that day and age.  But on the other hand, victims might believe ridiculous things.  Still, when the coverage of the issue ignores this empirical reality, the reporters ignore this issue harm their own credibility.  They have to address it, somehow.

I don’t know what to think of the charges against Cosby.  And maybe that is because of my bias.  Make up your own mind (as I am sure you would, anyway).  But we should not be ignoring the elephant in the room when talking about it.

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist (and adjudicated pedophile) Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the donation link on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.