Well, maybe. To be honest, I didn’t see the race aspect in any of this until Chapelle brought it up. Chappelle had about the raunchiest, most politically incorrect show on non-premium cable, and I loved him for it. Everyone seemed to love him for it. To push things even a millimeter further than he did would require moving to HBO. I mean, did he chafe under FCC restrictions? Howard Stern could comisserate, I’m sure, but he never accused Infinity Broadcasting of anti-semitism that I’m aware of.
He rather wickedly ripped on whites and gays of any color quite often, just as a forinstance, and nobody called him a bigot, or got defensive. We all got the satire, or so I thought, and “minstrel show” never entered my mind. Nor anyone else’s, that I can see. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it just thought it was the funniest damn show on television and couldn’t get enough.
Oh well. I’ll miss having new episodes, that’s for sure, but all good things must end, I suppose. I might just pick up the article, if only to cure some of my bafflement.
No, it really, really isn’t, esp. in the USA. How much of the real wealth of this country is owned by black and latino people? I don’t mean money, I mean wealth. You must realize that, while all of them aren’t white, few of them are black.
You do realize that, just because there are also poor white people doesn’t negate the fact that white people own everything, right?
First of all this is not true. Being white does confer some automatic, passive privilege that white people receive and black people don’t. Blacks and whites do not share the same fate. There are many ways to illustrate this, but this one’s the first that comes to mind: look at the composition of the prison population by race and then tell me it’s the same.
Chappelle’s humor focused on race, and he didn’t want to do it anymore because of the racial divide between blacks and whites. This divide does exit, racism does exist, and Chappelle felt he was hurting the situation more than helping. Nothing about that is horseshit.
Blacks only make up about 12% of the population. Just how much do they need to own for you to be happy? Most Latinos are immigrants so it’s going to take them a while to move up the food chain. There are, however, many wealthy Lations who live in places like…the continent of South America or the country of Spain. To be sure there are still issues relating to racism particularly with regard to Black Americans but that does not mean 1) You can now include Latinos in your rainbow coalition of victimhood 2) a man making in excess of $50m is a good example to highlight that racism.
Actually it does. White people don’t own everything. Some white people are very wealthy but most white people are not. You seem to be a little paranoid about this.
People tend to associate with people who look and sound like them. That isn’t unique to white people. And do you think, perhaps, that there may be a socio-economic cause to Black rates of imprisonment? For example, in countries like England most of the prison population is white, what are they doing wrong such that they are imprisoning their own white brothers? Your premise is overbroad, simplistic and really without much merit.
Or perhaps he just quit because the pressure was too much, he didn’t need the money, he got lazy, he joined a cult, likes farms in Ohio a lot, was burned out etc. etc.
Any one of the above are as legitimate as your pov.
The fact that Chapelle is being called to explain his actions over and over again doesn’t exactly prove him right, but it does explain why he feels so scrutinized.
He had a successful show. He didn’t want to do it anymore, so he stopped. The end. That’s the only explanation we, as an audience, need to know or are due.
(Okay, the fleeing to Africa without letting anyone know where you’re going was a tad odd, but the basic story is still none of our business)
I really don’t know about that. Chapelle was wildly popular and only growing moreso. He was offered a huge sum of money and a degree of latitude most artists can only have wet dreams about. His third season was as eagerly anticipated as any on Cable, and perhaps on any network…and he tossed it all and flew abrubtly to Africa, leaving everyone (Charlie Murphy, his bosses, you name them) to wonder what in the Hell was going on. I just don’t see this as a “black” thing. It looks like a spectacularly drama-queeny celebrity meltdown thing, quite frankly, and this kind of behavior would set tongues wagging no matter who he was or what he looked like. Yeah, he’s being scrutinized, but he’s a performer! You get real famous and suddenly implode like that, people are going to scratch their heads.
So would you have prefered he had said this instead?
“The bottom line was, people who are under the influence of certain sociocultural factors that are correlated with membership to the majority race which make them clueless to the general perspective associated with being an African-American are quite ubiqitous in the environment, and where can a person who has the particular sociocultural perspectives associated with African-Americans go and be himself or say something that’s familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize?”
I’ll tell you a little secret. Nearly all of those wealthy Latin Americans are WHITE.
I say give the guy a break. He’s a comedian. He’s used to going up on stage, doing his thing, and then going home. Now that he’s on a show, he’s got handlers and market researchers and a full panel of executives deciding what he should say…well, Hollywood is tough on everyone. It can be a nasty business and not everyone is cut out for it or wants it. It does hurt families and it does make it hard to know or keep actual friends. It can be especially nasty when there are race dynamic involved- and there are. Go look at a class of film students one day (or an Oscar party). You’ve never seen so many white faces. Even if it’s not a sign of deep running racism, it can be uncomfortable. If I had a job where whole corporate structures of Black people were telling me what to do, and my job was to be “a funny white girl”, I would be uncomfortable. We all get a little uncomfortable outside of our element.
