(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.
Well, there were (and still are) vastly different subcultures in the US depending on where you lived, and the deep south really can't be extrapolated to all of the country. If a fraternity president or anyone else at my New England college had said anything remotely like that in the 90s, they would've been ran off campus and probably expelled. I took a road trip cross country after college and when we were in the south the level of de facto segregation and the way people talked about racial stuff was *shocking* to my ears, I'd never heard such things before. I have to imagine/hope it is much better now.
I don't think I ever even really learned or heard any racial stereotypes (other than about Italians, who reveled in joking about themselves as guidos) until after college, and honestly I learned most of it from black comics. A lot of it was mystifying. Black people like chicken and watermelon?? That doesn't even make sense...EVERYONE likes chicken and watermelon. I don't even get the joke or insult there. That's like saying XYZ people like pizza and ice cream, I mean, who doesn't?
I don't know, maybe bc I grew up in a mostly white area, but a lot of stereotypes about supposedly poor/ghetto black people were just applied to white people, bc all the janitors and trash collectors and fast food workers and vagrants and the poorest people around were all white. There's no racial status system when all the lowest people in your town are the same race as the richest ones.
"Vastly different subcultures," indeed. That reality might call for a "prime directive" by which the outsider, at least initially, observes and seeks to understands, rather than to judge, intervene, and dominate. Normally, we want our own people to thrive, our families and the wider circles in which they exist. SI is like a religious movement that breaks up traditional allegiances in the name of a purported higher loyalty. It seeks to judge, intervene, and dominate. Hopefully there will be a noticeable countermovement worthy of WY's observation.
If you watch Dave Chappelle's interview on David Letterman's new Netflix show, it goes into a lot of detail about the small town in Ohio where Chappelle grew up part-time (and still lives today). It's an extremely progressive but predominately white college town with historical roots in abolition and promoting black advancement way back in history. So on the one hand, Chappelle grew up with his black professor father, half-time, in a very white, very accepting and caring place where he makes clear he knew everyone and the town all took care of each other. Then he also spent half his time with his mother in DC, in an almost entirely black and much more urban environment.
It seems that his being raised in such entirely different sub-cultures, and learning how to be in each, contributed to his astonishing ability to play with and joke about race and explore the social contradictions and tensions, all with intense empathy. It's also just that he's brilliant. But I would bet that if he had grown up in place like the 1970s Alabama described above, he would have an entirely different set of attitudes.
Likewise, as a teenager growing up in the South, I was mystified when I first watched the 1992 movie “School Ties,” set in a 1960 Massachusetts prep school, in which the WASP-y football team discovers the new quarterback, played by Brendan Fraser is…a Jew? I barely knew any Jewish people – I, and everyone I knew, just considered them white people. I guess I knew about Hitler and the Holocaust, but the idea that whites in America distinguished between “real whites” and Jews, much less hated them, baffled me. But I grew up, discovered that anti-Semitism is a real thing, and – to borrow from Jordan Peterson – adjusted my mental map of reality accordingly. Now that I’m a grown-up, I’m more aware of subtleties I missed as a child.
Speaking of mid-90s movies, I rewatched “Grumpy Old Men” recently. Set in Wabasha, Minnesota, the movie’s most memorable scene involves Walter Matthau’s character driving his truck onto a frozen lake to bulldoze Jack Lemmon’s character’s ice fishing hut. As the other fishing huts whizzed by, I saw it: a Confederate battle flag, hanging on one of the other fishing huts. In Minnesota.
Lazy regional stereotypes are no more helpful than generational ones. Did your road trip take you through South Boston? Detroit? Ohio? Wisconsin? Missouri? Los Angeles? I can assure you: you’ll find plenty of “de facto segregation” and racism – as much, and in many cases more, than in the South – in all of those places. There’s a reason there’s an old saw about how in the South, whites don’t mind if blacks get close as long as they don’t get uppity, but in the North, whites don’t mind if blacks get uppity as long as they don’t get close. Human nature persists.
Are there subcultures? Of course. Can the experience of the Deep South be extrapolated to the rest of the country? I guess it depends on what you mean, but in a real sense, it already has. Where do you think George Floyd came from? Do you think his ancestors came over on the Mayflower? If there are black folks in your town, chances are they’re descended from slaves in the South.
My point, I guess, is this: color-blindness (for lack of a better term) -- and the corollary principle of treating others first and foremost as *individuals* who are, as Dave Chappelle’s trans friend put it, “having a human experience” -- is a good and worthy ideal. But an *ideal* it remains. We need to be honest about this, the ways in which we’ve fallen short of the ideal, we Gen-Xers just the same as anyone else. It won’t do, to again borrow from Peterson, to “hide unwanted things in the fog” – to deny that there really are monsters out there that must be confronted and defeated.
I suppose my point is that it isn't helpful, and stands in the way of realizing the "ideal" view, for certain pathologies that are very tied to time in place to be (1) never forgotten and constantly dredged up and rehashed and brought into the future to keep re-opening wounds and make sure resentments and guilt never dissipate, and (2) applied to every place and nationalized when it really doesn't need to be.
