Since the premiere of "The Cosby Show" in 1984 — two decades after the civil rights movement — there has been a seeming obsession with presenting "respectable" and "good" Black people on network TV to majority-white Americans. That obsession, of course, has deep roots: Black Americans are raised with the expectation that they must be twice as "good" and hard-working as their white counterparts not just to succeed but also to avoid being touched by racism and racist scrutiny.
The reality, though, was that portraying one's respectability to white people is not, and never was, a shield from systemic oppression or personal racism.
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