(ThyBlackMan.com) The year 2014 was a special one, mainly because we had a chance to see the world change right before our very eyes. Activism was only for nerds and outcasts just a year ago, and suddenly it became popular. Now, when I speak on college campuses, I no longer have to work hard to explain to students why they need to get involved in something other than chasing money after graduation. Now, they are actually finding a PURPOSE.
Another thing we had a chance to see this year is the absolute OBLITERATION of Bill Cosby’s public image. Watching Cosby go down was like seeing the second tower fall on 9/11. Never, in a billion years, would any of us have expected that Cosby would experience the wrath that he’s endured over the past year. Also, most of us never would have guessed that he’d been sleeping with so many women who were NOT named “Camille.”
The crazy thing about Cosby is that the world would have probably forgiven him for being an adulterer. They would have even forgiven him for being a serial cheater. Even worse, many people would have been able to ignore as many as 12 or 13 accusers. But when the number got into the twenties, most of us started to feel like we were in the Twilight Zone. Bill took Hollywood celebrity privilege and stretched it in unthinkable ways. I hope Bill Cosby wasn’t led to believe that creating a few TV shows would make you invincible.
Cosby isn’t the only black man in the last 20 years to be publicly disassembled by white America. Two other previously lovable black men were Tiger Woods and OJ Simpson.
OJ Simpson was not only loved by white people, he was practically one of them. In fact, he seemed to have abandoned the black community, since he didn’t think he needed us anymore. It wasn’t until he was accused of killing a beautiful white woman, Nicole Brown Simpson, that he was suddenly treated like a n*gger like the rest of us. The lynch mob anger that America threw at OJ Simpson was a frightening reflection of the racist roots of our country, where a black man accused of hurting a white woman was considered worse than the devil himself. Historically, when mobs of white people got angry, the courts and police didn’t matter. You were still going to receive the death penalty.
Oddly, OJ Simpson was able to garner support from black people by utilizing the brilliant skills of the late Johnny Cochran, who led us to believe that backing OJ was a strike against 400 years of racial oppression. Even 20 years later, that still doesn’t make much sense.
Tiger Woods was another black man with such a squeaky clean, highly profitable image that he became a walking corporation. To Tiger’s credit, he didn’t connect with black people before his scandal and didn’t try to beg for our help afterward. Cosby and Simpson, on the other hand, realized that the black community might be the only friend they had left. Unfortunately for Bill Cosby, though, not many black folks are crazy enough to assume that 26 women all told the same lie, so people haven’t rallied on his behalf the way they did for OJ Simpson. The egregious consistency of Cosby’s alleged crimes is just too much for most people to stomach.
What Tiger, OJ, and Bill Cosby all have in common is that they seemed to have bought into the myth that America is a truly post-racial society. Most of us know that this isn’t true, but money and power have a way of clogging your eyes and ears, kind of like being perched so high above the clouds that you believe it will never rain again. In all three cases, the men were likely guilty of whatever they were being tried for in the court of public opinion. The difference, however, is that the “shame on you” response from the American public was one that was accelerated by the kind of racial animosity reserved for a black man who has done horrible things to a beautiful white woman.
Tiger and OJ Simpson committed the “crime” of allegedly hurting blonde white women who look good on TV. No matter what happened in those relationships, the women were the victims and the black men were the perpetrators. There was no in-between. Nothing about it was complex. It was simply good vs. evil.
Bill Cosby’s accusers weren’t nearly as photogenic as the ex-wives of Tiger and OJ Simpson, so the media halo didn’t fit quite as well. However, he was likely hammered tby the shear volume of allegations, which was disgusting. It’s hard to believe that the public shaming of these three men would have been so harsh had they been white or their alleged victims had been black. Bill Clinton has been accused of rape and Tiger Woods-like womanizing in the past, but he hasn’t been attacked with nearly as much venom as the media has used against the three black men mentioned in his article. In fact, people believe that Bill is squeaky clean, even though he and Cosby ran in many of the same circles.
Another interesting fact about these three black men is that none of them have ever been convicted in the court of law. OJ was famously acquitted, but treated as if he actually murdered someone. Bill Cosby’s accusers have never taken him to trial, and none have produced any physical evidence of an alleged rape. Tiger got the worst treatment of all, being treated like a criminal and sociopath, even though he was basically a rich guy who cheated on his wife. Sorry to break this to you, but it happens all the time.
My opinion? There’s a good chance OJ did kill someone, and I didn’t like OJ Simpson either before or after his trial. Tiger Woods always inspired me as a golfer, but not as a black man. Bill Cosby did a lot of good for the world, was a bit too self-righteous and might need to get some psychiatric help. You can’t spend so much time condemning the behavior of others when you are a married man sleeping with a new women nearly every single week.
But when we put aside our personal feelings about these three men, we should also realize that there is a special form of “justice” reserved for black men which really isn’t justice at all. Black men are consistently judged in negative ways, mistreated by society and subjected to ridiculous double standards. Our behavior is put under a spotlight, even if we do the same things that white men do every day. It’s not to say that we don’t make mistakes and sometimes do terrible things, but the penalty for imperfection tends to be much higher for black men than it is for everyone else.
Even Cosby’s condemnation of black men as irresponsible, unethical and lazy was simply an echo of what white America now thinks about Bill Cosby himself. He, OJ Simpson and Tiger are now being treated like the rest of us, and their greatest mistake was believing that they’d somehow escaped the plight of black men everywhere. But while we can certainly point to the mistakes of these three men, we must also point to our entire society. Had they been white, their good choices likely would have outweighed the bad and the media hammer would not have been so fierce. In fact, had these three men been white, there’s a good chance their “scandals” wouldn’t even outlive the news cycle.
That is what’s wrong with America.
Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.