Every place has its own issues, they don't need to be applied everywhere. Where I grew up, almost everyone was one of the Catholic ethnicities from the late 19th/early 20th century immigration wave. To the extent there was any "tension" (which was minor), it was between the Italians, Irish, and Polish, with the Italians being on top and the Poles on the bottom, status wise. Anyone else didn't really have a status because they were rare enough to be treated as individuals and not a group. My parents grew up in the South and fled to the north-east for various reasons but the racism was a major factor, since they lived through integration and Civil Rights Era and MLK Jr. was a huge hero to them. But they still tend to apply a lens from the 1950s South to things today, which in my opinion causes their perception to be a bit warped. There are places in Idaho and Utah where the primary social divisions and tensions are between Mormons and non-Mormons, and no outsider could even tell the difference because they all look like a bunch of white people, but to the residents the differences and hostilities are obvious and deep. Everywhere has their own pathologies, and I don't see the benefit in making other people have to be aware of them or spreading them.
If there are not racist stereotypes and a racial hierarchy in one's own sub-culture, how is it helpful to have those imported and forced onto you from another time and place? I get you have to learn the local mores when you travel, but you also can't get something out of your head once someone puts it there, and I'm not sure where the benefit lies in learning about the particular false and nasty stereotypes held by people in a different place.
Legacy national media has always been obsessed with black versus white because of the baggage of North/South and its history, when really that lens is just totally irrelevant out west, where there are very few black people and instead you have Asians of all different types, Polynesian, Mexican, Native American and white people as the main demography, in lots of places in a very diverse mix...the whole black/white obsession of national media that's based in NY and DC just seems bizarre and irrelevant (until George Floyd where now everything is about race and mostly about black people, all the time).
There's an idea that we need to "come to terms with *our* past" or contextualize things with historical lens. I disagree. First of all, it isn't *our* past, it's the past of specific people, some of whom aren't even alive anymore. Learning history is good when it's factual and removed and can be used to learn without taking on personal, emotional, connective implications. To me, learning about 1950s South Carolina is as distant and unrelated to me as learning about 19th century Russia. If I were to decide it's somehow related to me, I might be motivated to take on the pride or guilt or shame or resentment or whatever of my ancestors, and I don't think that is EVER a good thing.
To the extent that the US was ever or is now great, it was because of our lack of history, the fact that we were free to remake ourselves anew without the pathologies and baggage of people from the past. What de Tocqueville observed. The longer a place's history, in general, the more conflict and tension, as everyone carries out a never-ending cycle of grievance and retribution for the sins of their fathers, grandfathers, great-great-great-great grandfathers. I don't see why that's a good thing. The places in the world with the longest history are also the places still riven by the most conflict.
How is progress ever supposed to be achieved or enjoyed if everyone keeps wallowing in memories of regressive times and historical grievances committed by other people? I just don't see how it serves any purpose other than preventing achieving the ideal. But, that's just my stance -- in matters both personal and sociological/historical, I've always thought it better for people to leave their grievances (and their pride!) in the past and move on and live in the here and now. I've always found people who are prone to holding onto grudges from the past to be personally distasteful, and I find it even more distasteful when it's applied at a broad social level where people take on the grudges of dead or unrelated people they've never even met, based on some superficial supposed affinity based on category.
SI is deeply opposed to what you call the Creed, the ideal of an integrated, egalitarian, and free society. When you listen to Robin di Angelo, you feel that integration is an unredeemable failure. SI is there to help out with the totalitarian intervention chronicled by WY, rooting out wrongthink again and again, forever. If things are as she says, segregation is the more obvious and practical solution. Come to think of it, SI offers segregation, but with the enemy populations, or castes, continuing to occupy the same geographical space under intensive supervision. On the side of SI, however, integration can hardly be considered an unqualified success, if incarceration rates, illegitimacy rates, employment rates, personal wealth, and homicides are significant metrics. SI has an answer for everything, of course.
Thanks, Jack, for pointing it out. Classic Esquire was good journalism. I'm having trouble parsing your last paragraph above, but I am interested in the idea I think you are aiming at. Any chance you could expand on the thinking therein?
Hey J.D., my comment above to Kate is part of the answer, I think. Understand that I’m just an unfrozen caveman lawyer. I’m confused and frightened by your ways. I’m certainly no academic, so take my perspective as that of a layman who only has so much time and energy to devote to these topics. I stand in awe of some of the responses I’ve read in the comments of the Open Thread. I’m a student here.
With that out of the way, my little essay was intended as, I guess, a meditation on the narrower question of whether and to what extent we, and in particular Gen-X, “had it right” when it came to race in America. I’m not tackling Successor Ideology all at once; I’m nowhere near equipped to do that work.
One common interpretation of events seems to be that Gen-X and its ethos of color-blindness, as reflected in some of our pop culture (Michael Jackson singing “it don’t matter if you’re black or white” and “I’m not gonna spend my life bein’ a color!”; Garth Brooks singing “when the last thing we notice is the color of skin”; The Cosby Show; etc.), represented a sort of post-racial utopia – or if we weren’t there yet, we were almost there, until a new ethos of race-consciousness came along and erased all our gains. One comment in the first Chappelle installment on this blog, in particular, seemed to revel in that sort of gauzy nostalgia. I wanted to push back against that, just a little.
