Brittney C. Cooper
That Bill Cosby drugged and raped women for sport for many years was not new news in 2014. The story had floated for years with women sharing their testimonies, after the statute of limitations had run out, simply because they wanted to tell their stories. When comedian Hannibal Buress had the courage to take Cosby to task for his conservative, antipoor, misogynist respectability rants, people started listening again. It is problematic that folks only began to believe women were really raped when another man said he believed them, but that demonstrates the importance of male allies and the risk for women telling their truth.
Between the reports about Bill Cosby, rapist, and Stephen Collins, the actor from 7th Heaven who admitted to being a pedophile, the lovable portraits of family that anchored my childhood in the 1990s went up in smoke and, as represented on the November 2015 cover of Ebony, broken glass. And perhaps that’s a good thing. For far too long, Black women in particular have been saddled with the representational baggage of The Cosby Show.
I say that as an avid lover of The Cosby Show. Cliff Huxtable’s progressive gender politics and the show’s overt rhetoric of antisexism struck me in my adult years as decidedly progressive for the time. But it’s a sham. How can a man who is a vicious hater of women get all the rhetoric right, offering up an idealistic view of what a “good, feminist family man” might look like? It turns out that dudes, or their carefully crafted representatives, can sound right, and seem right, and still be all the way wrong. It turns out that you can have progressive feminist politics on the outside and still be deeply emotionally damaged and fucked-up on the inside.
And since Bill Cosby is a rapist, his avatar Cliff Huxtable is a representational terrorist, holding us hostage to a Black family that never was. But let him die. Stockholm syndrome be damned.
I’m reminded of a couple of moments that always struck me as creepy—after Denise got married, Cliff’s character felt compelled to have a conversation with Martin about whether she had been a virgin on their wedding night. Martin assured Cliff that she was “inexperienced.” And on another episode, when Vanessa got caught sneaking out with her boyfriend, he used the infamous apple demonstration to ascertain whether or not they had had sex. I understand the parent of a teenager wanting to know, for a variety of reasons, about the level of sexual activity of their sixteen-year-old, but he coulda kept the ocular demonstration. And the inquiry into his married daughter’s sex life was hella inappropriate, and perhaps offers us a clue into the mind of a sexual predator.
That obsession with Denise’s sexual practices was not unlike his row with Lisa Bonet in public after she, a grown woman, married Lenny Kravitz. It makes me think again about whether Bonet was the problem child she was made out to be, and reconsider her choice not to participate in the ten-year Cosby reunion special back in 2002.
It has long been time to slay the Huxtable patriarch. So, Cliff Huxtable, you’re dead to me! And perhaps now representations of Black families, and in particular Black women, can live and breathe on television.
The exposure of the utter fictiveness of the portrayal of Cliff Huxtable strikes me as really necessary in a moment where, because of Shonda Rhimes, Black women dominate The Cosby Show’s (and later A Different World’s) old prime-time Thursday-night slot. Rhimes brought Black Thursdays back.
But these new representations of Black women labor under the old expectations. That’s a problem for a lot of folks, one that won’t be solved because neither Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) nor Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) aspire to Clair Huxtable status. That’s a good thing. A thing that those of us with all of our respectability feminism would do well to really grapple with.
After the explosive two episodes in which Olivia (and Smelly Mellie) managed to rescue the president’s daughter from a sexisode without slut shaming her, and Viola Davis took off her wig and dark, dark, beautiful, earth-toned makeup on screen, everybody should be clear that Clair Huxtable is dead, too.
How meta does Shonda Rhimes have to get for us to see that she’s peeling back layers, forcing us to look in the mirror, offering Black women opportunities to deal with our racial and sexual traumas at the hands of White patriarchs and White patriarchy? Black men have traditionally dealt with that trauma by aspiring to the level of power White men have. Black women have experienced much of the trauma of White patriarchy in intimate spaces—though not only there—and it’s time we had an opportunity to work out that trauma in (representational) intimate spaces. For once it’s about us and our pain, and what “the man” has done to us, specifically. Would I have chosen Rhimes as my midwife through this moment? No. But she’s proving to be a far more savvy one than I initially thought.
