Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Cosby

What we are seeing exposed now is another dirty secret: For some people, it’s not just Bill Cosby; it’s also “The Cosby Show.” Though it portrayed an intact, upper-middle-class black family in a positive way, a certain segment of critics have disliked it. For these people the show’s greatest sin was this: Middle-class Americans loved the Huxtables.

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They loved them for a simple reason. Unlike so many other TV families, the Huxtables were that rare family where the parents were smarter than the kids. The family had its scrapes and clashes, but everyone loved each other—with mom and dad plainly in charge, pushing virtues that were middle-class ones of work and achievement.

This seems to have offended. An article in Salon now complains that “ Theo Huxtable was never harassed by the New York City Police Department because he was a young black male.” In the New Republic a few months earlier, another writer had whined that “white audiences were never made to feel bad about themselves or confront any hard questions about how they had benefited from American systems from which black Americans had not benefited.”

Remember, folks, we’re talking about a sitcom.

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