Another interpretation I’ve seen, which seems popular among alt-right types, is: “Finally. We can be honest. Let’s talk about race as a real thing rather than as a social construct, a real thing that we can measure and from which we can draw far-reaching inferences about group differences that should inform our policy-making. The statistics being what they are, the “race science,” the IQ research…you want to talk about race openly? Let’s get it on.” But I think that’s a dangerous path; here there be monsters we should be very reticent to provoke.
I think the embedded question in color-blindness vs. race-consciousness – again, I’m a layman, so maybe this is too crude a formulation – is whether we’ll first, as a starting point, see and treat others as unique human beings who are “having a human experience” (to borrow from Chappelle’s act). That, to me, should be a basic, agreed-upon starting point for what I’m clumsily calling the Creed. Where I land is here: we have to start with color-blindness. Maybe we can get good enough at it, mature enough later, to add more nuance. We’re nowhere near that point. And I think we should be really honest about that falling short. And Chappelle is also right to say, in so many words, that it’s utterly ridiculous both to analogize, say, the “transgender” movement to the black struggle for civil rights, and to think we as a society have solved race sufficiently to even consider such analogies.
I don’t know if I’ve clarified anything, or just confused it further. But if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to post another little essay I wrote last year in the midst of the George Floyd unrest. Maybe it will help.
On Atticus Finch, Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks, Billy Madison, and Race.
******
Above the spinet piano in my living room hangs a black-and-white photo: Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch from the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus -- tanned, handsome and bespectacled, and based, it’s always been said, on Lee’s own father as she grew up in 1930s Monroeville, Alabama-- sits in a simple wooden chair, still in his seersucker three-piece suit after a long day’s work at the law office. He peers down at his son Jim at his knee while his daughter Scout rests in his lap. Jim gazes intently at him, with expectation and admiration, waiting for his dad to convey some profound moral truth, perhaps about the God-given equality of men and the solemn duty to fight injustice wherever it is found and whatever the personal cost.
Also in my living room, on the top shelf of my built-ins where I can hardly reach it without a stool, is a hardcover copy of Go Set a Watchman. Billed as Lee’s long-rumored lost “second novel,” I ordered it from Amazon as soon as came out a few years ago. But in the two days between my order and the book’s arrival on my doorstep, I heard the news: Go Set a Watchman wasn’t a second novel, but rather the first rough draft of To Kill a Mockingbird – and what’s worse, the original Atticus was a segregationist and a bigot.
I’ve never opened the cover, much less cracked the spine, of Go Set a Watchman. I guess I like the fictional Atticus better than the real one -- or more to the point: I suppose I don’t really want to know the real one.
I bet I’m not alone. I bet the own-to-actually-read ratio of Go Set a Watchman is as high as any book in Alabama, save maybe the Good Book itself.
***********
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about race – specifically about this question about whether race-blindness or race-consciousness is the proper ideal.
Being a child of the 1980s and 90s, I’d like to talk about Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks and Billy Madison and see where we end up.
Man…Michael Jackson. The original “MJ.” In the 80s and early 90s, everybody loved him – black, white, it didn’t matter. He was a national treasure. Ronald Reagan – Reagan! – honored MJ on the South Lawn of the White House. I'm not saying I was MJ for Halloween one year...but I'm not saying I wasn't.
Jackson seemed almost post-racial to people like me – first, in the figurative sense in that his music had dynamic crossover appeal even to the rhythmically-challenged, and later, in the literal (if increasingly bizarre) sense that his vitiligo and plastic-surgery obsession moved him further and further away from his original, traditionally black appearance. The white experience with MJ began with the young MJ singing “ABC” with the Jackson Five on the Ed Sullivan Show, ran through “Beat It,” an admonition against gang violence during the 80s crack epidemic, extended to “We Are the World,” with the likes of Cyndi Lauper and Stevie Wonder and Huey Lewis and other superstars of both races singing joyfully about the brother-and sisterhood of man, and reached its apotheosis with 1991’s “Black or White,” in which a newly-famous McCaulay Culkin lip-synched: “I’m not gonna spend my life bein’ a color!” Pardon my French, but we white people ate that shit UP.
Around the same time, a chubby make-believe cowboy named Garth Brooks made everyone a country music fan, at least for a few months. When “Friends in Low Places” came blasting over the speakers at Mega Skate on a fall Friday night in 1990, even the black kids sang along. Two years later, Garth released his own feel-good anthem about our soon-to-be-realized post-racial utopia, titled “We Shall Be Free”: “When the last thing we notice is the color of skin / And the first thing we look for is the beauty within….” God, the feeling of self-satisfaction that washed over me as I belted that line to my Sony boombox was flat-out intoxicating.
Oh yes, when I was a kid, color-blindness was all the rage, at least among the white people I associated with. I read an MLK biography and memorized that oft-quoted line from “I Have a Dream”: “I have a DREAM that my four little children will ONE DAY live in a nation where they will NOT be judged by the COLOR of their SKIN, but by the CONTENT of their CHARACTER!”
There it is! It was so simple not to be racist! We’ll have this race thing licked in no time! Probably just need some old people to die, that’s all.
