Morning Must-Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Rape Accusations Against Bill Cosby Must Not Be Ignored
...In that essay, there is a brief and limp mention of the accusations against Cosby... [with] no opinion offered on the rape accusations. This is not because I did not have an opinion.... Believing Bill Cosby does not require you to take one person's word over another, it requires you take one person's word over 15 others. At the time I wrote the piece, it was 13 peoples’ word--and I believed them. Put differently, I believed that Bill Cosby was a rapist....
A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn't just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality.... And one cannot escape this chaos by hiding behind the lack of a court conviction....
I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts.... I would not dismiss all journalist who've declined to mention these allegations as cowards. It's worth considering what it feels like to, say, have been among those convicting Richard Jewell in the press. And should I have decided to state what I believed about Cosby, I would have had to write a much different piece.... The Bill Cosby piece was my first shot writing for a big national magazine. I had been writing for 12 financially insecure years. By 2007, when I finished my first draft, I had lost three jobs in seven years.... I don't have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.