We Is US: The United States (And That Means America)

 

 Over the last three posts, I've given you examples of how the absurdity of slavery negatively impacts our nation - I gave you a link to slavery, specifically, in the food industry.

   

 I've made the point conservative politics - unfortunately even the Republican Party's - aren't relevant, in any real sense, to our lives.

   

 We're doing the best we can, with what little we got, folks: 

 It ain't about hurting nobody,...

 

A Friend Of Mine Has A Message (For The White Man)

Yes, Keith Knight is a personal friend of mine - going waaay back - but, other than passing on the message, I'm staying-the-fuck out of this one:

I'm bad-off enough, with my back, than for me to get beat up over this shit again,...,...

ADDED - FROM A FACEBOOK FRIEND:

 

This is how I think, too,...

Noncents: "Frank Carson Was Penniless When He Died"

"Comic had just £8,000 to his name,...”

Wow:

I'm developing bedsores (after 8 weeks in bed) and would kill to be "penniless" right now,...

 

Dave Chappelle Is Obviously "Racially Vulnerable" And His Fans Are Obviously (And Actively) Driving Him Nuts

This is cruel.

Sorry but, other than Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, I don't hear about a lot of comics dealing with this and the man is too important to let it slide:

“I'm watching Dave Chappelle quit stand up,” tweeted Lesli-Ann Lewis. “He's tired of White people treating him like he should shuck and jive.” Writing for Ebony, she expanded upon her use of that historically loaded phrase:  

Being in that crowd, a sea of drunk White male faces and seeing Chappelle sit there and be jeered at made me uncomfortable. Heckling isn’t uncommon for comedians but often when a comedian as famous as Chappelle puts their foot down, it is usually respected.  

While the racial makeup of the crowd was incidental, the way they treated Chappelle is not. It speaks to a long complicated history: the relationship between the White audience and the Black entertainer. This is a relationship you can easily trace to early minstrel shows, to archetypes of Blacks that still define the roles we’re offered today. 

One of the reasons Chappelle abandoned his sketch comedy series at its peak of popularity was that he grew uncomfortable with the response to his racially charged humor from white audiences. During the taping of an ill-fated sketch in which he donned blackface as a “black-pixie” who prodded black people to perform as stereotypes, Chappelle noticed that one white male audience member seemed to find it a little too funny. “When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable,” he said. “As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take fucking time out after this. Because my head almost exploded.” Lewis’ reading of last night’s performance seems plausible given this history. 

Why was the crowd so rowdy to begin with? Splitsider reports that fans were yelling well-known catchphrases from Chappelle’s Show “right off the bat,” and that it went downhill from there. (By most accounts, there was plenty of alcohol flowing as well.) Chappelle did a riff about Damon Wayans performing stand-up to a crowd that only wanted to see him do Homey the Clown—one of his signature characters from In Living Color—an apparent analogue to his own experience onstage last night.

I'm not too concerned for Chappelle - he's married, with a child, and has a good head on his shoulders - but he might need to re-think his relationship with America from here-on-out: 

 He's no longer the *blind* KKK leader they thought he was,...

 

Self-Serving? (Why, If That's The Case, I'll Take Two) III

This piece on Dave Chappelle sounds so familiar to TMR it almost physically hurts to read it:

Theories for why he quit abound. Some say he had a mental breakdown, others presume he suffered from being “the one righteous man in a world of corruption”, as Jason Zinoman, a comedy critic for the New York Times, writes in his e-book “Searching for Dave Chappelle”. Though Mr Chappelle has never fully explained his reasons for leaving, in interviews he has said that he worried his comedy was becoming socially irresponsible. He mentioned hearing a white TV-crew member laugh during the filming of a sketch in a way that made him uncomfortable. 

Race is an important theme in his work. When Mr Chappelle first started out, playing to racially mixed audiences in Washington, DC’s largely segregated comedy scene in the 1980s, he caught flak for “not being black enough” (a concern over racial fidelity that white artists never have to face). His TV show dealt with race frankly and often surreally: one sketch concerned a blind white supremacist who did not know he was black; another featured a “racial draft”, in which American ethnic groups “drafted” biracial or culturally hybrid celebrities (the Jews took Lenny Kravitz; the blacks took Tiger Woods; the Asians got the Wu-Tang Clan). In Austin a particularly funny (and unprintable) bit involved him hiring as his personal chef Paula Deen, a white Southern cookbook author who was recently fired from the Food Network for using racial slurs. 

It is not clear what is next for Mr Chappelle when this American tour ends in late September. Despite his long absence, he seems at home on stage. If there were fewer roll-on-the-ground laughs than the audience may have expected, there was also the sense that a restless innovator is pushing the bounds of his art.

Yep - I know the feeling: 

That's just what some of us do,...