I know I’ve called in sick to a job and never came back. I’ve left jobs because the conditions skeeved me out. Just because he’s famous and we all like his show doesn’t mean he has some kind of responsibility to us.
But you probably only talk to reasonably enlightened people. From all the interviews DC’s done about why he left, doing the show exposed him to the fact that there are people watching his show who didn’t get it the way you and your friends get it. Fucked up people who take it on a different level. My personal guess is that even though he always knew in the abstract that people like that still abound, he didn’t have to confront deeply it until he started to meet the public and that’s when it became an unavoidable reality to him. The truth is that a lot of us are sheltered from the reality of hate. We encounter it from time to time and think it’s a fucked up anomaly and rush back to our enlightened circles to say, “woah, that was creepy,” but it doesn’t really open your eyes when there’s nothing at stake. Lots of things in life are like that.
People seem to take an arrogant view that if someone’s famous they owe it to everyone to be tough and just take it and like it in return for the money and love their getting, but sometimes those people are supposed to be artists and what makes them good is that they are sensitive and have emotional reactions. I don’t think Dave Chappelle would be funny if he didn’t have a finely tuned sense of how things ought to be versus how they are. If you don’t see what’s wrong and illogical in society, or if you don’t have any feelings about it, how can you comment on it in a new way that makes people laugh? I think what makes him special is that he doesn’t come at things from a jaded point of view. I don’t believe he had ever internalized the reality of racism to the degree that it exists and I think it’s the exact same problem a lot of his critics have. They haven’t had the wakeup call he’s had, and sometimes you just don’t know til you know.
The way I think of it is it’s like when you grow up in a diverse city and don’t think a lot about racism from day to day, and then you go on a roadtrip and you stop in some strange place and go to the grocery store and the white cashier is chatting with the person ahead of you in line and they are saying racist things. Maybe moving to BET might shelter him from those people a bit, but I think the point is that he had never really internalized that segregation was somehow necessary to feel free to be yourself. Yeah, we can all say, “how could you be surprised?” but really, don’t you feel shocked and assulted when you have to go into that grocery store and face that cashier. You just can’t wait to go back to the “real world” of home where people like that have no credibility and you can forget them.
Even though every celebrity has to go through that to some degree, most of them don’t talk about it in public because they know everyone will say they’re crazy. What did they expect? Who do they think they are and why do they think they’re so special? Of course you sold your soul and now you’re a commodity but that’s fair play for 50 million bucks. How naive were you? But my view of it is that if Dave Chappelle had been jaded on that stuff he never would have been so gleefully hilarious. Now he’s in this trap as an artist and as a public figure, and he’s trying a new way to get out of it and I think it takes a lot of guts. When people call you crazy you get put in the position of sacrificing your remaining credibility trying to show that you’re sane, and most people won’t risk it. They go hide. Not Dave, he keeps risking it all to tell the truth as he sees it and I’m hearing him. I think he is fucking awesome.
I dunno. We caucasians have had many years’ worth of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor (and their emulators) to watch and get used to the whole concept of a black guy sitting up in front of a crowd of white folks and making fun of us (and gays, and Asians, and black women, and white women, and drug addicts, and…). I don’t want to give myself too much credit, here. It just isn’t that much of a stretch anymore to appreciate someone like Dave Chapelle for simply being a great comedian among great comedians of any ethnicity.
I wonder what Chappelle thought about Africa…not exactly the friendliest place in the world despite the fact that it is mostly black. Wonder if the genocide in Dafur by Arabs against blacks bothers him at all?
Still, he’s right about the Rick James bit. We did ruin it
It seems to me that Chappelle has said several times that he was not comfortable being a superstar. He has implied that it negatively affected his friendships and other relationships. This was pretty clear in the Actor’s Studio interview. Yes, he wants to make a good living as a comedian and performer. Maybe he even likes being rich. But he’s not willing to do the superstar thing in order to be $50 million rich. He’s got his limits and he’s not willing what from his point of view is his soul for $50 million. It takes integrity and guts. You might not make the same decision. But really what Chappelle is saying is “I don’t want this life and having $50 million isn’t going to make it better.”
:dubious:
Africa is a big place, as big as a whole continent even. Chappelle didn’t visit all of Africa. He hung out at a friend’s place in South Africa, which is a fairly modern country.