That she weaved the scene in How to Get Away with Murder through a grammar and a vocabulary utterly familiar to Black women (the taking off of wigs, smoothing back of hair, lotioning of skin, removal of foundation—before a fight) suggests that she does in fact see us, does know us, even if it is not how we want to be known.
We need new representations. And we are getting them. But somehow, our feminist analyses can’t seem to wholly catch up. Far too many folk with otherwise good politics and insightful thinking circumscribe Olivia Pope to a mammy-jezebel-sapphire nexus that is both laughable (in its lack of rigor) and infuriating (in its prescriptiveness). Can a sister get it in on TV without y’all calling her a jezebel? Did y’all know mammies are utterly asexualized? And if a Black woman runs shit, but don’t take care of other people’s kids, why does that make her a mammy? If she was totally unloving and uncaring, we’d call her a bitch. But wait . . . ol’ girl Alessandra Stanley at the New York Times said some (totally incorrect) bullshit about all Shonda Rhimes’s characters embracing angry Black womanhood. So . . . where the hell does that leave us? I mean, on one hand Liv and Annalise might be cautionary tales in what it means to fellate and romanticize White-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy on the regular. I know that’s what many feminists want me to say. There I said it. On the other hand, they might be complicated, powerful women in love with complicated, powerful men. On this we probably gone have to fuck with the grays just a little bit.
Perhaps we needed to slay Clair Huxtable to find out. (I ain’t even into slaying the mother like that, but Cliff Huxtable has got to die, and unless we can imagine some new possibilities for widowed Clair, I suspect she’ll just not be the same without him.)
As someone who on some days aspires to have a partner and maybe a kid, I wish for more opportunities to see badass (cis and trans) Black women in both hetero and same-sex partnerships that aren’t emotionally abusive and fucked up. But I know far more professional sisters in “creative” configurations of relationships than ones in traditional hetero- and homonormative partnerships. It’s real in these streets.
Shit, even our inability to cut Liv some slack for loving somebody toxic long after they have outlived their usefulness strikes me as deeply emotionally dishonest. I know I have been there. I know what it’s like to try to imagine possibilities of relationships beyond the person that has moved you deepest. But maybe that’s my shit. I own it. But I also maintain that it seems mad difficult for us to really grapple with what emotionally vulnerable Black womanhood looks like on television.
Liv and Annalise are gonna force us to do it though. And it will take both of them and then some to move us away from our finely cultivated worship of Clair Huxtable, the sister who had the man, the kids, the beautiful home, the bangin’ career, fun friends, and hot sex.
Part of the reason pop culture is so important is because it refuses in so many ways to give us characters that conform to the shape of our deepest political desires. In so doing, it forces us to grapple with what it means to want the things we want. It makes us imagine that we could (and perhaps should) want other, better things.
What I see when I look at Liv, when I look at Annalise—they have cultivated options for themselves. I don’t agree with all their choices, and I prolly would not run my relationships in the ways they do. But in the ways they seem to exist always adjacent to marriage, almost as the sandpaper rubbing away the facade, they teach us something.
Nah, I ain’t saying Black women are only the sandpaper smoothing the walls of other people’s marriages. I’m saying that just as sandpaper’s rawness and roughness is used to smooth surfaces, these sisters rub our romantic and intimate desires right up against the rough-hewn nature of our most revered social and family structures, allowing us to see them more clearly. Meanwhile, they walk away with the bruises and scars to prove that those institutions are not as smooth and innocuous as they look from a distance.
We could continue to read these sisters as failures of certain kinds of respectable representation, or we could take a different feminist move and imagine what kind of possibilities they open up. And maybe those possibilities are about what they break, and not what they build. Maybe those possibilities are about the graves they allow us to dig, the bodies they allow us to bury, the fertilizer for the soil that those buried bodies become.
Perhaps their purpose is not so macabre as that. Like chocolate truffles broken open, the goodness, the substance, runs out of the center. But like good sex, it’s all impossible to enjoy without getting messy.
Maybe they simply inhabit every representation that we have been taught to fear, from the mammy to the jezebel to the overachieving Black lady. And perhaps once we have confronted our ghosts, dealt with the things that haunt us about who we might get to be in America’s popular imagination, we can ease up and let these sisters live.