Which brings us to 1995 and Billy Madison.
I was sophomore in Ms. DeArman’s public-speaking class when the OJ verdict came down. While the verdict itself surprised me – I, like most white people I knew, thought OJ was guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt – it was the elated and emotional reaction of some of my black classmates that shocked me. How could they celebrate such an obvious miscarriage of justice? I thought. Surely they don’t believe the Fuhrman-racist-cop slander, do they? I thought. Why do they seem to be taking this so personally? I really wondered.
That same year, an idiotically hilarious film titled Billy Madison hit theaters. It was about the privileged, no-account, large adult son of a wealthy white man who is shocked to learn that he never actually graduated high school – in fact, he never actually passed first grade, or any grade thereafter – because his father had bribed Billy’s teachers throughout his school career. Hilarity ensues as Adam Sandler (as Billy) must pass all 12 grades in 24 weeks for his father to consider letting him manage the family company.
So I said I’ve been thinking a lot about race, and race-blindness, and race-consciousness. And it occurs to me: I am Billy Madison. We – and I’m talking here to my fellow white people – are Billy Madison. Here I am thinking I graduated with honors, and the truth is: I haven’t passed the first grade. We just all agreed to social-promotion our way through this thing. I thought Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks could make up for centuries of slavery, segregation, prejudice and oppression and brutality. I thought we had racism pretty much under control, that “it don’t matter if you’re black or white,” that “there’s only one race, and that’s mankind,” that the OJ thing was just a weird aberration, a bump on the road to our post-racial harmony. And it turns out: I never really learned anything. I just wanted to feel good about myself and the world.
*********************
So. Atticus Finch.
As he stood before an all-white-male jury in fictional 1935 south Alabama, the To Kill a Mockingbird version of Atticus implored his all-white-male jury not to consider and appreciate Tom Robinson’s blackness – but simply, in this one instance, put it aside, try not to see it, give Tom a fair shake and weigh the evidence impartially. Be race-blind, he begged. “Our courts have their faults,” said the noble Atticus, “as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.” The jury, of course, wrongfully convicted Tom, but the point remained: the first tepid step towards racial justice – the bare but necessary minimum! – is to be willing to see past race. You have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. And despite all of our back-patting over our racial progress, many of us are still babies when it comes to race. We may not be 1935 south Alabama, but we’re not nearly as far along as we’d like to think. We’re Billy Madison. We need to go back to first grade and master some basics.
Because here’s the deal: if we had the basics down – if we could just see past race, in the moment, if we could at least aspire to see past it as a first tepid step -- Ahmaud Arbery would be alive today. If we had the basics down, George Floyd would be alive today. And so would Eric Garner. And Walter Scott. And on. And on. And on.
We have to admit that we never graduated – that, in fact, we’re still in first grade on this thing.
We can’t comfort ourselves with delusional fictions about “how far we’ve come.”
We’ve got to have the courage to pull Go Set a Watchman off the dusty, forgotten top shelf, find a comfy chair, crack the spine, come face-to-face with the real Atticus Finch, and realize that he is us.
And then read it again.
And then, hopefully one day, we can earn the expectant and admiring gazes of our own children at our knee, and pass on some actual, hard-won moral truths to them, and do so without the pangs of hypocrisy stabbing us in the heart.
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.
This is the second installment in a series. The point is to show the evolution of things and the psychological matrix out of which SI evolves — and also, crucially, to examine the dialectic of the black civil rights struggle and the “unity of oppression” narrative that appropriated it. Chappelle has an ambivalent relationship to each aspect of ideological succession — he believes at once that Kaepernick was his champion and the intensification of progressivism in response to Trump is a great historic boon AND that he remains free to joke about or think about the various aspects of SI dogma however he likes. He is learning otherwise and may or may not be brought to heel by it in the long run. They are now “calling him in”.
He is taking a terrible risk, remember this phenomenon was successful in de platforming a President. He is dancing between the devil and the deep blue sea; a lot of people are looking to get him and if he should err, no one will risk standing up for him. We all live in a state of uncertainty, what is permissible, what can we say? We won’t defend Chappell because it’s to risky and we don’t trust we know how - that is a powerful part of the enforcement of SI dogma. I wonder if we will see him grovelling like Andrew Dice Clay? I doubt it, he’s too real, but you never know fame and fortune are so very enticing. I sold out for money. We all do in some way.
His willingness to give up $50 million for his convictions is a source of succor and strength to him today -- he keeps referencing for that very reason. Now that he has both that knowledge of his own character AND $100 million in the bank, he is as well-armored as a human being can be. Still, it might not prove enough.
Ya, $100 million, that buys integrity. Money and integrity are linked; integrity is a rich mans privilege; with out money integrity gets you martyrdom.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Well, there were (and still are) vastly different subcultures in the US depending on where you lived, and the deep south really can't be extrapolated to all of the country. If a fraternity president or anyone else at my New England college had said anything remotely like that in the 90s, they would've been ran off campus and probably expelled. I took a road trip cross country after college and when we were in the south the level of de facto segregation and the way people talked about racial stuff was *shocking* to my ears, I'd never heard such things before. I have to imagine/hope it is much better now.
