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Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Page began his career in journalism as editor for the Middletown Journal and Cincinnati Inquirer, and received his ...
Read more about By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services.
Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Page began his career in journalism as editor for the Middletown Journal and Cincinnati Inquirer, and received his ...
Read more about By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services.
Why Cosby Likes 'The Obama Show'
By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services
Twenty-five years ago NBC took a risk. In late September, the network
launched a half-hour situation comedy about a prosperous,
well-educated family whose children actually listened to their parents
without a lot of wisecracks.
And, oh, by the way, the family also happened to be black. Young people today may have a hard time imagining it, but that was a big deal at the time.
ABC had turned the show down but NBC, which was lagging in the ratings, was a bit more desperate. They won. "The Cosby Show" lasted eight years, five of them as the number-one sit-com in the Nielsen ratings.
Changing times give the show's anniversary special significance as we ponder how much the show helped change our times. The program is often credited with enriching the image of the African American family in the eyes of the world. I think it also deserves credit for reaffirming the value of the traditional American family unit, regardless of race or ethnicity, although with a more equal-partner role for the wife than used to be the typical case in 1950s sit-coms.
Heathcliff Huxtable was a doctor. Clair Huxtable was a lawyer. I don't recall seeing her in an apron, although it is not hard to imagine Cliff wearing one, if only to offer a visible argument for partnership in a successful marriage.
Before Cosby brought us the Huxtable family, networks had little interest in reviving the too-perfectly idealized strong-dad/omniscient mom/obedient kids format of "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It to Beaver." But repackaging those old-school middle-class family set-ups with a middle-class black family sent a reassuring social message that subtly grabbed viewers' hearts: The American Dream was not for whites only.
Cosby sounds a less grandiose when talking about his achievement, but no less ambitious. He simply didn't like the sitcoms TV offered.
"It had nothing to do with the color of them -- I just didn't like any of them," he said in a recent interview with the online Web site The Root. "I wanted to take the house back. I felt that on all these other shows the children owned the house. Now in real life, I have five children and (my wife and I) aren't letting people go around the house the way the writers were writing for these kids."
The show offered a glimpse of the self-help initiatives for which Cosby has more recently crusaded across the country, despite critics -- like Georgetown Prof. Michael Eric Dyson, author of "Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)" -- who complain that he lets structural racism off the hook.
But if Cosby's view is conservative, as Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger with The Atlantic, put it recently, "he's much closer to the conservatism of black nationalism than to the conservatism of Shelby Steele." He does not reject outside help for the black poor. He does call attention to what blacks at all levels of social need should do to help one another.
It is inevitable that we also wonder how much "The Cosby Show" helped to prepare the way for President Barack Obama's election. Cosby plays that down. "You can't get elected because of somebody you see on TV," he told The Root. But he was being modest about media power. Since John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard M. Nixon in 1960, no one has gotten elected president without paying due respect to the selling power of TV images.
I think President Obama owes a cultural debt to the Huxtables. What better way for the Obamas to calm voter anxieties than to present the nation with a real-life version of America's most beloved TV family.
I also think the anti-Cosby backlash has been overblown. Having interviewed Cosby several times over the years and witnessed him work the standing-room-only crowds at his call-outs, his rhetoric resonates with the social conservatism of black barbershops, churches and backyard barbecues that looks for allies in the battle against social dysfunction.
In similar fashion, he broadened the vision that we Americans have of ourselves. Amid all of our divisions over other issues, he tapped the fundamental values that most of us share. He reaffirmed the value of nuclear families at time when black Americans in particular were suffering from rising crime, violence, drug addiction and out-of-wedlock births.
Cosby tapped the old-school values that still make up a common culture in our otherwise diverse country. He made mainstream Americans more comfortable with the idea of a black family on their television sets and, eventually in the White House.
Cosby says he enjoys what he calls, "The Obama Show." He should. He helped to produce it.
========
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com, or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.
(c) 2008 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
This news arrived on: 09/23/2009
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Posted Comments:
09-25-2009 23:34
JCE wrote:
Gentlemen in Europe less than 200 years ago just knew that a good horse or dog had more sense and value than a woman. Of course, they had doctors who refused to wash their hands, or use alcohol on their instruments. And men commonly believed the cure for a venereal disease was a virgin. At that time, it was hard to find a virgin past puberty on the street, and even some places virgins not even yet at puberty. Even the upper class had to guard their virgins. Some states, when cars first came out, passed a law that said in certain places, if a woman was driving, a man had to run in front of the vehicle, with a lantern, warning people that a woman driver was coming.
09-25-2009 16:25
Bob wrote:
Yep, things have changed since 1955. I got my first "real" job in 1957. The first job that produced a paycheck complete with tax deduction. It was a job with a major company in my hometown and had a starting pay of %1.57 an hour. I married in 1958 and paid $45.00 a month rent for my first apartment.
09-25-2009 12:18
Goldenwren wrote:
JCE! You forgot an important one! Women will never be able to do the same things as men. They just don't have enough brains.
09-25-2009 12:13
Redneckette wrote:
Cosby
The Cosby show was about what many already knew. A family is alltogether difference than a man and woman begetting "kids" - they must be kids they are allowed to act like goats, butting into everyone and everything, butting is bullying. Green, Alien from Outter Space, black, white protestant, catholic, muslin or any religion it is not race, creed or relition that makes us act writh or wrong - If all citizens using common sense and truly being parents as the Cosby's did for a generation or two would turn this nation around. Lack of responsibility for self, each other and your own children and in fact not showing deep abiding love as the Cosby's did is what is lacking and the root of many if not all of the problems today.
Bill Cosby has forgotten more good sense and most adults today ever hoped to possess.
Bill Cosby has forgotten more good sense and most adults today ever hoped to possess.
09-25-2009 10:45
JCE wrote:
People have seen it all along, just refused to take action. That just doesn't seem to change, as my last two posts show.
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