Bill Cosby’s infamous “pound cake” speech was delivered in May 2004 at an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The court ruled that laws separating public schools for Black and white students was unconstitutional.
Many Black folks thought the speech was too condescending and had an elitist attitude towards poor folks. It also ignored systemic white supremacy’s role in the Black condition in America. He even attacked the idea of having African or Muslim names and thought names like Bill, Tom, and John were better.
“But these people, the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.’ Not ‘You’re going to get your butt kicked.’ No. ‘You’re going to embarrass your family.’
“We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.”
Although some Black folks laughed about Cosby going down under a crooked American justice system, I didn’t. I know better. Cosby gave us “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World”. He donated millions to Morehouse and Spelman colleges and he genuinely cared about Black people. I may have disagreed with his approach to poor folks and those at the bottom but no one can take the sincerity of Cosby and his good works away from him.
Yes I believe Cosby raped multiple women in some cases and carried out his fetish consensually in other cases.
For decades, he liked to drug women and have unconscious sex. It seems he preferred unconscious sex over the type of sex that is safe within the law. Going further, our brother used a Hollywood casting couch to lure vulnerable, poor and broken women into a den of exploitation and abuse. A sexual predator optimizes his or her prey by systematically targeting and exploiting the most vulnerable among us. Cosby was that guy. Cosby didn’t make one or two mistakes. He was a sick old man.
As a result, some people believe Cosby could be a case of somnophilia, or sleeping princess syndrome. It is a fetish “of the marauding-predator type in which erotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to and dependent on intruding upon and awakening a sleeping stranger,” wrote the late Johns Hopkins sexologist Dr. John William Money.
Stepping back from a crooked American justice system, if you happened to have a fetish for three decades that involved having “knockout sex,” where you preferred unconscious women over conscious ones, you were setting yourself up for a rape charge.
Having a fetish for drugging women and having unconscious sex is not in the Black nationalist or Afrocentric playbook. I never saw any remorse from Cosby for having such a sick fetish. He is likely a psychopath who doesn’t feel for his rape victims.
I don’t think Cosby would have ever spent a day in jail if he hadn’t spent a decade railing against poor Black folks for moral shortcomings. I don’t blame the Black community for pulling back. He should be held to the same standard as he held “Shaniqua” in the housing projects with three kids.
In “The Godfather”, Don Corleone told his son Michael Corleone, “I didn’t know until this day that it was Barzini all along.”
In the case of Cosby’s moralizing, the Black community could say, “I didn’t know it was Cosby riding so dirty all along.” Cosby was the one committing a lot of crimes, and he was fortunate enough to settle multiple rape cases against him. He was shot in the back by the American justice system for stealing too much pound cake.
“And then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? “
We could reorganize his pound cake speech and say:
“You run out and are outraged. ‘Cosby should have never been convicted. This is racist.’ Well, what the hell was he doing drugging and having unconscious sex with broken women over multiple decades?”
by Jamarlin Martin