I don't think I ever even really learned or heard any racial stereotypes (other than about Italians, who reveled in joking about themselves as guidos) until after college, and honestly I learned most of it from black comics. A lot of it was mystifying. Black people like chicken and watermelon?? That doesn't even make sense...EVERYONE likes chicken and watermelon. I don't even get the joke or insult there. That's like saying XYZ people like pizza and ice cream, I mean, who doesn't?
I don't know, maybe bc I grew up in a mostly white area, but a lot of stereotypes about supposedly poor/ghetto black people were just applied to white people, bc all the janitors and trash collectors and fast food workers and vagrants and the poorest people around were all white. There's no racial status system when all the lowest people in your town are the same race as the richest ones.
"Vastly different subcultures," indeed. That reality might call for a "prime directive" by which the outsider, at least initially, observes and seeks to understands, rather than to judge, intervene, and dominate. Normally, we want our own people to thrive, our families and the wider circles in which they exist. SI is like a religious movement that breaks up traditional allegiances in the name of a purported higher loyalty. It seeks to judge, intervene, and dominate. Hopefully there will be a noticeable countermovement worthy of WY's observation.
If you watch Dave Chappelle's interview on David Letterman's new Netflix show, it goes into a lot of detail about the small town in Ohio where Chappelle grew up part-time (and still lives today). It's an extremely progressive but predominately white college town with historical roots in abolition and promoting black advancement way back in history. So on the one hand, Chappelle grew up with his black professor father, half-time, in a very white, very accepting and caring place where he makes clear he knew everyone and the town all took care of each other. Then he also spent half his time with his mother in DC, in an almost entirely black and much more urban environment.
It seems that his being raised in such entirely different sub-cultures, and learning how to be in each, contributed to his astonishing ability to play with and joke about race and explore the social contradictions and tensions, all with intense empathy. It's also just that he's brilliant. But I would bet that if he had grown up in place like the 1970s Alabama described above, he would have an entirely different set of attitudes.
Andrew Sullivan’s “why woke is winning “ gives a great simple explanation of SI’s attraction.
Thanks, I'll look for that. But I think there is a lot of territory it won't win.
Let’s hope.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/archive
Likewise, as a teenager growing up in the South, I was mystified when I first watched the 1992 movie “School Ties,” set in a 1960 Massachusetts prep school, in which the WASP-y football team discovers the new quarterback, played by Brendan Fraser is…a Jew? I barely knew any Jewish people – I, and everyone I knew, just considered them white people. I guess I knew about Hitler and the Holocaust, but the idea that whites in America distinguished between “real whites” and Jews, much less hated them, baffled me. But I grew up, discovered that anti-Semitism is a real thing, and – to borrow from Jordan Peterson – adjusted my mental map of reality accordingly. Now that I’m a grown-up, I’m more aware of subtleties I missed as a child.
Speaking of mid-90s movies, I rewatched “Grumpy Old Men” recently. Set in Wabasha, Minnesota, the movie’s most memorable scene involves Walter Matthau’s character driving his truck onto a frozen lake to bulldoze Jack Lemmon’s character’s ice fishing hut. As the other fishing huts whizzed by, I saw it: a Confederate battle flag, hanging on one of the other fishing huts. In Minnesota.
Lazy regional stereotypes are no more helpful than generational ones. Did your road trip take you through South Boston? Detroit? Ohio? Wisconsin? Missouri? Los Angeles? I can assure you: you’ll find plenty of “de facto segregation” and racism – as much, and in many cases more, than in the South – in all of those places. There’s a reason there’s an old saw about how in the South, whites don’t mind if blacks get close as long as they don’t get uppity, but in the North, whites don’t mind if blacks get uppity as long as they don’t get close. Human nature persists.
Are there subcultures? Of course. Can the experience of the Deep South be extrapolated to the rest of the country? I guess it depends on what you mean, but in a real sense, it already has. Where do you think George Floyd came from? Do you think his ancestors came over on the Mayflower? If there are black folks in your town, chances are they’re descended from slaves in the South.
My point, I guess, is this: color-blindness (for lack of a better term) -- and the corollary principle of treating others first and foremost as *individuals* who are, as Dave Chappelle’s trans friend put it, “having a human experience” -- is a good and worthy ideal. But an *ideal* it remains. We need to be honest about this, the ways in which we’ve fallen short of the ideal, we Gen-Xers just the same as anyone else. It won’t do, to again borrow from Peterson, to “hide unwanted things in the fog” – to deny that there really are monsters out there that must be confronted and defeated.
I suppose my point is that it isn't helpful, and stands in the way of realizing the "ideal" view, for certain pathologies that are very tied to time in place to be (1) never forgotten and constantly dredged up and rehashed and brought into the future to keep re-opening wounds and make sure resentments and guilt never dissipate, and (2) applied to every place and nationalized when it really doesn't need to be.
