Through the medium of television Bill Cosby has been intimately influencing American perspectives on race, class, how we think about ourselves and, most crucially, how we feel about him, for more than five decades.
Give that information a moment to sink in, to really scrabble its way inside the inkiest crannies of your gray matter. Only by processing how long the comedian, actor and self-styled moral police commander of the African-American community has been running his game on an entire nation of viewers — several generations’ worth — can we begin to comprehend the significance of Thursday’s verdict.
