This is a thing that happened. Bill Cosby convicted three to ten years, got to serve three from what I saw. So we're at this space where "America's Dad" now has an inmate number. Have we even started to digest that? Resolve that? I don't know. But "America's Dad" now has an inmate number, and he has a mug shot. He's accused and convicted of dropping quaaludes and raping women. That's the first part of it, when we talk about this elitism. I don't want to belabor the point, because you know Antonio Moore did a very good article "Cosby Show Dreams and African Financial Realities". If you haven't read that, and you want to get the context, like I said, Politics 102. But here is the thing for me. It's kind of hard to hit that curve [1984-1992 period] and think about the way I think about The Cosby Show now. It's still a funny show, but it kind of goes back to who we are.[1984-2018] Are we Cosby Show people? When you look at that house, when you look at what the purchase price was, you realize that what The Cosby Show was, you see that The Cosby Show represented approximately zero percent of black people. And even if it represented point one percent of black people, then why was it on TV? Ninety-nine point nine percent of us aren't living that way. You begin to understand a little bit about how propaganda moves. You begin to understand what America did instead of making things right.

The civil rights movement and our fight for rights in this country was about making things right. You've been robbed, systematically deprived. Every time you go up: Smash it down. Go up: Take it down. Start a business: No. Get elected to the senate: No. Elected to governor: No. No you can't go that way. You can't go that way. That's why I get mad. If we had been left alone, like I said, during Reconstruction, everything would be fine. We wouldn't be equal, but we would have our own elite class. We'd have an upper-middle. We'd have a middle. We'd have a normal social structure. But that didn't happen.

In order for The Cosby Show to exist means racism didn't happen or we were made whole. That's what it requires for The Cosby Show to have existed. The problem with The Cosby Show is that it moves in such a way that it made not only us but white America believe that racism didn't happen, and it didn't exist. And even if it did exist, it's been fixed.

You're living in this era now where everything is about this kind of expression of wealth. So you talk art. You talk about the house. The Cosby Show house was worth 700 thousand dollars in 1984. You had to put down one hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash. No black people were doing that! What are you talking about? But this was represented as like a normal black family. Not only to us --It drove us crazy-- but it made white people feel like, "Cosby is my friend, because I don't have any." We were talking before, we were talking about 'virtual integration'--that means white people don't know any black people. If you don't know any black people your integration is on TV. If your best friend is Bill Cosby, and he's fine, black people are fine. They don't need anything from you. What are they talking about?

Now I want you to understand what that did to us. Because The Cosby Show was an expression, everything that happened in there was this was living off this aspiration. So we started feeling like not only could we do it, we started liking stuff we never liked before. You got a lot of people who started liking doing golf. I want to do art. I can do anything I want to do. I can be anything. I can think any thoughts. I ain't got to worry about politics no more. I can be apolitical. I can do whatever I want to do. You know what that sounds like when you tell me you can do whatever you want to do? The skies the limit. It sounds like you think you're a rich white person. Hey, people who believe they can do anything and believe they can move any way they want and maneuver how they want to maneuver, those are elite white people.

So we were living through Cosby America, when our real America was Good Times America [1974-1979]. And we're still living through the consequences of not understanding our economic predicament instead of living through an aspiration. That is the legacy of Cosby. That is the legacy of The Cosby Show. It's best to watch it as if it is a white show, because it is. It is a white show in every wealth metric that matters. Black people were not living like that. And for the overwhelming majority of us we still aren't. So I want you to think about the context of that in terms of what we're going to talk about. How The Cosby Show led us to mimic these expressions of whiteness in a way that we thought, that's what mattered.

"Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016," June 2018
An important upshot is that the top and the middle of the distribution are affected differentially by changes in equity and house prices. ... A second consequence of pronounced portfolio heterogeneity is that asset price movements can introduce a wedge within the evolution of the income and wealth distribution. ... Thanks to its demographic detail, we can also exploit the HSCF to shed new light on the long-run evolution of racial inequalities. The HSCF covers the entire postwar history of racial inequality and spans the pre- and post-civil rights eras. Importantly, as we have information on income and wealth, our paper does not complement only the recent studies of the long-run evolution of racial income inequality (Bayer and Charles (2017)); we also add an important new dimension: the HSCF data offer a window on long-run trends in racial wealth inequality that have so far remained unchartered territory. We expose persistent and, in some respects, growing inequalities between black and white Americans. Income disparities today are as big as they were in the pre-civil rights era.
[University of Bonn, CEPR, IZA: 3-4]

"This is a condemnation of all of them."

I have seen Charles Blow. I have seen Don Lemon. I have seen two black men talking about their sexual assaults not in terms of just what happened to them. They're talking about it in defense of the woman, or women, who are accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

So let's just explore one of these women, who she is. Let's talk about, have a conversation about, what the accusations are. And let's get into it.

And she goes into her career. Now, I want you to pay close attention to this, because this is an example of a very elite life, ladies and gentleman. [READS AFFIDAVIT]
She's going through her resume, basically. These are a lot of high-end jobs, because she was running in the same circle as Kavanaugh. That's what it means though. Four women who came forward -- This is not the fourth one --I think she's number three. All these women, like, moved in Brett Kavanaugh's circle. Now, let's go to the accusation.[READS AFFIDAVIT]

Now, this is some horrible stuff. [VERNACULAR]Gang raped, child.

See these people are moving in circles. These people are trying to find people to date and be with and live with and I want to be with a future Supreme Court justice and all of that. I'm trying to thread that needle here with what Don Lemon and Charles Blow will tell you, sexual assault is sexual assault. Both Charles Blow and Don Lemon said, they were young when they were sexually assaulted. They were not women who were at that age, drinking, and coming to parties. One of the things that strikes me in that is she says, "I saw them spike punch."

So hold on. Was everything OK while they were spiking punch as long as you didn't drink the punch? Why? We don't ever really call into question the morality of these women. We just see them: "You're just like me."

Webtrends Corporation v. Julie Swetnick

Now, I'm not saying anybody deserves to be sexually assaulted. This is awful. This is wrong. What I am saying is, sexual assault is not just sexual assault across the board. That's not what this is. There are stages to everything. It can end in sexual assault, but there are degrees to everything. I am calling into question, ladies and gentlemen, your morality.

"Hold on, playboy, what you think you doing?"

Let me tell you: If I go to a party, and I see somebody spike something, I am going to be, like, "Hold on, playboy, what you think you're doing?" And I'm going to tell everybody else at the party, "I don't know what he put in this. But there's some stuff in here that you probably didn't plan on drinking. I saw him pour something in here. I don't know what it was. Maybe he wants to tell us what it was. What you poured in there. I saw you pour it in there." Because I don't want to see anybody get raped. I'm not going to come back to a party after I see [someone] pouring stuff in there.

You know, there's a difference [between] a bunch of people [who] go and get some alcohol, and they all decide --"We're going to have [barkng?] fruit punch." They all decide that's what they're going to drink, and they're all drinking it-- [and] you're spiking it. You get real rapey when you start spiking stuff and doing slick stuff off to the side. If you see somebody do that, and you don't say anything to anybody else, I have to call into question your morality. Because it sounds to me like you don't have a problem until somebody drops a quaalude in your drink. Then, all of a sudden, you don't want to "ride the train." But that other girl don't want to ride the train either. Maybe if you had told her that somebody was going to put something in her punch, she wouldn't have to "ride the train."

Another thing has to come into context is here. Understand the reason this person didn't tell all the other girls that there was something in the punch is --she, you, don't want to get ostracized. You don't want to get left out of this group. Right? And you're not really being honest. We've seen all kind of Hollywood stuff about "mean girls" and stuff like that--how you "really" are. Do I really want to talk, listen to these elite women, about how you let your "sisters" get raped. [VERNACULAR] "I don't know. I don't know why she drank that. And now she's in there, girl, you know, it's better her than me. I don't know. I didn't drink it. I saw him when he put it in there, and I wasn't going to drink it." You saw this a few times, a line "riding a train." What does that say about you, what you're willing to do to have access to this group of men? This feels very awful to me.

