Nearly 20 years after its final episode, The Cosby Show continues to be a powerful teaching tool and an intense source of discussion.
As someone who grew up watching the Huxtables, I often mistook the sitcom for reality. The Huxtables were not characters, but real people whose experiences I could relate to. Moreover, my connection with The Cosby Show was shaped in part by my environment.
I grew up around Jack & Jills — young people whose parents were part of the Jack and Jill Society, an upper and upper-middle class Black organization — and others who had been exposed to the privileges of African-American affluence. The representations in The Cosby Show seemed representative of my upbringing in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
But as Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis noted in their 1992 book Enlightened Racism, too many people see The Cosby Show as real. This can, as they note, have positive and negative consequences, including a White backlash against affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s. The Huxtables were somehow seen as embodying what could be accomplished in the absence of racism.
I led a discussion about The Cosby Show in one of my classes, where most of the students are freshmen or sophomores. Though they were too young to remember the show during its original run, all of them told me they have watched it on syndication regularly.
Ironically, many of my students felt that The Cosby Show was a powerful force in their lives and that their parents encouraged them to watch the show to get positive role models. This is troubling because we too often rely upon mediated representations to help us construct our views. The Huxtables are fictional and yet are used as socializing agents.
One of my students said watching the show made him proud of his race, a similar refrain among the respondents studied in the Jhally and Lewis book. Again, should Cliff and Claire Huxtable be a barometer for racial pride?
