Melissa Harris-Perry, filling in for Rachel Maddow, talked to Ebony Magazine senior editor Jamilah Lemieux about Cosby’s infamous moralizing and how people were more interested in protecting an “imagined notion” of Cosby than actually looking into the allegations against him.

Lemieux imagined what would have happened if Cosby didn’t have that respectability politics and if he “was a supporter of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.”

“Say that he was a leftist,” Lemieux said. “Say that he was really on our side, quote unquote, politically. Would we be having this conversation?”