“The show that changed forever the way black families are portrayed on television, the show that paved the way for a rainbow of African-American sensibilities on TV from In Living Color to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air …”-Lisa Schwarzbaum (1992)
Television's first racial groundbreaker was the comedian Bill Cosby, whose co-starring role in I Spy (1965-1969) finally placed an African American as an equal to anyone of the white race. Cosby was again the star--and now also the creator--of another breakthrough, The Cosby Show which practically dominated Prime-Time sitcom from its premiere on 20 September 1984 until its last episode, during the Los Angeles Uprising, on 30 April 1992.
Cosby created for himself the role of Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, a physician who lives with his wife Claire, a lawyer, their children Sondra, Denise, Theo, Vanessa, and Rudy. in a spacious Brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, New York City. Cosby insisted that it be produced entirely in New York, which it was, mostly in Queens at the historic Kaufman Astoria Studios, which was the East-Coast home of Famous Players-Lasky / Paramount from 1920 until 1932. The Marx Brothers filmed Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) there. The Huxtable Brownstone pictured in the series is 10 St. Luke's Place in Greenwich Village. The series must be understood as a New York, not a Hollywood production, but since Lasky and DeMille came from Broadway to Hollywood, this distinction is not always a difference.
Indeed, The Cosby Show is a direct descendant of the Hollywood-produced family sitcoms Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch, only all-black, rather than all-white, and upper-class rather than middle-class. The Huxtables were a two-career family. "Cliff" is an Obstetrician; Claire, modeled on Cosby's wife Dr. Camille Cosby, is a lawyer who balances career and family. While the Cosby Show enjoyed five years as America's top-rated TV sitcom, Claire was a role model to all American professional women who, especially in the 1980s, attempted to bring 1960s-70s feminism into the real world.
While Norman Lears' Good Times (1974-1979) was the first to portray an entire black nuclear family, The Cosby Show was the first to do so and to reject stereotypical roles of blacks as service workers who live in ghettoes.
Norman Lear's The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and and Good Times, all reproduced the inner-city image: most bluntly in Sanford and Son, with Red Foxx playing a junkyard owner in the title role. The Jeffersons are newly-affluent: "Movin' on up," as the show's theme song puts it. George and Louise Jefferson are the entrepreneurial owners of a dry-cleaning chain. Their high-rise is a "De-luxe apartment, in the sky." Sociologist Herman Gray characterizes such portraits as “pluralist” or “separate-but equal discourses.”
While both white and black audiences tuned-in, the small-screen world they watched was still segregated: the protagonists had little contact with the white world during most episodes.
The Cosby Show stood out above all for putting “black excellence” on display, very much in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois's "Talented Tenth." DuBois argued that the best-educated and creative class of African Americans had a responsibility to lead the Race, and to prove by example that blacks are as brilliant and accomplished in all fields of human endeavor as any other race. Cosby said the same trying about his own intentions. [***WHERE IS THAT QUOTE?] It is sobering to see that television still had not learned that lesson until 1984.
The Cosby Show also stands out for almost completely ignoring race and racism altogether, and in that it was not at all in the tradition of DuBois. The erasure of race in Cosby was intentional: Bill Cosby wanted The Huxtables to be an American family, who also just happen to be of African descent. His humor almost never hinged on race, and perhaps because of that, the show and his stand-up routine before that, reached astronomical viewership among whites.
And then, we must ask, whose Brooklyn was portrayed in The Cosby Show? During the 1989-1990-television season, The Cosby Show’s viewership was stronger than ever, in the midst of a record-setting five year run as the most viewed television show in America. In that particular year, 23.1 million viewers per show tuned in to Dr. Huxtable and Clair Huxtable’s, upper-class brownstone home in Brooklyn Heights.
In the same year, other New York artists presented a different portrayal of New York and Brooklyn specifically. The most important of these was Spike Lee’s 1989 landmark film, Do the Right Thing, which Lee dedicated Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Griffith, Arthur Miller Jr., Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, and Michael Stewart, six victims of the New York Police Department’s brutality. Lee’s vibrant, yet intense neighborhood drama makes gentrification, interethnic/racial conflict, police violence and a demobilized black working class, central features of Brooklyn.
Cosby’s portrait of New York, Brooklyn, and black America, was largely race neutral. New York, as early as the mid-late nineteenth century, has been a site of violent racial strife, from the 1863 New York City Draft Riots. Police shootings of unarmed black men and children, sparked two African American led uprisings in Harlem (1943 and 1964). From August 19-21, a mere couple of weeks before the final season of The Cosby Show began, the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn tensions between black and Jewish residents exploded after two Guyanese immigrants were accidentally struck by the motorcade of Rebbe Menchem Mendel Scheerson.
Brooklyn, and greater New York, has always been home to a diverse and vibrant Afro-Atlantic world culture, centered in Harlem. Afro-Carribian New Yorkers from Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay, whom DuBoise shunned for being too working-class oriented, have always been a part of the "black" New York, and that diverse Africana society is nowhere insight in The Cosby Show. Instead, Bill and Camille Cosby believed in showcasing the most prominent African American artists, such as Lena Horne and Aretha Franklin, to play cameos on this Televisual Talented Tenth display.
Cosby excluded the rebellious Afro-New York of Public Enemy and Spike Lee entirely from The Cosby Show. But, like another conservative white-chosen spokesperson for the black race, Booker T. Washington, he quietly funded and produced the rebellion itself. Cosby made a life-saving loan of $50,000 to Melvin Van Peebles to produce his utterly militant Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971. And he produced The Cosby Show spinoff, A Different World, which directly addressed white racism, police brutality, and the real social diversity of African American society.
Cosby's backing of raw, race-charged confrontational media, seems like a counter-balance for naive race-erased picture that he pained in White America's favorite TV show. Indeed, we can argue that racial strife was exacerbated by Ronald Reagan's presumptively "color blind," "post-civil rights," post-race and post-class politics: the American dream as accessible for all based purely on telent. In regards to this ethos of politics, poverty is delinked to race and classism and portrayed as a moral failure. As CBS pondered the “vanishing black family” [in its news hour???] and as Reagan attacked poor black individuals as “welfare queens,” the Huxtables represented acceptable blackness.
While Spike Lee's film ends with a justifiable riot in protest of the police killing of character Radio Raheem in a choke-hold with a billy club, Bill Cosby and Mayor Bradley asked the people of Los Angels on the second day of the 1992 Uprising to stay inside and watch the last episode of The Cosby Show:
“We believe we need this time (as) a cooling-off period . . . to remember what our Thursday nights were like before this all began. If major events dictate, be assured that we will return immediately."
In the early twenty-first century, Cosby himself more visibly engaged in the politics of respectability and acceptable blackness. Most notably, during the 2004 NAACP awards ceremony to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Cosby criticized the black community, claiming that they too often engaged in overly licentious behavior, frivolous spending, the use of inappropriate vernacular (slang), and many other things. Cosby opined:
But these people, the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And 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? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, 'If you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.' Not 'You're going to get your butt kicked.' No. 'You're going to embarrass your family.'
Cosby asks Americans to stop “playing the race card” and to cease blaming American institutions. As sociologist Michael Eric Dyson notes Cosby neglects “white society’s responsibility in creating the problems he wants the poor to fix on their own.”