Thirty years after The Cosby Show's debut, scholars reflected on the show's influence on social discourse in America Thursday at the John Hope Franklin Center.
At a roundtable discussion on "The Cosby Show at 30: Reflections on Race, Parenting, Inequality & Education," a group of students, faculty and Bill Cosby fans watched clips from the show and discussed how they illustrated social issues from generational gaps to corporal punishment
The Cosby Show ran from 1984 to 1992 and was the most watched television show in the nation for five consecutive years, said Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African & African American studies and director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture & Entrepreneurship. At its peak, the show averaged 13 million viewers per episode.
The show re-energized the traditional television sitcom and was a landmark for its depiction of the African-American family and even for Phylicia Rashad's portrayal of working mother Clair Huxtable. Although The Cosby Show touched on several issues of race and socioeconomic class, it did not make grand or overt statements about inequality, faculty said
“Cosby is safe,” said Natalie Bullock Brown, chair of the department of film and interactive media at Saint Augustine’s University. “There weren’t a lot of pressing political issues or grand statements about race and inequality because white folks would have never watched that. And black people would have been put off too, it would have been too didactic.”
Although The Cosby Show marked a change in the entertainment industry and the depiction of black America, many viewers have criticized its hold in reality.
“The Cosby Show was really put up as real in my middle class household,” said Joshua Lazard, C. Eric Lincoln minister for student engagement at Duke Chapel. “But this was a sitcom, it was not meant to be reality. Bottom line: it’s entertainment.
Lazard added that The Cosby Show was not meant to fit all images of a black family, but instead provide examples for people to relate to.
“The black community is not monolithic,” Lazard said. “We try to bring this all together that this one show with 200 episodes has to be representative of all 40 million black people or people who claim to have African or African American heritage. For me it was a TV show, and I identified with some parts of it.”
Promoting higher education
Beyond discussing parenting styles, the panel reflected on The Cosby Show’s influence on historically black colleges and universities.
While "The Cosby Show" was airing, HBCUs were no longer the only option for aspiring black college students, said Blair Kelley, associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. With the rest of the collegiate world now integrated, people began questioning the need for HBCUs, Kelley said.
But "The Cosby Show" exposed an entire generation to different higher education options, and contributed to an increase in enrollment in HBCUs. The show's regular exposure to imagery and subtle advertising for HBCUs reaffirmed the importance of the institutions to the greater public.
“I always remember him having a sweatshirt on that had the name of some HBCU,” Brown said. “There was never overt promotion of HBCUs, but they were there. Their presence was felt, and the exposure to names of schools that a lot of people in the viewing audience had never heard of before was important.”
"The Cosby Show at 30: Reflections on Race, Parenting, Inequality & Education" is the first event to be sponsored by The Center for Arts, Digital Culture & Entrepreneurship at the Duke Consortium on Social Equity.