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The Fragility of Post-Racial Ideology in American (Visual) Culture

CosbyShow

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Tracing Post-Race Through Raced Eras: The Cosby Effect
The Cosby Show aired from the years 1984-1992, most of the program airing during the Reagan administration and later the George H.W. Bush administration. The character of Bill Cosby represented to mass audiences the notion of a “good” black body, that subscribed to white patriarchal notions of power, privilege, and humor. The Cosby family was upper-middle class and depicted as upwardly mobile. Cosby himself commented on how he wanted to challenge and combat his idea of the “bad” black through actively promoting the image of the assimilable “model minority” Cosby family in the terms laid out by white America.

As Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis state after compiling a sociological study on Cosby viewers, “the Huxtables, having risen to the comfortable upper middle class world, have, for many white viewers, thereby disentangled themselves from their racial origin” (84). This points to the notion of an “enlightened” racism, or colorblindness, which requires a distanciation from blackness– neither wanting to acknowledge the blackness of the Cosby’s or the existence of any form of overt racial tension at all within our society.
In the last season of the Cosby Show, and specifically amidst the final episodes of the series, the LA Rebellion took place in Los Angeles. This highly visual and televised eruption of racial and class tensions between black, Korean and white communities in the heart of Los Angeles. The news media managed the events, only focusing on the black versus Korean narrative, surrogating victimhood to the white viewers at home and entire police institutions let Los Angeles racialized communities go up in flames. Bill Cosby went on NBC and in response to the entire conflict, told Americans to stay at home and watch the final episode of The Cosby Show instead of taking part in the uprising (Fiske, 107). The Cosby Show’s adherence to nostalgic Reaganisms, attempted to “reassure white viewers that society is now color-blind” and ease minds of socio-cultural racial upheavals (Hunt 20).

This promotional image presents the Cosby family as a heteronormative nuclear family all engaged in wearing a smile for the cameras. They are physically connected representing their closeness and homogenization. They are wearing warm, pastel colors, emphasizing a certain degree of wealth and American-ness. The imaging of the Cosby family is meant to return to the traditional family dynamic while distancing from a certain notion of ethnic or racial specificity, a central vehicle for the post-race narrative.