Every place has its own issues, they don't need to be applied everywhere. Where I grew up, almost everyone was one of the Catholic ethnicities from the late 19th/early 20th century immigration wave. To the extent there was any "tension" (which was minor), it was between the Italians, Irish, and Polish, with the Italians being on top and the Poles on the bottom, status wise. Anyone else didn't really have a status because they were rare enough to be treated as individuals and not a group. My parents grew up in the South and fled to the north-east for various reasons but the racism was a major factor, since they lived through integration and Civil Rights Era and MLK Jr. was a huge hero to them. But they still tend to apply a lens from the 1950s South to things today, which in my opinion causes their perception to be a bit warped. There are places in Idaho and Utah where the primary social divisions and tensions are between Mormons and non-Mormons, and no outsider could even tell the difference because they all look like a bunch of white people, but to the residents the differences and hostilities are obvious and deep. Everywhere has their own pathologies, and I don't see the benefit in making other people have to be aware of them or spreading them.
If there are not racist stereotypes and a racial hierarchy in one's own sub-culture, how is it helpful to have those imported and forced onto you from another time and place? I get you have to learn the local mores when you travel, but you also can't get something out of your head once someone puts it there, and I'm not sure where the benefit lies in learning about the particular false and nasty stereotypes held by people in a different place.
Legacy national media has always been obsessed with black versus white because of the baggage of North/South and its history, when really that lens is just totally irrelevant out west, where there are very few black people and instead you have Asians of all different types, Polynesian, Mexican, Native American and white people as the main demography, in lots of places in a very diverse mix...the whole black/white obsession of national media that's based in NY and DC just seems bizarre and irrelevant (until George Floyd where now everything is about race and mostly about black people, all the time).
There's an idea that we need to "come to terms with *our* past" or contextualize things with historical lens. I disagree. First of all, it isn't *our* past, it's the past of specific people, some of whom aren't even alive anymore. Learning history is good when it's factual and removed and can be used to learn without taking on personal, emotional, connective implications. To me, learning about 1950s South Carolina is as distant and unrelated to me as learning about 19th century Russia. If I were to decide it's somehow related to me, I might be motivated to take on the pride or guilt or shame or resentment or whatever of my ancestors, and I don't think that is EVER a good thing.
To the extent that the US was ever or is now great, it was because of our lack of history, the fact that we were free to remake ourselves anew without the pathologies and baggage of people from the past. What de Tocqueville observed. The longer a place's history, in general, the more conflict and tension, as everyone carries out a never-ending cycle of grievance and retribution for the sins of their fathers, grandfathers, great-great-great-great grandfathers. I don't see why that's a good thing. The places in the world with the longest history are also the places still riven by the most conflict.
How is progress ever supposed to be achieved or enjoyed if everyone keeps wallowing in memories of regressive times and historical grievances committed by other people? I just don't see how it serves any purpose other than preventing achieving the ideal. But, that's just my stance -- in matters both personal and sociological/historical, I've always thought it better for people to leave their grievances (and their pride!) in the past and move on and live in the here and now. I've always found people who are prone to holding onto grudges from the past to be personally distasteful, and I find it even more distasteful when it's applied at a broad social level where people take on the grudges of dead or unrelated people they've never even met, based on some superficial supposed affinity based on category.
https://youtu.be/1EwgvDvtqQs?t=55
SI is deeply opposed to what you call the Creed, the ideal of an integrated, egalitarian, and free society. When you listen to Robin di Angelo, you feel that integration is an unredeemable failure. SI is there to help out with the totalitarian intervention chronicled by WY, rooting out wrongthink again and again, forever. If things are as she says, segregation is the more obvious and practical solution. Come to think of it, SI offers segregation, but with the enemy populations, or castes, continuing to occupy the same geographical space under intensive supervision. On the side of SI, however, integration can hardly be considered an unqualified success, if incarceration rates, illegitimacy rates, employment rates, personal wealth, and homicides are significant metrics. SI has an answer for everything, of course.
This is the motte to which the diangelos and kendis are the Bailey
That's awfully lazy.
https://www.welcometothemachine.info/media.php?ID=44
Bingo - that's it. Thanks for linking to it.
Thanks, Jack, for pointing it out. Classic Esquire was good journalism. I'm having trouble parsing your last paragraph above, but I am interested in the idea I think you are aiming at. Any chance you could expand on the thinking therein?
About to be tied up for awhile, but yes - will do this evening.
Any chance to follow-up Jack?
Hey J.D., my comment above to Kate is part of the answer, I think. Understand that I’m just an unfrozen caveman lawyer. I’m confused and frightened by your ways. I’m certainly no academic, so take my perspective as that of a layman who only has so much time and energy to devote to these topics. I stand in awe of some of the responses I’ve read in the comments of the Open Thread. I’m a student here.
With that out of the way, my little essay was intended as, I guess, a meditation on the narrower question of whether and to what extent we, and in particular Gen-X, “had it right” when it came to race in America. I’m not tackling Successor Ideology all at once; I’m nowhere near equipped to do that work.
One common interpretation of events seems to be that Gen-X and its ethos of color-blindness, as reflected in some of our pop culture (Michael Jackson singing “it don’t matter if you’re black or white” and “I’m not gonna spend my life bein’ a color!”; Garth Brooks singing “when the last thing we notice is the color of skin”; The Cosby Show; etc.), represented a sort of post-racial utopia – or if we weren’t there yet, we were almost there, until a new ethos of race-consciousness came along and erased all our gains. One comment in the first Chappelle installment on this blog, in particular, seemed to revel in that sort of gauzy nostalgia. I wanted to push back against that, just a little.
