Just after William Henry Cosby, the comedian, actor, philanthropist, and, as of this year, convicted felon and sex offender, was led away from a courthouse in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, his spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, denounced the proceedings as “the most racist and sexist trial in the history of the country.” That’s a high bar for a country that has witnessed the Scottsboro trial; the 1955 trial that exonerated the men who killed Emmett Till, another martyr figure whom Cosby’s supporters have compared him to; and the trial of the Central Park Five. Fourteen years have elapsed since the night when Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand. His conviction required the election of a new Pennsylvania prosecutor, the voiding of an agreement with the previous prosecutor, two trials—the first ended in a hung jury—and, contextually, similar allegations from nearly seventy other women. The scales of justice may be tipped, but at every step of these developments they were leaning in Cosby’s favor.

The spectacle of Cosby in handcuffs is wildly, irreconcilably dissonant to anyone who witnessed him at the height of his career and influence, in the eighties. But it is even more jarring in the context of late-stage Cosby, the moral scold, the comedian turned societal heckler who launched that career by literally defending the police shooting of presumably unarmed black men. In a 2004 screed that came to be known as the “pound cake” speech, he said,

People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged: “The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, “If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.” Not “You’re going to get your butt kicked.” No. “You’re going to embarrass your mother.”

It is difficult to find adjectives equal to the scale of Cosby’s hypocrisy. He gave that speech to the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund—an organization that, among other things, fights against entrenched bias in the criminal-justice system and which fought historically against actual lynchings, not the hyperbolic kind that attended Cosby’s sentencing. But what Wyatt’s comments lacked in historical accuracy, moral clarity, or even basic truth they made up for in calibrated indignation. At the moment when Cosby was shackled and shuffling away to begin a prison sentence, another man, a white one, accused of sexual misconduct, was being defended by the most powerful men in the country—also white—and anticipating a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. On the day Cosby was designated a “sexually violent predator” by Judge Steven T. O’Neill, the President of the United States said that a second woman to make allegations of misconduct against Judge Brett Kavanaugh “has nothing,” and pointed to her level of inebriation when the incident took place.

Therein lies the source of Cosby’s indignation. Underlying his début, on the TV show “I Spy,” in 1965, and throughout the incendiary career that followed, Cosby’s appeal lay in his representation of a particular node of racial progress. His early standup career was marked by a kind of accessible everyman humor, a comedic equivalent of the crossover appeal of Motown. A young Richard Pryor bristled at the anodyne swath of culture that Cosby occupied in the sixties and the pressures it placed on other comedians, particularly black ones, to create humor that soothed the racial anxieties of a white audience. For the six decades prior to dozens of allegations of sexual assault and rape becoming public knowledge, Cosby served as a brief for a particular kind of racial equality. The indignation on Tuesday stemmed from his presumption that, in America, equality means equal impunity. This peculiar definition was not formed yesterday. In language that was inflammatory in the moment and only became more outrageous with the passage of time, the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas referred to the 1991 Senate inquiry into his own history of sexual harassment as a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” Here was a profane inversion of history—the memory of black men and black women whose bodies were mutilated for the sake of macabre white entertainment and the shoring up of Jim Crow deployed on behalf of men angered by the consequences of their own transgressions. This is the rhetoric of men whose definition of victimhood is the inability to victimize others. But the greatest profanity is the fact that it worked and that, as a consequence, Thomas remains seated on the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, Wyatt labelled Kavanaugh and Cosby as fellow-victims of a “sex war.” If so, Thomas is, of course, the link between them, a precedent working on behalf of them both. If Kavanaugh ascends to the Supreme Court without a formal investigation into the accusations made against him (all of which he has denied), it will be, in part, because a black man established a model for how best to present oneself as a victim in public. This is a form of interracial unity that the country could do without. Kavanaugh cannot fall back on a nightmare history of recreational murder, but there is some fraternal recognition of a shared plight (Cosby’s prison sentence notwithstanding). Cosby and Kavanaugh are twin exemplars of a kind of amoral amnesty. It is granted to men of great talent and wealth and to those born to men who possess either talent or wealth. The outrage on their behalf is really disdain for the idea that what has been sold as a form of lifetime immunity has become a conditional one. Cosby’s precipitous fall is Exhibit A in this transition.

At Cosby’s sentencing, Judge O’Neill noted that the comedian “has never accepted responsibility for his crime nor has he shown remorse.” The centerpiece of Cosby’s poverty-hectoring tours and the book “Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors” is the corrosive effect of irresponsibility. In a powerful victim-impact statement, Constand pointed to the enduring trauma that Cosby inflicted on her. She lost weight; she was plagued by nightmares. “I dreamed that another woman was being assaulted right in front of me and it was all my fault,” she told the court. Constand has never married and leads an insular life—outcomes she sees as a legacy of the night when Cosby violated her trust and assaulted her. Cosby did this. He inflicted this trauma at least sixty times over. There is no accounting for the mechanisms of deflection or rationalization that allowed him to behave in this way while simultaneously denouncing others for far smaller concerns, like what they choose to name their children. He might not ever do what he has demanded of so many others—take responsibility—but he can no longer avoid being held responsible.