I remember having a bunch of conversations with black women when this went down, and the thing that always perplexed black women was [VERNACULAR] "Child, left their friend at the club? Or they didn't know where she was?"

The sense with black women was, listen, you come tell me in a club. [VERNACULAR] "Girl, Jennifer drunk. She about on the floor. I think, she threw up. Oh, my god, well, we got to leave!" And when Jennifer gets in the car, everyone is going to cuss Jennifer out. [VERNACULAR]
"Jennifer! We done told you. You going to have to get help if you're just going to keep out here drinking, falling down. We can't even enjoy ourselves. What's wrong with you? We told you not to have them shots before you left the house anyway. You had them shots, now you drunk on the floor. Now we got to go home again, and you can't ever be the designated driver. You can never drive us nowhere 'cause you get drunk before you leave your house." And you're going to cuss Jennifer all the way home. You're not going to leave Jennifer in the club. And you're not going to sacrifice her in order to access this group of men or because you don't want to make them mad.

Now, what I want Charles Blow and Don Lemon to understand is that's a very different thing. Because she finally 'got the qualude' and rode "the train" is a different thing from you, getting raped as a little black boy in your own house. How do you not understand that there is a difference between what happened to you and this woman who was trying to access something until she 'got the quaalude'?

We keep trying to see our lives and ourselves through elites.

No. You ain't never been to that party. This ain't no party where you're on the south side of Chicago, and somebody jumps in the room. This ain't no kind of party where you got raped by a frat boy. This ain't that party. We think we understand them, but we don't. This is an elite group of people doing elite things. This whole thing seems very awful to me.

Now, that doesn't say anyone deserves anything. Regardless of what she did, she did not deserve any kind of assault. What I'm telling you is, that watching that punch get spiked, watching this stuff happen more than one time and coming back says something to me about the person you are morally. It says something to me, when I see Don Lemon and Charles Blow, it says to me that you all want to keep your jobs at The New York Times and CNN as opposed to just telling the news.

What's happening, when a white woman gets assaulted, is everyone becomes the voice of that white woman. All of a sudden, even black men [are] the voice of white women, because sexual assault is all the same. Sexual assault of little black boys is somehow the same as women who go places and watch punch get spiked and women get thrown into rooms and men running around with their little ding dongs out. Somehow we attribute a level of sameness to that. It is not the same. Here's how we know. [READS EXCERPT]

"Huge dark basements", child? Really?

"with enormous sofas and yards, and lots and lots of beer. No parents---thinking back on it now, as a parent myself---were ever around. We traveled in groups and knew never to leave a friend alone at a party, but there was so much drinking that we sometimes lost track of each other. It could be difficult to know where your friends were and--if they were in a room with a boy--what was going on in there."

Understand what was said just then. "There were no parents around." That's how you know this is a group thing. That's how you know this is not an individual thing, this Kavanaugh and frat boys doing what they're doing. She said, no parents were around. Kids drinking beer, running "trains," pulling out their genitalia, and no parent are around. But nobody condemns the group. Everybody's, "Oh! Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist."

No. This is a condemnation of your group, not just Kavanaugh, and not just frat boys. It's a condemnation of all of you who are in that group watching punch get spiked, and you don't say anything until it happens to you. See, when stuff happens to us, everybody condemns all of us. Nobody says, "Well, that's just one person."

"Wilding"

But hold on. No parents were around. No one's in charge. They just let their kids do whatever. Y'all remember this? [1989] Y'all remember this black woman? [2014] [MOCKING] "Well, what kind of mom is she? I don't know what kind of mom she must be to leave her kids. I don't care what's going on. She should have kept the kids."

