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(Reposting my comment from Part 1, which I came to late.)

The anxiety that led to Chappelle’s abrupt disappearance wasn’t misplaced. It’s important for us Gen-Xers to be clear-eyed about this, and not succumb to gauzy nostalgia (and I’m as guilty as anyone) for the good ol’ days of the 70s-90s, when too often, many of us were color-blind only when convenient, and all-too-quick to give ourselves credit for the most basic gestures of racial harmony. Lazy generational stereotypes obfuscate rather than elucidate; far more binds the generations than distinguishes them from each other. Human nature persists.

From my seats on the 25 yard-line of the Alabama-Tennessee game Saturday night, some observations. They’re not fresh — I’ve had them before, I’ve been to dozens of ‘Bama games in my lifetime and grew up in this state — but they still, somehow, startle me anew.

Before the game, the 1971 Alabama football team was honored. Along the south endzone stood

fifty or so gray-headed white men, many of them of almost comically slight stature. While ‘Bama technically integrated in 1971, only two black players were on the squad that year. That 1971 team won an SEC title but was absolutely thrashed by a fully-integrated Nebraska team in the Orange Bowl for the national championship.

1971. That’s 35 years after Jesse Owens — incidentally, an Alabama native — dominated the Berlin Olympics. That’s 639 homers into Hank Aaron’s — another Alabama native — record-breaking 755. That’s 638 homers into Willie Mays’ — yet another (!) Alabama native — illustrious, arguably-greatest-of-all-time career. And the University of Alabama’s legendary football program was only taking the most tepid baby steps toward allowing black athletes on the team.

Today, of course, 80% of the team, and 90%+ of the starters, are black. The makeup of the attendees remains overwhelmingly white. It makes for an interesting, and not altogether unhealthy, dynamic — as long as we’re playing well, that is. When we’re not, “we” turns to “they” uncomfortably quickly.

It was homecoming. At halftime, I went to get some Dreamland BBQ nachos while my 12 year-old daughter remained in her seat to take in the festivities. As I stood in line, I heard a loud boo go up from the crowd — during halftime, mind you. When I returned to my seat, my daughter asked me why the crowd booed the homecoming queen, but cheered loudly for the runner-up.

So that was the boo, I thought. I explained it to her: the runner-up was a softball pitcher who had led the Tide to the Women’s College World Series last year, a tall and stately blonde, quite popular on campus and well-known throughout the state.

The homecoming queen was also a white woman. She was the “Machine-backed” candidate for homecoming queen, certainly the daughter of an influential, old-money family. What is the “Machine”? It’s a secret society, a remnant of the Theta Nu Epsilon suprafraternity, that controls student affairs at the University. It’s made up of secret representatives from the most prestigious fraternities and sororities on campus. It’s been running the campus for over a hundred years, using the Student Government Association as a sort of training ground or farm league for state politics. It rarely loses, and when it does — or even thinks it might — it engages in conduct that makes Watergate look laughably tame.

Why the boos? There was a widespread belief in the student body — only 20–25% of the students are members of the Greek system — that the Machine would rig the election. And, as it turns out, they did: for starters, the Machine-controlled SGA simply ignored the run-off requirement and gave the crown to their candidate with only 47% of the vote. The softball player had received 45% of the vote. There were three other non-Machine candidates who shared the remaining 8% of the votes.

Same ol’ shit.

Reflecting on Saturday night, I reread an Esquire Magazine expose of the “Machine” from 1992. Then, a friendly, color-blind, Gen-X fraternity president — trying to navigate calls to force the integration of the Greek system following an incident where two white Kappa Delta pledges had donned full blackface to attend a “Who Rides the Bus?”-themed fraternity party costumed as pregnant black women — articulated his own dream of racial harmony and the conditions under which he’d accept integration of his particular fraternity, Kappa Alpha:

“I’d love to be president [of Kappa Alpha] when there’s one [a black person] who’s right,” he says. “But I don’t see it in the next five years. I’d love to give him a break. Someone who really, really wants to be a K.A. … Someone who appreciates southern heritage….Someone with the same view I have, that there’s n*ggers and there’s blacks and there’s rednecks and white people.”