Another interpretation I’ve seen, which seems popular among alt-right types, is: “Finally. We can be honest. Let’s talk about race as a real thing rather than as a social construct, a real thing that we can measure and from which we can draw far-reaching inferences about group differences that should inform our policy-making. The statistics being what they are, the “race science,” the IQ research…you want to talk about race openly? Let’s get it on.” But I think that’s a dangerous path; here there be monsters we should be very reticent to provoke.
I think the embedded question in color-blindness vs. race-consciousness – again, I’m a layman, so maybe this is too crude a formulation – is whether we’ll first, as a starting point, see and treat others as unique human beings who are “having a human experience” (to borrow from Chappelle’s act). That, to me, should be a basic, agreed-upon starting point for what I’m clumsily calling the Creed. Where I land is here: we have to start with color-blindness. Maybe we can get good enough at it, mature enough later, to add more nuance. We’re nowhere near that point. And I think we should be really honest about that falling short. And Chappelle is also right to say, in so many words, that it’s utterly ridiculous both to analogize, say, the “transgender” movement to the black struggle for civil rights, and to think we as a society have solved race sufficiently to even consider such analogies.
I don’t know if I’ve clarified anything, or just confused it further. But if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to post another little essay I wrote last year in the midst of the George Floyd unrest. Maybe it will help.
On Atticus Finch, Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks, Billy Madison, and Race.
******
Above the spinet piano in my living room hangs a black-and-white photo: Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch from the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus -- tanned, handsome and bespectacled, and based, it’s always been said, on Lee’s own father as she grew up in 1930s Monroeville, Alabama-- sits in a simple wooden chair, still in his seersucker three-piece suit after a long day’s work at the law office. He peers down at his son Jim at his knee while his daughter Scout rests in his lap. Jim gazes intently at him, with expectation and admiration, waiting for his dad to convey some profound moral truth, perhaps about the God-given equality of men and the solemn duty to fight injustice wherever it is found and whatever the personal cost.
Also in my living room, on the top shelf of my built-ins where I can hardly reach it without a stool, is a hardcover copy of Go Set a Watchman. Billed as Lee’s long-rumored lost “second novel,” I ordered it from Amazon as soon as came out a few years ago. But in the two days between my order and the book’s arrival on my doorstep, I heard the news: Go Set a Watchman wasn’t a second novel, but rather the first rough draft of To Kill a Mockingbird – and what’s worse, the original Atticus was a segregationist and a bigot.
I’ve never opened the cover, much less cracked the spine, of Go Set a Watchman. I guess I like the fictional Atticus better than the real one -- or more to the point: I suppose I don’t really want to know the real one.
I bet I’m not alone. I bet the own-to-actually-read ratio of Go Set a Watchman is as high as any book in Alabama, save maybe the Good Book itself.
***********
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about race – specifically about this question about whether race-blindness or race-consciousness is the proper ideal.
Being a child of the 1980s and 90s, I’d like to talk about Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks and Billy Madison and see where we end up.
Man…Michael Jackson. The original “MJ.” In the 80s and early 90s, everybody loved him – black, white, it didn’t matter. He was a national treasure. Ronald Reagan – Reagan! – honored MJ on the South Lawn of the White House. I'm not saying I was MJ for Halloween one year...but I'm not saying I wasn't.
Jackson seemed almost post-racial to people like me – first, in the figurative sense in that his music had dynamic crossover appeal even to the rhythmically-challenged, and later, in the literal (if increasingly bizarre) sense that his vitiligo and plastic-surgery obsession moved him further and further away from his original, traditionally black appearance. The white experience with MJ began with the young MJ singing “ABC” with the Jackson Five on the Ed Sullivan Show, ran through “Beat It,” an admonition against gang violence during the 80s crack epidemic, extended to “We Are the World,” with the likes of Cyndi Lauper and Stevie Wonder and Huey Lewis and other superstars of both races singing joyfully about the brother-and sisterhood of man, and reached its apotheosis with 1991’s “Black or White,” in which a newly-famous McCaulay Culkin lip-synched: “I’m not gonna spend my life bein’ a color!” Pardon my French, but we white people ate that shit UP.
Around the same time, a chubby make-believe cowboy named Garth Brooks made everyone a country music fan, at least for a few months. When “Friends in Low Places” came blasting over the speakers at Mega Skate on a fall Friday night in 1990, even the black kids sang along. Two years later, Garth released his own feel-good anthem about our soon-to-be-realized post-racial utopia, titled “We Shall Be Free”: “When the last thing we notice is the color of skin / And the first thing we look for is the beauty within….” God, the feeling of self-satisfaction that washed over me as I belted that line to my Sony boombox was flat-out intoxicating.
Oh yes, when I was a kid, color-blindness was all the rage, at least among the white people I associated with. I read an MLK biography and memorized that oft-quoted line from “I Have a Dream”: “I have a DREAM that my four little children will ONE DAY live in a nation where they will NOT be judged by the COLOR of their SKIN, but by the CONTENT of their CHARACTER!”
