In rough grainy footage from 2014, here’s the comedian Hannibal dropping a truth bomb on Bill Cosby’s reputation. The explosion of that bomb had vast ripples. To date 60 women have come forth to charge America’s Dad with some version of date rape, and of course he’s been through court and is now out of jail on some rich man’s technicality. But it all started with a joke that had truth in it.

The most interesting thing about the joke, to me, is that Hannibal wasn’t directly coming down on Cosby for being a rapist, but for being a moral hypocrite.

“Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ‘80s,” Buress said during a show at a Philadelphia comedy club, mocking Bill Cosby.

“Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby. So turn the crazy down a couple notches.”

Meaning: Bill Cosby was pre-rapist famous for a lot of things 15-20 years ago, but in the black community especially, he was notorious for blaming the victims for the crime. For calling them violent and illiterate and profane, and in particular:

“He also had harsh words for black men who don’t have jobs and are angry about their lives:“

“You’ve got to stop beating up your women because you can’t find a job, because you didn’t want to get an education and now you’re (earning) minimum wage,” Cosby said. “You should have thought more of yourself when you were in high school, when you had an opportunity.”

So the subtext of Hannibal’s joke wasn’t rage against the rapes, so much as it was rage against Cosby turning himself into a shitty conformist, profiting by it immensely and famously, and then turning around and vilifying every black man who didn’t conform, and didn’t succeed, and wasn’t America’s beloved and secretly rapey daddy man.

I remember the time when he did so. Let me tell you, there were plenty of well-off people, black and white alike, who timidly and quietly applauded Bill Cosby for saying what he said.

Those people are trauma victims each and every one. They wear nice clothes. They live in big houses on nice streets. Their insipid core religion is about things like fantasy football and Mediterranean diets and taking the family to worship services at Disney, and they’re hollow as fuck inside. Victims perhaps in their own right, but maybe more like good Germans who went to work every day and made sure the trains ran on time, and were proud of their status as good, moral, hardworking people. Patriots. The non-iodized salt of the earth.

Being victimized by rape is a tragedy, and everyone knows that.

Being victimized by taking it up the ass since childhood from a broken system? Well now.

That’s a gray area, don’t you think?

Bootstraps, people, c’mon, get with the Program …

You’re peeking now inside the real black heart of what Eeyore calls the capitalist death cult.

To some greater or lesser extent, I’m a cult member and so are you.

Not just a cult member either, but fairly high-ranking at that. Neither of us is eating out of a dumpster or living in a Sentra.

I’m not trying to shame you or prescribe for you. I’m just stating revelatory truths, like Hannibal did 8 years ago.

My post-cult religion teaches me that good things can come of that.

So I’m living as if I’m moving toward those good things and maybe, theoretically, against the odds, some of them will come true.

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h/t: W. Kamau Bell On Bill Cosby’s Legacy