And then there was gender. “The Cosby Show” was, on its surface, extremely progressive on the issue of domestic and professional power balancing between the sexes. Clair Huxtable was a lawyer, ambitious and funny and brilliant and demanding of respect. She and Cliff had an equitable, loving, sexually charged relationship; they offered an idealized vision of a feminist hetero coupling. He was a nurturer to their children; his engagement as a father and as a domestic partner was the basis of the whole show. Even his work had a feminist dimension: He was an obstetrician. He took joy and pride in delivering babies, in treating the impending parenthood of his patients and their husbands as a project that would be a shared one.

But when Cosby began to do his moralizing on race and responsibility, some of the cracks in the show’s gender politics were exposed. It became clear that he placed a lot of blame for racial inequality not just on black people, but on black women who were not like Clair Huxtable. Cosby’s infamous “pound cake” speech, delivered in 2004 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, was about what he saw as the role of parental inattention in landing so many black young men in jail. He was officially addressing both mothers and fathers, but his gendered judgments got clearer as he demanded, “Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18, and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol? And where is his father? And why don’t you know where he is?” In the same speech, Cosby lamented, “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” and chided, “Five or six different children, same woman, eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to.” This was a brutal language of misogyny, blaming women—women unattached to men—for the social disintegration of the family.

These were the same years that the charges that Cosby had assaulted women were beginning to emerge. Cosby denied the rape allegations, but in several cases conceded that he had had consensual relationships outside of his long marriage to wife Camille. This alone should have provoked a critical examination of his message: A man who was running around the country yelling at women for how they were conducting their sex lives, a man who held his own marriage up as a model of functional commitment, had in fact been repeatedly unfaithful.

To have gone further—to have really dealt with the possibility that this extremely rich man lambasting poor people for everything from stealing pound cake to wearing low-slung pants to how they named their children—might have drugged and raped more than a dozen women would have made our heads pop off. It would have made us question every single good, reassuring, optimistic thing that Bill Cosby ever made us think about ourselves and our country. It might have made us rethink the way he had held up wealthy people as model feminists, and about exactly how screwed up it was that that his progressive cheerful vision of post-racial America had never addressed the structural realities faced by non-wealthy people.