Relating to Race with Chris Rock

I’d heard that the article In Conversation: Chris Rock by Frank Rich (Vulture) including some groundbreaking statements on race by Chris Rock. I like Chris Rock and I like his standup. He’s a comedian, though, so while his niggers vs. black people bit was funny at the time, in retrospect, it’s a savage attack on the poor and uneducated. Still, admittedly funny at the time.

On Bill Maher

Seeing that Frank Rich of the New York Times had interviewed him was not encouraging. So let’s see what Rock has to say. It starts off … suspiciously. Frank asks about “the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims”. How the hell is it appropriate to classify Maher’s material as a “riff” on Muslims? He is an adamant and unapologetic Islamophobe. He doesn’t riff on them; he basically advocates eradicating them as an otherwise unsolvable problem. And he’s been doing it long enough in non-comedic settings that we have to assume he means it.

Maher changed roles from comedian to political analyst quite a while ago. In neither role is he very good, in my opinion, but that’s neither here nor there. But it’s easy to see that Rock has a weird—though quintessentially American—definition of “left” when he later in the interview classifies “Maher [as] on the left”. Maher is in fact a self-described, fanatical libertarian who thinks Muslims are evil. That is in no way a leftist attitude. So take Rock’s political opinions with a grain of salt: he seems relatively well-indoctrinated, unfortunately. I say “seems” because Rock is a comedian and he generally tries to make people laugh, not to provide trenchant analysis.

Rock responds to the question about Maher’s “ban” from Berkeley[1] that he too “stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.” That’s his answer. Instead of distancing himself from Maher and his poisonous racism, he sympathizes with him, noting that kids these days are too intolerant.

Kids these days

There is evidence that this newest generation is considerably more sensitive to discrimination issues, that they feel more entitled to not hearing opinions that they consider unsavory. That this sensitivity leads to an aversion to Maher is not a bad thing. In addition, anyone who picks Berkeley to represent colleges in general is out of touch. I can’t imagine that Berkeley and Texas A&M are at all on the same wavelength as far as racism-sensitivity goes. Calling a college like Berkeley conservative is just baiting contrarianism. Rock’s just trying to get the interviewer to double-take. Classifying kids who don’t want their school to pay a racist for his hate speech as conservative is not correct, and is even unfair.

Let the idiot talk

I don’t agree with banning racists, by the way. I prefer to hear the racist or the islamophobe—give him or her enough rope to hang him- or herself. Will some people cheer him or her on? Sure, and they will self-identify as well as people desperately in need of guidance or avoidance, depending on how far gone they are.

But how many times do we have to hear someone’s unaccepting schtick before we stop giving that person a stage? Have we heard enough from Rush Limbaugh now to form an opinion? Can we stop listening now? Are we sure that he doesn’t have something useful to contribute to the conversation? Does Rock still listen to Limbaugh? You know, just to be sure he isn’t missing something? Probably not. And the rest of us have stopped listening to Maher.

We all have a limited amount of time to spend on things. Maher isn’t worth it, in my opinion. I understand that it’s highly unlikely that this is Berkeley didn’t host him—to help people avoid wasting time. They probably did it for the petty, closed-minded reason that Rock cited. Should Berkeley have booked him and paid him, but let all of its campus groups encourage no-one to show up? Pay him to play an empty room—there, that’ll show him? That sounds kinda stupid, too. Where a lovely guy like Maher’s involved, it’s damned if you do and damned if you dont’.

Comedians are different

Rock definitely has a point about comedians. Comedians are often not even representing their own opinions in their material and their act. They’re just being funny. Bill Burr is a classic example. Some of his material is jarring, but when you hear him banter with another comedian, you realize he’s a more even-handed guy than his on-stage persona. He has a pretty big audience, some of whom probably take him seriously, but what can you do?

And you can’t make people want to listen to stuff that makes them uncomfortable. Does it possibly expand your horizons? I think that it does. But it’s not for everyone. Most people don’t have the ironic background to let them process things that aren’t true and still glean something from the experience. I like Bill Hicks. I like Doug Stanhope. But I’m not surprised if Stanhope has trouble booking a gig at Berkeley.

Rock’s other policy ideas

Rich keeps asking Rock policy questions, but it’s unclear whether Rock is answering as a comedian or as a policy analyst. Most of his metaphors sound like bits, so it’s hard to take it seriously. He seems to be uncomfortably apologetic about Obama, which isn’t too surprising since he probably thinks Obama’s a goody-two-shoes leftist who’s trying his best.

His take on race relations is spot-on, though:

“Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.”

I have nothing to add there.

Is a black president a sign of progress?

The following statement from Rock seems right, doesn’t it?

“[…] to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.”

Is it, though? Can we first agree on what we call progress? Or that we don’t all think of progress in the same way? Rock and I—I will venture—consider progress to be a society that is capable of electing the best leader regardless of skin color. That is, a society that can choose a leader based on qualities salient to the job rather than non-relevant ones is more advanced than one that cannot. At the very least, that society will have leaders more likely to fulfill the needs of a larger proportion of the population.[2]

Is that what happened, though? Is it that these “[qualified] black people” that Rock mentions simply kept on keepin’ on and white America finally noticed and elected one? Or is it more that these intelligent black people figured out how to make themselves more appealing to the entrenched system?

Obama is not Martin Luther King. Before we pat ourselves on the back for having elected a black man, we should consider what kind of man he is. He is policy-wise no different than Bush. He’s arguably worse.[3] He’s like Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas—all very powerful black people. However, the reason they’re allowed to be powerful is because they promulgate the white agenda. They play nice. They’re not Django; they’re Stephen. So I don’t think it’s progress in the way that Rock characterizes it.

End on a high note

Where Rock does hit a proper note is that the newer generations are objectively better at ignoring race than previous ones. It is not clear that we are moving toward the goal of being an actually “advanced” society, as defined above. Perhaps we have to wait for a few more generations to die off first.

So we’re still not great at it, but as Rock puts it,

“The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”

Indeed. I can back that 100%.[4]