One of the most brilliant sketches on the reliably brilliant Chapelle’s Show was Dave Chapelle’s night out with Wayne Brady. Brady, of course, has the reputation of being squeaky clean, almost to the point of absurdity. And so it comes as a bit of a surprise to Dave that their night out involves murder, pimping, and general mayhem.
Like much of Chapelle’s humor, the sketch works on multiple levels. Yes, there’s that top level of watching Wayne Brady break a policeman’s neck. But at the deeper level, I think the sketch was saying something very important: that there are many kinds of blackness, and that Wayne Brady is no more or less “black” because he’s a nice guy than he’d be if he were a stereotypical, racist projection of a thug.
It’s a powerful message, one that Chapelle and Brady slid nicely under the radar. Is Wayne Brady not a “black actor” just because he’s nice? That’s as wrongheaded as saying that because Wayne Brady’s black, he must be a gang banger. Both are stereotypes. Both accept a fundamental level of racism, a view of “blackness” as something monolithic. Chapelle and Brady rather brilliantly lay out exactly how absurd this viewpoint is.
I was reminded of this sketch by a Bill Maher tweet.
Maher is criticizing President Obama for his decision not to lay into Texas Gov. Rick Perry for all the stupid things Gov. Goodhair’s been saying. Now, first off, Maher couldn’t be wronger if he said the Sun is made of apples; the story is that Rick Perry is running around being an idiot. If Obama engages, the story morphs into “Obama vs. Perry: Smackdown!” Obama’s simply sitting on shore while Perry drowns. Why would he be stupid enough to throw Perry a lifeline?
But it’s not Maher’s complete lack of political sense that drew my attention. No, it’s the “President Wayne Brady” crack, followed up by the demand that Obama “lift up his shirt just enough to show em there’s a gun tucked in there?”
There is a certain strain of progressive that supported Obama because they thought he’d be their own personal gang banger. They wanted him to be their Suge Knight. And when Obama turned out to be Barack Obama, the guy who was a lawyer, family man, and professor, these people turned on him, demanding that he conform to their idea of blackness.
Well, as Chapelle and Brady so ably showed, there is no one form of “blackness.” Obama is not your gangsta, any more than Wayne Brady is. He’s Barack Obama, which is, quite frankly, pretty damn impressive.
Expecting Obama to morph into a racist caricature of a thug is, itself, racist. It is expecting him to conform to stereotypes of what an African American is supposed to behave like, and it is no less racist a conceit when it’s used to backstop the argument that Obama should “fight” or “grow a spine.”
Barack Obama is who he is. He’s not going to choke his opponents, metaphorically or literally. If you’re a white person who thinks that’s not “black enough,” the problem is not with Obama. It’s with you.
All I wanted was for Biden to go on every single talk show and when the host brought up the Republican talking point de jour, ask him if he was stupid or evil. “You know that’s false, don’t you? Why are you repeating a lie that hurts average Americans?”
It’s not like Biden was doing anything special with his time that I could see.
I didn’t realize that I was picturing Obama as a gangsta. My profuse apologies to him and to you.
I think you’ve rather badly missed my point. Can you point out where I talked about Biden?
You didn’t, but this progressive wishes that Obama been as aggressive against the Republicans in office as he had been while campaigning. The best way to have done that (and avoid the “Angry Black Man” stereotype) would have been to use Biden as attack dog, which I **thought** was the whole point of choosing him for Veep.
Somewhere between folding like a cheap suit on so many issues and “gansta” or “Suge Knight” or whatever is an Obama that could do for the stimulus or health care what he did for DADT.
Biden’s too erratic to be a reliable attack dog. And the point of choosing him as veep was to put an older, working-class white guy on the ticket. It was ticket-balancing, pure and simple.
There is a certain strain of progressive that supported Obama because they thought he’d be their own personal gang banger.
Bull. Even Maher, from what I can see, actually claimed to have “thought in two years that I’d be making jokes about what a gangsta he was.” He just called himself a bad comedian.
Just want to post this article here about the real effects of a culture that has decided it’s OK to make jokes about sex workers. I know it’s not the central point of this post, but the “choke a bitch” tag line you use as the title is right out of bad “pimp/ho” jokes, and of course is how it’s deployed in the video as well.
Violence against women used as humor is just not that funny. Violence against women who may well be trafficked and/or coerced is way less funny. And jokes about women who work in the sex industry really hurt women and girls who have been trafficked and coerced (and to a lesser extent, women who have chosen sex work and feel neutral or positive about the experience but who still can be harmed by stereotypes and denigrating attitudes toward sex workers.)
Elusis:
I would say in the context of that video, which aimed to show how EVIL Wayne Brady could be those jokes were funny. They made a point, the point being that secretely, Wayne Brady is a real scumbag. Sometimes mild or implied violence against women can be funny, sometimes mild or implied violence against men can be funny.
Responses that emerge around blackness as identity or blackness as qualifier serve to usurp not only all the progress that we as a race have sought to make as people and not a category, but ignores the hybridity and heterogeneity that characterizes black Americans today. Much like my channel (which I hope all watch and spread- http://shrt.fm/purTE3 ), this article looks at the ways that race is used paradoxically- both as something that blacks must live up to ‘as blacks’ and cannot live up to as ‘leaders or even acceptable members of American society generally’.