‘Bama would go on to win the college football national championship that year, 1992, when they routed Miami in the Sugar Bowl. Black players like George Teague, Antonio Langham, Sam Shade, Eric Curry, John Copeland, Antonio London, Derrick Oden, Lemanksi Hall and Tommie Johnson led a legendarily-stingy Crimson Tide defense to a stunning upset over the heavily-favored ‘Canes. Our golden boy white quarterback was 4 of 18 for 13 yards and 2 interceptions.

And that friendly, color-blind, Gen-X, Kappa Alpha president almost certainly celebrated that victory and thumped his chest harder than anyone.

Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that integration had to be forced on the UA Greek system — in 2014. Not that it has made much difference.

But perhaps it will surprise you to learn that Alabama continues to labor under the longest written constitution in the world — no, literally — the 1901 Constitution, whose explicit purpose, as articulated by the president of the constitutional convention during his opening speech, was “to establish white supremacy in this state.” It’s been remarkably successful in preserving the power of the landed gentry, the former slave-owning plantation farming families, while ensuring that the descendants of slaves stuck in the Black Belt and poor whites stuck in the Appalachian foothills have virtually no prospects. And, like the stupid, petty homecoming queen race at the University of Alabama in 2021, the “Machine” of that time quite openly stole the election ratifying the 1901 Constitution, going so far as to stuff ballot boxes in Black Belt counties with more votes than there were citizens.

No, Chappelle’s anxiety wasn’t misplaced at all. He sensed something that was — and is — real: a failure, our failure, to live up to what we say we want, our Creed, which is to see and treat others as full-bodied individuals, regardless of skin color, regardless of social station or power; our unwillingness to courageously confront real injustice and real entrenched power; and our tendency to treat tokenism and smiling at black people and rooting for black athletes and laughing at black comedians and “having black friends” like the endpoint of racial progress. It’s not, and he was right to sense that he was being used in that way, even if it was unintentional.

The answer isn’t to throw out the Creed, though. The Creed is good, right, and just — indeed, it’s the only just and workable principle for a civilized society. Chappelle has re-emerged to courageously fight for the Creed, while so many of us have cowered in the corner as what Wesley Yang has coined the “Successor Ideology” — what you might call “radical woke-ism” — terrorizes the land and does grievous harm to our shared culture. Certainly, many in my generation will seek to use Chappelle in the same way they — we — used him before. I hope it won’t be too many. He’s got something very important to say.

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While this is interesting I don’t think it bears on the successor ideology, as the non-woke can agree that there’s an uncomfortable seam of racism in our culture, and empathize with chapelle for the way those laughs made him feel.

What the successor ideology wants to do is take that as the jumping off point to establish tokenistic racial quotas and racist diversity trainings, and celebrate the shaming and denial of livelihood of anybody who puts a foot wrong. It wants to expunge the complex, multivariate way race and class are woven through our past and present in favor of a comic book version that denies basic statistical realities. It seeks to redefine challenging opinions as violence and teach children they’re either oppressors or aggrieved. Etc.

Chapelle makes basic factual errors in The Closer, but his paranoia over how his irony was received in 2005 isn’t on my list of critiques.

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"It is a sentence poised on the tip of a fatal ambiguity that is worth scrutinizing, for it tells us a great deal about the ongoing psychodrama of integration of which Chappelle’s life and career is such a revealing case."

Not even a paragraph in and I'm left wondering whether it's the author having a stroke or me.

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This column brings to mind a joke by an English blogger who declared he had become a vegetarian. He would continue to eat meat, but would do so ironically. Our traditional American point of view would hold that a comedian or writer should not be held responsible for audience misconstructions, and that it is better for the constructions to be debated in the service of truth than for someone to censor himself to the lowest common denominator. He is free to adopt a do no harm standard, though.

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Cosby being released from prison is proof that American justice still works. They indemnified him against self recrimination then used that same testimony to find him guilty. This is a good sign. Rule of law still exists, the state is only allowed to use its power within the framework of law. I’m sure he raped those girls but it’s better they set him free owing to state authority being misused.

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Dorothy Hughes's "The Expendable Man" (1963) presents the paranoia you describe to devastating effect and then shows why it is justified. I've often thought her novel should be a part of "diversity" training for the revelatory power of its first several chapters alone.

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