There it is! It was so simple not to be racist! We’ll have this race thing licked in no time! Probably just need some old people to die, that’s all.
Which brings us to 1995 and Billy Madison.
I was sophomore in Ms. DeArman’s public-speaking class when the OJ verdict came down. While the verdict itself surprised me – I, like most white people I knew, thought OJ was guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt – it was the elated and emotional reaction of some of my black classmates that shocked me. How could they celebrate such an obvious miscarriage of justice? I thought. Surely they don’t believe the Fuhrman-racist-cop slander, do they? I thought. Why do they seem to be taking this so personally? I really wondered.
That same year, an idiotically hilarious film titled Billy Madison hit theaters. It was about the privileged, no-account, large adult son of a wealthy white man who is shocked to learn that he never actually graduated high school – in fact, he never actually passed first grade, or any grade thereafter – because his father had bribed Billy’s teachers throughout his school career. Hilarity ensues as Adam Sandler (as Billy) must pass all 12 grades in 24 weeks for his father to consider letting him manage the family company.
So I said I’ve been thinking a lot about race, and race-blindness, and race-consciousness. And it occurs to me: I am Billy Madison. We – and I’m talking here to my fellow white people – are Billy Madison. Here I am thinking I graduated with honors, and the truth is: I haven’t passed the first grade. We just all agreed to social-promotion our way through this thing. I thought Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks could make up for centuries of slavery, segregation, prejudice and oppression and brutality. I thought we had racism pretty much under control, that “it don’t matter if you’re black or white,” that “there’s only one race, and that’s mankind,” that the OJ thing was just a weird aberration, a bump on the road to our post-racial harmony. And it turns out: I never really learned anything. I just wanted to feel good about myself and the world.
*********************
So. Atticus Finch.
As he stood before an all-white-male jury in fictional 1935 south Alabama, the To Kill a Mockingbird version of Atticus implored his all-white-male jury not to consider and appreciate Tom Robinson’s blackness – but simply, in this one instance, put it aside, try not to see it, give Tom a fair shake and weigh the evidence impartially. Be race-blind, he begged. “Our courts have their faults,” said the noble Atticus, “as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.” The jury, of course, wrongfully convicted Tom, but the point remained: the first tepid step towards racial justice – the bare but necessary minimum! – is to be willing to see past race. You have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. And despite all of our back-patting over our racial progress, many of us are still babies when it comes to race. We may not be 1935 south Alabama, but we’re not nearly as far along as we’d like to think. We’re Billy Madison. We need to go back to first grade and master some basics.
Because here’s the deal: if we had the basics down – if we could just see past race, in the moment, if we could at least aspire to see past it as a first tepid step -- Ahmaud Arbery would be alive today. If we had the basics down, George Floyd would be alive today. And so would Eric Garner. And Walter Scott. And on. And on. And on.
We have to admit that we never graduated – that, in fact, we’re still in first grade on this thing.
We can’t comfort ourselves with delusional fictions about “how far we’ve come.”
We’ve got to have the courage to pull Go Set a Watchman off the dusty, forgotten top shelf, find a comfy chair, crack the spine, come face-to-face with the real Atticus Finch, and realize that he is us.
And then read it again.
And then, hopefully one day, we can earn the expectant and admiring gazes of our own children at our knee, and pass on some actual, hard-won moral truths to them, and do so without the pangs of hypocrisy stabbing us in the heart.
We have our homework. Let’s get to it.
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.
This is the second installment in a series. The point is to show the evolution of things and the psychological matrix out of which SI evolves — and also, crucially, to examine the dialectic of the black civil rights struggle and the “unity of oppression” narrative that appropriated it. Chappelle has an ambivalent relationship to each aspect of ideological succession — he believes at once that Kaepernick was his champion and the intensification of progressivism in response to Trump is a great historic boon AND that he remains free to joke about or think about the various aspects of SI dogma however he likes. He is learning otherwise and may or may not be brought to heel by it in the long run. They are now “calling him in”.
He is taking a terrible risk, remember this phenomenon was successful in de platforming a President. He is dancing between the devil and the deep blue sea; a lot of people are looking to get him and if he should err, no one will risk standing up for him. We all live in a state of uncertainty, what is permissible, what can we say? We won’t defend Chappell because it’s to risky and we don’t trust we know how - that is a powerful part of the enforcement of SI dogma. I wonder if we will see him grovelling like Andrew Dice Clay? I doubt it, he’s too real, but you never know fame and fortune are so very enticing. I sold out for money. We all do in some way.
His willingness to give up $50 million for his convictions is a source of succor and strength to him today -- he keeps referencing for that very reason. Now that he has both that knowledge of his own character AND $100 million in the bank, he is as well-armored as a human being can be. Still, it might not prove enough.
Ya, $100 million, that buys integrity. Money and integrity are linked; integrity is a rich mans privilege; with out money integrity gets you martyrdom.
He’s a hero of mine.
"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.
Wesley’s is the juiciest, most viscerally enjoyable prose of any writer I read regularly.
He makes us work for it. Fantastic
I appreciated that particular flourish.
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.
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.
Incrimination
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.