Can I Hate the Bigotry of Blacks Against Blacks?
Does Black Privilege Exist?
I actually found myself not laughing at the new Marlon Wayans’ special. I just couldn’t stand the overt racism. I couldn’t stand the position of him starting off using the N word but ending with an a. It wasn’t the use but the continued repetition and context. And it wasn’t really the word — I’ve listened to rap songs with black artis using the word and understand that blacks can use it among themselves, and that’s OK with me — but it was the demeaning mentality behind it. Something post-George Floyd bothered me.
He kept attacking an easy target: the black man in the ghetto the whites and cops have piled on for decades.
Immediately, I was reminded of the recent David Chappelle controversy. While Chappelle’s jokes about or against transwomen were mildly offensive and not funny, his attitude was arrogant. I’ve seen him recently on another special and opening for Saturday Night Live and thought his commentary was very interesting and refreshing take for SNL. It wasn’t frivolous and vapid as some special guests are, but he used it to reflect a serious moment in history. He does have a voice and does try to use it to make social points. For that I don’t discredit him.
But it was the “I’m rich and great” attitude, his wealth bragging and I’m such a great comedian I can make anything into a laugh routine in one of his specials that just threw me the wrong way. The joke ended up being funny. I laughed. But all this bragging and superiority acting, where had I seen this before in recent times in the last four years?
David Chappelle still gave me some laughs, and I wasn’t so offended to get all apoplectic. I didn’t get all faux outraged. I’m not banning him or canceling him. He’ll reflect on it and probably use it in a new routine. I’m more angry at the media outrage which is more about attacking Chapelle as a black man for saying the wrong word or trying and failing to address a social issue. I don’t think he should quit performing, just quit the trans humor. It’s clearly not working out, and he continued it since the special, apparently addicted to the controversial attention.
He isn’t feeding off the controversy and getting morally outraged by the ‘snowflakes’ who are criticizing him. Chappelle is a long way from being even close to Trump in complete lack of self-awareness and deliberate controversy stoking. Watching him being pushed to the right to ‘that group’ the “left” is outraged at, is media nonsense.
Instead, the more subtle offense if the upping of themselves, both Wayans’ and Chappelle. And no, I’m not against rich black guys. I’ll stupidly watch the next Sam Jackson movie, who is a billionaire and the highest paid actor. It is the I’m rich now and I can make fun of poor ‘trashy’ black. It looks to me like a piling on the ‘super predator’.
The fight to elevate himself, and by extension his audience, above the ‘ghetto blacks’ offends me. I’m not being a delicate white elitist. It’s just that with Blake shot seven times in the back by a cop and then watching the interview with him, made him very real, very human. Hearing George Floyd talking nicely to everyone in the store just before he was shot as the tape was played at trial, you could hear the humanity, the kindness, of him. These were poor, but very human, black men we could sympathize with. It is often very hard for them to be heard. For a few minutes, it seemed the whole country was silent, listening to them.
Here’s a people forced for untold generations into crushing poverty, stripped of their rights almost constantly to participate in democracy, portrayed as ‘beasts’ and ‘animals’ and lynched for that perception, turned into a modern ‘super predator’ during the crack years by centrist Democrats teaming up with Republicans in the ‘war on drugs.’ A war that became the excuse for the housing of black men in prison due to the charged fabricated perception of the angry dope-selling black men roaming the streets at night pushing crack and heroine.
It’s this perception creating that continues and bothers me. Do blacks that make it like Wayans have the right to spend the first segment of their new comedy special beating down, through humor, on these ‘poor’ uneducated blacks deprived of schools that are funded properly because there is very low property tax in the ‘ghetto’ to pay for them? Because the simplest steps upward are deprived of them because criminal records over a couple joints? Or from routine police searches through unjustified traffic stops?
If a white man like me got up and said the exact same words he did in the exact same manner, you would hear a pin drop in five minutes. In ten minutes, the internet would be a blaze. In fifteen, by the time I got to the bit about boys going to the prom trying to sleep with his daughter, I would beaten up literally. It simply wouldn’t be funny. It would radically offensive. Same words, same delivery even. Vastly different outcome.
I don’t think I’m in a position to judge either comedian morally, maybe. But I stopped seeing the humor in these routines after the peaceful protests for months from Black Lives Matter. Both comedians went too for an easy target: a minority that most middle class people have not encountered — transwomen — with Chapelle; or the poor ghetto uneducated black man who apparently all have outie belly buttons, according to Wayans’ “personal” fear. A group that blacks have encountered in the non-upper-class audience Wayans stood in front of in Miami for that set but who he perceived as that they would want to feel better than. It was a kind of micro-class separation, a raising of one group of blacks that could afford to see him over one that couldn’t. And of course HBO whites and blacks in the suburbs.
So, is it the creation of black privilege? Isn’t privilege the perception of appearing better than another race and-or class? The same lower class and race the whites rail against in the Wayans’ case, the ‘ghetto’ black man’? Maybe. Of course, it’s hardly the deeply entrenched white privilege fossilized into law that systemically repressed and represses blacks, often resulting in horrific violence. But do I have a ‘right’ to find their humor offensive? Should it be on HBO, a traditionally educated pay per view channel of elitists (now of all color)? I don’t know. I just hope you won’t condemn me for trying to reflect on the issue.
Sometimes thought experiments can help us see what is there in a different light. White people piling up against poor blacks and making them appear like stupid ghetto brutes — vastly horrific, extremely racist. And it is. But a rich and successful black comedian doing the same thing? It’s OK, he’s allowed to. It’s class lowering.
But the class differentiation is not just from these black comedians or the Prince of Bellaire’s adoptive family. It is a perception started during the Regan era and the crack ‘epidemic.’ The perception of blacks and the ghettoizing of blacks to me started by whites in power. Not without monetary incentive either. Prisons exploded, built by private corporations and then managed by them, housing a vastly disproportionate number of blacks, often for minor infractions. 99 percent of the time forced to plea bargain away their rights.
The ghetto was created not by accident, but by hard work. Building prisons, organizing mass round ups of lower-level dealers or blacks who looked that way, playing over and over again on the respected evening news of the big three channels in the late eighties and early nineties the story of the black crack mother, the baby born addicted to crack — that’s hard work, that why they call it the nightly news.
Over and over again playing a story about one mother with one baby that was not true is not easy. The myth of a drug addled black women who started out as welfare queens under Reagan (again one black woman as it turns out, and only one, was that queen) has to be pounded into the heads of a general populace to justify not just filled prisons but Clinton’s ending of welfare. The myth is the mantra: they don’t deserve it. The don’t work hard. They’re lazy.
The myth is that black women don’t deserve taxpayer money. Reagan, who uncovered this abuse, found them lazily lying around the house under having more and more babies to increase their welfare checks, until their checks got so big under Bush and Clinton, they decided to use it to buy crack. Before, they were stealing from the taxpayers by having babies, so they don’t have to work, but now under Bush-Clinton they were going even further by blowing it on hard drugs. Talk about undeserving and abusive. Thank goodness Clinton ended welfare. Obviously, they deserved it, just get back to work.
Chapelle and Wayan can do whatever they want. If they need to lower other blacks or transwomen to feel better about themselves in order to make people laugh, that’s fine. I’m going with a No for now to both questions posed in the title and subtitle. Black privilege doesn’t exist in my white mind.
They can have as much privilege at they can want, without any blow back from whites. They’ve already had centuries’ worth of it.
