Ebony’s November Cover Breeds Mixed Emotions
Lately, Ebony magazine has been posting the covers to their upcoming monthly issues on Twitter and on Facebook. The cover they recently revealed for the upcoming November issue…let’s just say folks are talking...a lot.
The November issue, named “Family Value(s),” prominently displays a photo of Bill’s Cosby’s television family, the Huxtables, with a shattered glass graphic. When social media got wind of the image, there was an immediate firestorm of mixed “emotional” reactions.
Facebook commenter Davene Ward said this:
”Ebony magazine has lost all of my respect. The ignorance and self harm you portray by that Cosby cover is so offensive and demonizing towards African American families. Ebony magazine is a joke and you have the nerve to make that cover for attention and publicity with zero good benefits. Ebony magazine shows its true face, you are the slave of the media and puppet of ignorance and self-destruction of everything African Americans stand for. Shame on you.”
Another Facebook commenter named “Cocoa Fly” disagreed by saying:
“The Cosby Show's reputation has been shattered whether you think Bill Cosby is a rapist or not. These allegations have affected the wholesomeness of the show. The photo reflects this. People are upset before even reading the article. For all we know, the article could be supporting Cosby.”
Ebony’s Editor-in-Chief Kierna Mayo made an appearance last week on CNN to defend the controversial cover saying, ”We we’re faced with a situation where we could keep going in the more traditional direction, which would have been a celebrity cover in the classic sense, but one of my top editors, S. Tia Brown, suggested that we do “The Cosby Show.” And it immediately resonated. It really stopped me in my tracks.”
Mayo went on to say, “But in this case we simply let our audience sit with this idea of a fracture over this iconic family that so many of us truly revered, and some still do revere. We wanted to ask the question: “Can we separate the man from the art?” And that’s what we do inside, with the story. And I really invite readers to not just react to the cover, but to take in the reporting as well.”
Jill Hopkins, co-host of Vocalo Radio’s “The Morning Amp,” says that Bill Cosby and the Huxtables represented the best Black America had to offer.
“My family and other black families saw the Huxtables as, at once, the mountaintop...The "War on Drugs" painted black people from urban areas as people with problems. Cliff, Claire, and the kids painted us as the Ideal. We were here for it,” Hopkins says. “Bill [Cosby], for at least one entire generation of Americans, was Cliff Huxtable. Not just because he was on our TVs every week for eight seasons, but because for every public appearance, every book he wrote, every movie he did, every commercial he was in he fashioned himself as "America's Dad".
Hopkins went on to say that the recent allegations hit Black America harder than anywhere else.
“For a lot of us, he was the best male role model we had. I saw more of Cliff Huxtable than I ever saw of my actual father,” Hopkins says. “He made a living out of telling us to be better, to pull our pants up, to go to college, to give back to our communities. Of course we wanted to believe that was real! He was all we had!”
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