I want to tell you I loved Bill Cosby for a long time. I loved him because as a kid, I watched The Cosby Show and I saw a family that was similar to mine--middle class, loving, imperfect. When I watched A Different World I saw what college might look like for a girl like me. Bill Cosby was the warm, funny man who wore ugly sweaters. He was the Jello Pudding Pop man. He…
I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence in a personal way. It is easier to say, things happened. They were terrible. They are in the past. If I must, want to be able to write about these things without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has…
Growing up, my brothers and I were only allowed to watch an hour of television a week. We had to be judicious with that time because there was so much we wanted to see and so little time. In 1984, when The Cosby Show premiered, we quickly decided to allot half an hour to Cosby even though that meant we could only watch another half hour of some other show. We were a middle class…
