W. Kamau Bell, actor, comedian and producer of
Showtime’s ‘We Need To Talk About [Bill] Cosby’ on whose side he’s on:
“I know some Black people say, ‘Don’t tear down this Black
man,' but a third of the survivors are Black women. Why are we prioritizing one
man over all these Black women? I don’t know how you don’t reckon with the
fact that over 60 women have come forward. ,” he says, noting that women who do
go public with sexual assault accusations do not have an easy time. [Cosby] had
a very big influence on my life—as he did for a lot of people, specifically for
Black people of that generation, and then you find out about all the
accusations of sexual assault and rape and eventually I realized I believed all
those women to be telling the truth. How do I then as a comedian answer the
question, ‘Who are your favorite comedians growing up?’ How do I say, ‘Bill
Cosby’? But if I don’t say ‘Bill Cosby,’ it feels like I’m lying, so it just
felt like, if you’re gonna have this conversation, you have to have the whole conversation
and you can’t split it off into parts. Ultimately, you have to figure out, what
can I learn from this or what can we all learn from this?”
Bell says he hopes his documentary—which is wonderful, by
the way—leads “to a further conversation” about sexual assault where women feel
more comfortable coming forward because “that’s not the case right now and how
do we create a system that limits harm?”
I, too, believe the women.
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