bill cosby
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The Cultural Significance of Whitney Houston
At Vela Magazine, Danielle Jackson discusses Whitney Houston as an embodiment of black excellence, and the continued erasure of black artists’ contributions to commercial music: Houston and the entire lineage of black women performers that preceded her invented techniques and sounds…
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Fresh Comics #7: Giving Up The Ghost
If you’ve never heard of Whit Taylor, then now is the perfect time to discover her. Ghost (2015) is her understated masterpiece, self-published just months ago. As I began reading the book, I thought I was in for a nice little story…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Forgiving my Father, the Serial Rapist
This bit of vital truth to the story of how I came to be came like a puncture—strong, sharp, and sudden.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Brandon Hicks compares a nostalgic past with a scary future in “When I Was A Kid… A Personal Essay.” Then, in the Saturday Essay, Josie Pickens tries to reconcile the real Bill Cosby with the one we’ve come to admire…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Bill Cosby’s Faux Legacy
Bill Cosby was never the man, the icon, the protector and illustrator of black culture, the guide, the genius we have created in our minds.
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Getting Difference Wrong
In an interview with Salon, the always-wise Roxane Gay offers her opinions on Bill Cosby, Lena Dunham, and the challenges of writing characters whose experiences differ from one’s own: We can imagine spaceships and different planets and aliens, but when…
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Staring Our Idols in the Face
For the Guardian, Roxane Gay sums up 2014 not so much as “public figures falling from grace… as we, the public, lowering our pedestals and staring our idols in the face.”
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Stain
It’s hard to remember why I was silent. Maybe, like some of the women only now reporting they were raped by Bill Cosby decades ago, I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed.
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Laugh Track
Inconceivably, unexplainably, and, inevitably, thankfully, Bill Cosby’s on tour again. But even off-stage, he’s been there all his life: In 1976, Cosby earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, after writing a dissertation about whether teachers found…
