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Bill Cosby after his release in summer 2021
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Dennis Van Tine / STAR MAX / AP
Bill Cosby, author and filmmaker W. Kamau Bell said recently, is the key to understanding America.
You could also say that anyone who wants to understand America in the 21st century should have seen Bell's four-part documentary We Need to Talk About Cosby, which the United States is currently discussing.
It's a series about the historic career of the famous African American comedian - and the allegations that he drugged and raped at least 60 women during that career.
At the same time, the series is much more.
It is located at the intersection of American entertainment culture, Afro-American social history, patriarchal structures and the psychogram of a gifted artist.
Bell, who has published numerous books, makes the podcast Kamau Right Now, and hosts the CNN series United Shades of America, makes no bones about the fact that he's touching on a hot topic as a black filmmaker.
He has repeatedly confessed that he faced numerous rebuffs when trying to find contributors to his documentary.
And he keeps emphasizing that he himself was very reluctant to do a critical piece about Cosby, who was sentenced to prison in 2018 for rape and released in 2021 for a procedural error.
It is possible that these anxieties have fueled the depth and astonishing prudence of his documentation.
In the 1980s, Bill Cosby became America's most successful African American entertainer and a national father figure with The Cosby Show.
But for the African-American diaspora, he was much more - the man who revolutionized the portrayal of Black Americans in film, television and on stage, who snatched an entire population from the condescending sovereignty of white Americans, who represented Black America on his stage personally redefined.
»America's Dad«
Long before white America knew Cosby, he was the hero of black children, youth and adults.
His comedy won a Grammy in the mid-'60s.
In the spy series "I Spy" from 1965 to 1968, alongside Robert Culp, he shaped one of the first Afro-American TV characters to be distinguished by intelligence and attractiveness.
He got black stuntmen hired on movie sets.
With »Fat Albert« he created an enormously entertaining animated series in the early seventies, which was about black city kids and had a claim to education.
With the “Cosby Show” he finally advanced to “America's Dad” in the 1980s – not “black America's Dad”, as Bell notes, but to the father figure of all Americans.
White Americans, given their devotion to Cosby, could feel relieved of the responsibility to address racism;
Black Americans could finally enjoy television that transcended the prevailing stereotypes of poverty, crime, and second-class status.
But as Cosby built his status as the righteous hero of both his own community and America as a whole, it became increasingly impossible to engage critically with him - not least because, like Kierna Mayo, former editor-in-chief of the African-American magazine "Ebony" in the Doku notes that "Cosby represented progress," but flourished in an industry "riddled with misogyny."
Bell details how the abuse allegations against Cosby date back to the beginning of his career.
But all accusations roll off him.
While the dominant white culture simply dismisses women's allegations against Cosby as implausible - women's rights activist Gloria Allred describes how American judges instructed judges in rape trials to be skeptical about protestations by female victims - the black community is wrestling with an old racist one Pattern denouncing African American men as sexual buccaneers.
Cracks opened up in the black diaspora.
"My worst enemy," says African-American actress Lilli Bernard, one of Cosby's victims, "were black men: how dare you put down an icon?"
The gap between moral authority and crime
"We Need to Talk About Cosby" is a carefully compiled document of a complicated career;
it is accompanied by sparse off-screen commentary by Bell himself.
The series is anchored in the #MeToo era — Cosby was America's first powerful man to go to prison over the matter — and Bell offers a harrowing tract on sexual abuse.
But the series opens the view far beyond this topic.
In Bell's conversations
A panorama of ethnic, cultural, gender-specific and psychosocial perspectives emerges.
The documentary traces how the gap between Cosby's moral authority and his crimes widens, culminating in the violent death of his son Ennis in 1997 as a turning point.
In the following, Cosby increasingly behaves as a moralizer, branding black poverty as homegrown, condemning single mothers and railing against low-hanging pants and the swear words of young African Americans.
His omissions divide the black community.
It's these tirades that black comedian Hannibal Buress mocked on a show in 2014: »I don't swear on stage!«, Buress mimics Cosby in one performance.
"Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby." A shaky cellphone footage of Buress's comments spread like wildfire across social media, eventually knocking Cosby off his pedestal.
#MeToo has raised the question of whether the artist should be considered separately from his art.
W. Kamau Bell's "We Need to Talk About Cosby" may offer a partial answer—that it falls short to isolate Bill Cosby, his art, and his crimes from their social context.
As journalist Kierna Mayo sums it up: »Bill Cosby is a catalyst for the American experiment.«
»We Need to Talk About Cosby« has been on Showtime since January 30th.
A German broadcaster has not yet been determined.