Something’s been plaguing us for years now. As African American Children of the Eighties, we’ve grown up in the overwhelming shadow of one particularly enduring television show, and yesterday’s episode of Oprah, with its surprise cast reunion, really opened Pandora’s box of post-bourgie pontification.
As a result, we can’t help but involve you in our angst, as we ask: Just how important are The Cosby Kids, really? No, really. In the overall fabric of the American landscape—no, let’s make it personal—in the patchwork of the story quilt your life is telling, are these people any more than a wisp of thread waiting to be absently snipped by your shears?
We only ask because several social circles, media outlets, and apparently Spelman College have worked tirelessly to foist these folks upon us and demand that we acknowledge their profound impact on our collective consciousness. Every few years, someone trots them out, dusts them off, and makes them talk about their experiences as cast members of one of the most “ground-breaking” shows about an African American family in U.S. history. And we’re getting a little tired of it.
Speaking as someone who was born the same year as Keisha Knight Pulliam, I have to concede that watching that show made me wish Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Williams, Nancy Wilson, Blair Underwood, Tito Puente, and others would just… stop by to croon or pop-lock, unannounced. I wished Melba Moore was my music teacher. I hoped I’d grow up to be as cute as Justine when I was a teenager.
So you see, I’m not so above it all that I’ve forgotten the sitcom’s influence on my adolescent imagination. But that influence was pretty superficial, wasn’t it? It’s one thing to look at a show and admire all the cool multicultural, weirdly dressed teenagers using slang that never quite caught on. It’s quite another to credit a situation comedy with uplifting America’s view of the race or declaring that the Huxtables are singularly responsible for proving the existence of a Black middle class or, if you’re like Oprah’s show guest, Chatice, deeming The Cosby Show “the reason why [you] graduated from the University of Virginia, married an engineer, earn six figures and currently have two beautiful boys.”
That’s quite the large leap.
No one gets the show’s cultural import more than the cast members themselves, as is evidenced by all their reunions (one for NBC this year, one for Nick at Nite that year, a spiceless E! True Hollywood Story over there…) wherein they trot out a litany of stock answers about their retrospective response to their experience. We’ve heard it all before. “Mr. Cosby” was like a father. He valued education. They all went to college. They had “no idea” how “important” the show was until it was over. They still get mail today from fans thanking them for proving that “Black people do live like the Huxtables.”
Sigh. Wake me up when they start heralding the wonder that was Phylicia Rashad as Clair.
That’s a sentiment I can really get behind. As an elegantly twirling, impeccably coiffed, giggling, grinning, doting, reprimanding attorney-dancer-chanteuse, Rashad shone in a role that could’ve been serviceable at best and whenever “the Cosbys” get to the point in their reunion program where they lament the fact that she “never won an Emmy,” they’re preaching to the choir.
The rest of the time, though, they just seem like a bunch of self-important snobs, who sit high, look low, and don’t want to be associated with anything or anyone they deem “common” (read: Lisa Bonet), patting themselves on the backs for accomplishments long past.
Whether they’re voraciously bigging up “Mr. Cosby,” trying to appear philosophical and introspective, reassuring everyone that the values the show instilled have stuck to their adult incarnations, or making blanket statements about the U.S.’s persistent disbelief that Black doctors married Black lawyers, raised kids, and owned two cars and a brownstone, one thing’s certain: The Cosby actors are on a perpetual Talented Tenth tangent and no one wants to call them on it.
Well, we’re here to rise to that occasion and finally put to rest our long-held beef with the Cosby Kids’ seemingly over-inflated sense of self. Newsflash, guys: you weren’t the be-all, end-all spokespeople for the black middle-class, the black intelligentsia, or the black bohemia. And your show would’ve been a little less dated in syndication if you’d given Denise dysfunction that was a bit more realistic and relevant. She “drops out of college” to *gasp!* work… and everyone treats that like it’s the worst thing in the world, but then she goes to Africa (presumably on the family’s constantly replenishing dime) where she, very succinctly, finds both herself and a straight-laced husband who Talk Like a White Boy and happily, responsibly mothers his totally well-behaved, cherubic toddler.
What’s wrong with the “black middle-class” having legitimate flaws? Why did Sondra and Elvin have to go back to law and medical school in order to stop being the butt of the family jokes? Why is it soooo important, even now, fourteen years after the show’s debut, to come across as this exclusive, entitled, exempt bastion of black prosperity? They’re always bragging about the successive generations of kids still watching their sitcom but now that, according to them, everyone’s aware that a black middle class exists because of their televised efforts, what purpose is it serving for today’s youth? Is it spurring them on to post-secondary education? Or making them add “jammin’ on the one” lexicon? Are they most heartened by Denise, the dropout? Or do they most relate to her revolving door of bizarre friends (remember the one where Stacey Dash had the mysterious illness she needed to talk to a gynecologist[read: Cliff] about? Or the one where Lela Rochon got pregnant on purpose)?
And now that we’re asking questions: did Cousin Pam ever get that birth control she asked Cliff for? And what took Malcolm Jamal Warner so long, cutting off those dreads?
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