Stereotypes In The Cosby Show

As a child, my favorite thing to watch on TV was The Cosby Show. When the show was on, I was a Huxtable. And in reality, I was still pretty damn close to being a Huxtable. I was the youngest child of a black, upper middle-class family that resided in New York. My parents both had post-graduate degrees – in fact my father, like Heathcliff Huxtable, was a good-humored physician. Just like the Huxtables, we were a nuclear family of seven: two cis-gendered married parents with five spirited children who rarely got into any serious trouble. The relationships between the Huxtable kids reminded me of my relationships with my own siblings, and the way in which Heathcliff and Clair parented their children reminded me of the way my own parents had raised …show more content…
While I wasn’t experiencing a lot of the things that I saw in other shows centered around black families, The Cosby Show offered me a way to reconcile my identity crisis as a young adolescent raised in white suburbia. I saw black people who lived like me, talked like me, had friends that looked like my friends, and had parents with the same kind of jobs as my parents. The Huxtables presented America with another definition of blackness, as countless intellectuals in the discourse surrounding The Cosby Show have affirmed. It was the definition of blackness that I knew and the definition that became a major part of my …show more content…
I extend love and acceptance to the reality of my parent’s relationship, no matter how dysfunctional it may be. Perhaps Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri were right when they claimed that “the modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family.” Perhaps my parents bought into the idea of a nuclear family that The Cosby Show romanticized. Hardt and Negri’s criticism of the society’s narrow notion of love speaks to the fact that this picture-perfect form of marriage may not be meant for anything beyond