We have to ask ourselves, What do I want for my kid who doesn't have the protection of wealth? Who doesn't have the social capital. Who doesn't have the connections. Why would I want my kid to be around you with your wild, crazy self? I don't want my kid to be around no wild animal just raping. And the one's who aren't raping is just watching stuff get thrown into punch. I don't need my kid to be around that unless I have wealth, some kind of protection I can insulate that kid from your wildness and your degradation. I don't want my kid to go to school with you if I can't protect him. I need to be able to protect my kid from you, because you're a problem. You're a wild animal. Running around, just throwing your little ding dong out, rubbing it up against everybody, then throwing something in peoples' drink. [MOCKING] "We're going to get them in this room over there and run the 'train'."

That's wild. Like we don't ever hold these people accountable for how wild they are, for who they are. That's wild. Like we don't ever hold these people accountable for how wild they are, for who they are. Why would I want to be around you? Honestly, right now, these are people I, at my age, wouldn't be alone in a room with. I wouldn't be in a room with three or four of these people. I know what you're capable of.

Y'all got to give me a break. Don Lemon gave us a "pound cake " speech of his own. You've got to stop viewing your life from their lens. You ain't them. I find it hard to have a lot of sympathy for this group anyway. But you want to bring me a girl who wen to ten little rapey parties and saw all this stuff. Ten, that she tells me. I don't know how many she actually went to. She said she went to ten, and you want me to feel? [MOCKING] "Well, we want to have a conversation about it, Yvette."

No, we can't. Understand that the conversations we are having, when you're talking about opiods or cocaine. That's a policy conversation we're having: How to change policy.

I can't give spending all this time about this one woman or four women who said they got raped at a party they knew was a rapey party as opposed to this whole group of American d.o.s. people who are suffering. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that for you, because I have breasts, a vagina, and a set of ovaries. That's not going to happen. I'm so sorry. That's between you and Brett Kavanaugh. I got other problems.

I got lead in my water. You got lead in your water? I got people with no money who built this country. You got that? I really don't want any Trump nominee on the Supreme Court.

But what I'm saying is, I'm not going to give you that kind of energy, because what you depend on is me seeing you, thinking, Oh, my god that happened to me! No, that didn't happen to me. Y'all got a whole different set of stuff going on. That ain't what happened. Even black women, other people who get raped, even poor white women --that's not the same thing that you all were doing there, trying to leverage how mean y'all be to your friends or other women who get caught up.

Well, okay. You all deal with that. This is an elite problem. You're having an elite dysfunction that no one ever told you about. You deal with that, and we'll decide what we want. I'll treat you the same way that you treat black people you see homeless. You step over. Well, I'm going to step over you, too, and go on to the next issue.

Postscript

As my eye traveled further down the page, it came across a much smaller headline below the fold: "Nobel Peace Prize Is Awarded to Two Who Fight Rape in War." Sharing the prize this year are a Yazidi woman from Iraq, Nadia Murad, and a Congolese physician, Dr. Denis Mukwege. Ms. Murad and Dr. Mukwege are being honored, in the prize committee's words, "for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict."

What are they talking about? "Fight rape in war". This is some inspirational message, some high, high-order thinking, some kind of elite, philanthropic filip under the the circumstances.

1. War is permissible. 2. Warfare comes with rules. 3. War need not be violent. 4. The purpose of war is unknown. 5. Women never participate in war. 6. Men are never raped. 7. Rape is never punished. 9. Everyone is otherwise "fine." 10. Brett Kavanaugh acts alone.

That's wild. That's is some "train" tunneling through intercontinental rapine to capture the "elevated" rapist and an encrypted "right" to end a pregnancy. Better dead or maimed, homeless, and starving than raped. I have to question this morality. I'm sure MLK has. Quadaffi might have. Maybe not Mssrs. Roosevelt, Wilson, Kellogg, Hull, Kissinger, and Obama or the diva Aung San Suu Kyi. But I have to question the morality of anyone incapable of identifying who all is responsible for re-producing a culture which routinely assaults human comprehension of peace.