When I was a child, I loved to eat dinner in the kitchen, sitting at the family dining table, alone, while watching monster movies, “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons,” and “The Cosby Show.” My mother would obsessively wash dishes, leaning into the air conditioner during humid summer days; our dog, a black and white mutt, would lie on the linoleum floor, attentively waiting to see which of us would give him a treat. It was during one of the early evenings, my homework done, before I had rushed back to playing Nintendo, that I exclaimed about the wonders of “The Cosby Show,” that the Huxtables were America’s greatest family, how everyone should have a dad like Bill Cosby.

My mother, having just thrown the dog a bit of bread and pulling up the sleeve of her winter robe to keep it from catching fire on the oven, poured her tea and threw some verbal darts. “You don’t have to look at the TV to find a role model or father figure. He is here, in this house, right now.”

I remembered that moment the other day when I saw the news that Cosby had admitted in a previously sealed deposition to drugging women in order to rape them. In all probability Cosby is a serial sex offender. Thus, the public scold of the black ghetto underclass may in fact be guilty of far worst “crimes” than wearing sagging pants or giving their children names that reflect an unfortunate deficit in social and economic capital.

As Salon’s own Brittney Cooper explained, much of the anger at Bill Cosby is rooted in how he betrayed the special trust that was placed in him by Black America. His most noteworthy enterprise, “The Cosby Show,” was a shining exemplar of upward mobility, dignity, and a functioning black family. Now Cosby’s legacy has been called into question.

Americans on both sides of the color line are upset by Cosby’s behavior not exclusively because of the horrific nature of his crimes, but also because his failings have robbed many of them of an innocent and positive part of their youth. Being disabused of childhood nostalgia is one of the most painful parts of being (and becoming) an adult. But perhaps the focus now should be on the source of that nostalgia itself, and how the politics and values of “The Cosby Show,” which were so attractive to so many and for such a long time, are based on a distorted and inaccurate presentation of the black community, one that has enabled a pernicious type of right-wing “colorblind” racism to flourish.

Television offers a distorted image of reality. It—and other types of mass media—are the primary means through which unreal and false representations of human social relationships are learned by the public. The family drama and situation comedy both provide excellent examples of this phenomenon.

“The Cosby Show” followed the day-to-day struggles and experiences of a rich black New York family called the Huxtables. The father, played by Cosby, was a successful obstetrician, and his wife, Claire, was a partner in a law firm. They had one son and four daughters. They hail from a long line of successful African-Americans who were graduates of historically black colleges. The show was a response to a white popular imagination that largely saw black and brown Americans as poor, as members of the underclass,  as criminal, or beaten down by racism — and as such lacking agency, freedom, or upward mobility.

In many ways “The Cosby Show” was the anti-“Moynihan Report”—a much misunderstood and misrepresented exploration of “black ghetto poverty” and “the breakdown of the black family” written in the 1960s by the Labor Department. “The Cosby Show” was also a rebuttal to ’70s TV producer Norman Lear’s popular shows — “Good Times,” “Sanford and Son,” and “The Jeffersons” — where the humanity and travails of black folks living in poverty (and escaping such conditions) were the dominant themes.

Popular culture is inherently political and ideological. While the depiction of a rich and “functioning” black family was superficially transgressive, “The Cosby Show” channeled a particular understanding of race, capitalism, “success,” and “middle class” identity that more often than not reinforced dominant American cultural norms and rules basically in line with the the Horatio Alger myth; it offered to viewers a harmless type of “diversity,” where blackness and the “Black experience” were massaged down into a throwaway mention of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or the struggle to end Apartheid, or simple guest appearances for accomplished black musicians, artists, and actors.

For most of its 8 seasons, “The Cosby Show” existed inside a bubble that was outside of the day-to-day lived experiences of the vast majority of black Americans. The events in bubble were white fantasies of black folks’ lives.

“The Cosby Show” was set during the 1980s and early to mid 1990s in New York City. This was a tumultuous time of protest activity, anti-black and brown police harassment, brutality and killings, tensions between African-Americans and Koreans, anxieties about black “super predators,” “wilding,” the Central Park Five, the Crown Heights riots, and the racist murders and assaults on black youth by white racists in the neighborhood of Howard Beach.