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I like how Dave Chappelle dealt with Candace Owens on his new thing, and he captured the emotion people are feeling perfectly, but he didn't capture reality. In fact, he did the same kind of materialist Critical Race Theory that Derrick Bell (father of CRT) did.
I sat there listening and thinking, wow, the emotion is real and the cynicism is deep. This is Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Bell's 1992 fictionalized account of race in America, where he wrote: "racism is an integral, permanent and indestructible component of this society…"
Chappelle said that slavery is today. Nah. Wrong. Sorry. I understand the frustration and pain, I see the outrage, even if people will tell me I can't possibly, but the feeling isn't reality. It wasn't when Bell wrote it in '92 and before and after, and it isn't now.
Here's the opening salvo in Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Read it. It's a feeling, maybe, but it's not reality. It was written in 1992.
Around that same time, Michael Jordan was basically God. Every white kid I knew had Jordan stuff and broke parents. Looking down? Nah. Nope.
Around that same time, Michael Jordan was basically God. Every white kid I knew had Jordan stuff and broke parents. Looking down? Nah. Nope.
Oprah Winfrey was a bajillionaire and overwhelming thought influencer in 1992 (
). She was so rich Dave Chappelle had a recurring bit about knocking her up so he could cash in by doing the right thing by her and being a good dad.
). She was so rich Dave Chappelle had a recurring bit about knocking her up so he could cash in by doing the right thing by her and being a good dad.
I get it. Those two, and many, many others, are exceptions, not the whole story of black experience in America in 1992, but you're literally out of your mind cynical if you believe poor whites as an imaginary class of people looked down on blacks as a rule in 1992. CRT is that.
Chappelle expressed some real pain, real frustration. It's tied to some real things, but it's also not. Slavery isn't today (in the US...). Prisons aren't great but aren't slavery. We are the furthest out from slavery we've ever been, not just as a nation but as a species.
And Critical Race Theory, even if it's not the postmodernist brand we're used to from BLM now, is still Critical Race Theory, even when it's from a comedian, not a scholar. Critical Race Theory is a mood, or a set of moods, and Chappelle gave us one of them here.
And Critical Race Theory is still a cynical, paranoid, and toxic way to look at the world and the real issues we face. It's a way to keep looking at the bottom of the well of society until you find yourself, or people of a particular race, there.
The thing is, Critical Race Theory finds who it finds at the bottom of the well mostly because it puts them there. We should look up instead. What we'll see that way might surprise us.
