I think for me it was about time and place - doing it to one of my neighbours isn’t really something I wanted to get into. I own my house, he owns his house, we always stop and chat (cul-de-sac type situation). I don’t know how you’d define a level of racism, but put it this way, he’s not the white supremist type that wants to kill me - I’m of Indian descent, we’re on first name terms, he’s always pleasant and chatty with me. If he hated anyone that’s not white, he wouldn’t even stop and acknowledge me.
In my mind, I’m not going to change the views of a man that’s 30 years older than me, that jumps from topic to topic, I doubt he’d listen to me and everything would be followed up with a “but” and the last thing I want to do is end up falling out with a neighbour when we live in the same street.
I do agree with your general point about challenging it - and I do. I felt I challenged it enough (calling out the difference between asylum seekers and immigrants, saying that the Colliston stuff wasn’t about erasing history and his good, and it barely appeared to register. If I’d carried on it’d just ended in a shouting match in my own street - no thank you.
My father had a stroke in his last years before his death. You could clearly see the brain damage on the scans, but you couldn’t really notice at first glance, no speech or movement impediments. But his personality changed. It was like he had gotten colder, like there was some kind of empathy centre being hit - don’t know how else to describe it. It was really sad at the time to hear him rant in weird xenophobic statements, which he had never done before. Like a completely different person.
Not saying every racist has brain damage. But it did make me wonder if there are certain biological ‘things’ that make people slightly more prone to those kind of opinions…probably absurd, I know…
The last 10 years or so has seen the reemergence of public, prideful old fashioned Alf Garnet style racism, but for period prior to that we had lived in a supposedly evolved period where people thought racism was a thing of the past but it had just changed and what you describe is exactly how racism was presented by most people. People could harbor awful beliefs about groups of people who weren’t in their demographic, even if they had a “friend”. we had largely moved on from “I wont share a restaurant with black people” to “I’m fine with black people, as long as they act and speak and think exactly how I need them to for me to be comfortable.” The people they were friends with were just the “good ones” not a reflection of their lack of prejudice.
Things have happened in the last decade or so…Syria, Brexit, the response to Obama, Trump…that brought back that really overt form of racism, and as disturbing as that is in some ways its easier to deal with because these people are at least honest. This 90s and 00s style racism is more pernicious because its associated with the lie told to self that “Im not a racist” which gives the moral freedom to the individual to go and be racist as fuck.
I just find it tedious. Crying about being “cancelled” because his documentary got rejected from a film festival while he literally has a $60m contract at Netflix and anything he chooses to release gets pushed onto the front page.
Netflix aren’t threatening to remove his content and no one outside of Netflix are going to sway them to do so.
Successful men whinging about “cancel culture” is very boring.
I’m with you on this. I don’t sway to the right and I don’t believe Chappelle does either, but he’s never been one to mince his words. There’s some serious manipulation of the media going on, has been happening for some time now.
Note, I don’t have an opinion on this yet. I’ve gotta spend some time watching what’s happened with him in the past couple of years (he took a long time off after he pulled the show off Comedy Central to re-evaluate WHY it was so successful?).
I’m really curious to catch up on what’s been going on with him. I heard he was hosting shows during lockdown, but I think there’s more to this story…
At some point, people just look for reasons to be offended…
its not as blunt as that though is it, the average bloke on the street isnt getting cancelled becuase he has nothing to be cancelled, it has no affect to cancel him, the victim will always be someone in the spotlight. (not nes. malew though admittedly)
what you have here is a movement that can really do damage not even deciding in some kind of democratic way where the line is drawn, just following each other like a big blob absorbing whatever gets in its way.
the danger isnt Chappelles particular view on any matter, cancel culture can easily be abducted by an organisation with rather darker interests.
canselling something isnt debating it and coming out with a reasonable conclusion that hopefully changes some peoples perspectives.
its just another step down a road i really dont think we want to go down.
i mean…cancelling someone. just cancelling them? isnt that…worrying? any alarm bells?
The thing is, nothing has been cancelled apart from some documentary from a few film festivals. That’s not cancel culture, that’s private businesses deciding they don’t want to be associated with him anymore.
He’s still actively promoted on Netflix, he’s still selling out whatever venue he decides to play, he’s still worth tens of millions of dollars, he’s still able to get his opinion printed in any newspaper or magazine in the world, even his “cancelled” documentary is now selling out arenas around the country. If anything, this whole affair is likely to have solidified his fanbase, not eroded it (who the hell is buying arena tickets to watch a documentary film before this?)
In this circumstance the term “cancelled” seems particularly meaningless.
Chapelle had a stand up with some really ugly shit about trans women. The internet responded by saying “ugh, dude. What happened to you? This is some awful shit.” Chapelle then spent the next couple of weeks speaking repeatedly on a number of different platforms about being “cancelled” while psuedo promoting his cancel culture documentary and retaining his distribution deal with netflix.
I would strongly suggest that everyone watches his final Netflix special and hear what he actually says.
I came away from it with a much different perspective than those who are claiming he is “transphobic”. There are major lessons to be learned from his final, very sad, story.
Unfortunately for some, in this instance Chapelle cannot be labelled - this issue is not for him (and most people) a right and wrong or black and white issue. These issues are constantly and often purposefully reduced down into an “us and them” argument It is way more complicated than that.
At the end of the day he is a comedian - and as he says, there are certain groups who should stop punching down on comedy. - Watch the special before jumping to any conclusions about what he says.
John Cleese has some pretty insightful comments about what comedy is and should be.
