Here is The Real Reason Why People Are Coming For Phylicia Rashad For Defending Bill Cosby

Here is The Real Reason Why People Are Coming For Phylicia Rashad For Defending Bill Cosby

Depending on you and your life experiences, Bill Cosby is either an abuser or the latest Black man to fall prey to being unjustly accused. In the case of the 83-year-old actor, it is actually dozens of women -- the majority of them White -- over several years who alleged sexual misconduct by Cosby dating back decades. (Cosby has consistently denied the allegations.) Which is why when his longtime friend and costar Phylicia Rashad celebrated the overturning of the verdict against Cosby on Wednesday, it set off debate involving race, misogyny and the #MeToo movement. Well before Cosby was convicted and sentenced in 2018 to three to 10 years in a state prison for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004, there was much debate over his guilt and innocence. But no where more so than in the Black community, where Cosby had meant so much as both an entertainer and an advocate for education. "The Cosby Show" was groundbreaking television. Running from 1984 to 1992 on NBC, the sitcom depicted an upper middle class Black family devoid of the usual stereotypes often assigned to Black characters in Hollywood. Cosby portrayed Dr. Heathcliff "Cliff" Huxtable, an obstetrician and patriarch of five children. Rashad played the matriarch, attorney Clair Huxtable. Their loving family dynamic -- and Cosby's affable portrayal as the comical and often beleaguered father -- found him frequently topping polls as America's favorite TV dad. He embodied the parent that many who grew up in the tumultuous 1980s as latchkey kids, or those with more absent fathers than Huxtable, wished they had. "The Cosby Show debuted during the Reagan era, when the plagues of crack, AIDS and spiraling homicide were ravaging African-Americans," writer, professor and culture critic Jelani Cobb told Ebony Magazine in 2015. "[The show was] huge among Black people because it was a counterpoint to the stream of negativity that we heard and saw about ourselves so frequently during those years." As beloved as Cosby's Dr. Huxtable was, Rashad's Clair was as well. A deeply loving wife, she modeled excellence for the Huxtable children (played by Sabrina Le Beauf, Lisa Bonet, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Tempestt Bledsoe and Keshia Knight Pulliam) and portrayed a strong, Black feminist in a television landscape with few. That image seemed in stark contrast to some when Rashad tweeted "FINALLY!!!! A terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!" after the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania vacated Cosby's conviction on Wednesday. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/entertainment/phylicia-rashad-bill-cosby-black-community/index.html

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