Bill Cosby and the return of the repressed

Scott links below to the remarkable New York Magazine piece, in which a few dozen of the women and girls Bill Cosby raped, usually after giving them drug-spiked drinks, tell part of their stories.

After reading it, I looked up the infamous “Pound Cake” speech that Cosby gave at a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The whole thing has to be read to be believed, but let’s just say it’s a text whose interpretation has been enriched by subsequent developments:

You got to tell me that if there was parenting, help me, if there was parenting, he wouldn’t have picked up the Coca Cola bottle and walked out with it to get shot in the back of the head. He wouldn’t have. Not if he loved his parents. And not if they were parenting! Not if the father would come home. Not if the boy hadn’t dropped the sperm cell inside of the girl and the girl had said, “No, you have to come back here and be the father of this child.” Not ..“I don’t have to.”

Therefore, you have the pile up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature raised by no one. Give them presents. You’re raising pimps. That’s what a pimp is. A pimp will act nasty to you so you have to go out and get them something. And then you bring it back and maybe he or she hugs you. And that’s why pimp is so famous. They’ve got a drink called the “Pimp-something.” You all wonder what that’s about, don’t you?

Here is a TNR piece on the extra-creepy hyper-racist fetishism of the “cuckservative” meme:

The term has emerged out of the white supremacist movement as a term of abuse for white conservatives deemed race traitors unwilling to forthrightly defend the interests of white America. Borrowing shadings from porn (“cuck” is a genre where husbands, often white, watch their wives have sex with other men, often African-Americans) . . . the term cuckservative is popular because it pushes psycho-sexual hot buttons. Racism and sexism have always been connected, with one of the prime justifications for racial hierarchy being the supposed need to protect white women from black men and also, more implicitly, to keep black women sexually submissive to white men. A cuckservative thus conjures up one of the supreme nightmares of the white supremacist imagination, the fear that white men will assume a submissive role (or position) in the sexual hierarchy.

And here is a NYT op-ed deploring the way Israeli politicians other opinion makers have handled the campaign to release Jonathan Pollard:

The Israelis who employed Mr. Pollard also failed to take into account the risk he posed to the American Jewish community, which was subsequently suspected of disloyalty. Documents from the C.I.A. reveal that the agency viewed Mr. Pollard as an American Jew who had translated his support for Israel into two alternatives: immigrate to Israel or spy for it. For years afterward, the Pollard affair made it difficult for Jews in the United States government to get security clearances for sensitive jobs. . . if Israelis celebrate his release and possible “homecoming,” there must be a responsible adult in Israel who understands how turning a spy into a returning hero will be interpreted in Washington. Israelis must realize, even if 30 years too late, that Americans see Mr. Pollard as a traitor of the worst kind and that celebrating his release will only further harm Israel’s already strained relations with America.

While researching something else, I was struck recently by the striking extent to which anxieties about miscegenation were a problem for the civil rights movement in the post-Brown era, even among many liberals. Significant portions of American history become much easier to understand if they are understood as reflecting the fears of white men that black men will rape/have sex with (the distinction is often far from clear) white women.

Consider that in 1959 Hannah Arendt was taking a controversial stand among readers of the New Republic, when she wrote a piece advocating the repeal of statutes barring blacks and whites from marrying. The magazine held a symposium on the subject, in which one contributor argued thus:

To fight now, as a matter of first principle, for the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws is, I believe, to give strength to the very contention that is most frequently, and by all accounts most tellingly, employed by those who resist the repeal of segregation laws—namely, the contention that this is but a device to promote sexual intercourse among the races.

In light of this history, Cosby’s Pound Cake speech is an astonishing act. Here is an African American man who has spent most of his adult life committing, over and over again, the very worst crime*, in a psycho-political sense, that any black man can commit — the crime that inflames the most destructive fears and morbid fetishes of every overt racist, crypto-racist, and I’m-not-a-racist-but white man in America — and he chooses the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision to lecture the entire African American community about — wait for it — “personal responsibility,” and in particular, personal responsibility in matters of sexuality.

This is roughly analogous to Jonathan Pollard doing what he did if he had been Secretary of Defense, as opposed to a pathetic schmuck in the grip of delusions of grandeur. ETA: Apparently the OP isn’t clear that the point of this analogy is that Cosby and Pollard each committed the precise crime that triggers the most intense racist and anti-Semitic reactions, respectively. (To be fair, Pollard didn’t give a speech berating the American Jewish community for dual loyalty before he was caught, so the analogy is inexact). The NYT article emphasizes the special damage that this sort of crime causes for the communities of the wrongdoers.

Perhaps the ultimate question here is if the Pound Cake speech was a manifestation of profound denial and neurotic repression, or rather just another example of the conscious pleasure a sociopath takes in ignoring the most minimal standards of human decency, and getting away with it, over and over again.

*Cosby seems to have raped many women of color as well, and it should go without saying that those crimes were no less horrible.