One of his bits was him recalling the words he'd said in the 72 hours after Trump was elected, and how those words were perceived and reported on by the media. He repeated a few jokes that he'd done in New York the day Trump was elected, then talked about how a reporter had interpreted what he'd said to mean he supported Trump. He then talked about his appearance on Saturday Night Live right after the election and how he'd come up with something rather spur of the moment, something like "we'll give him a chance if he gives us a chance." Chapelle said he wished he hadn't said that. He credited his comments to the elephant effect, the way it's difficult to talk accurately about something until you've had enough distance from it.
I'm familiar with saying the wrong thing
We've all experienced this, of course. Anyone with the capacity to be the least bit honest and introspective will occasionally look back on the things he's said and feel sheepish about them. In 2017, I wrote a fair bit about race. That's because I feel like that urban blight, which affects black Americans disproportionately, is the most pressing issue America has to face. It's also because I feel that as much as conservatives miss the boat by promoting a bootstraps philosophy too much, at the same time, a lot of liberal rhetoric on race is also inaccurate and not helpful. And the whole conversation we're having about race isn't leading to improvement; being properly woke isn't going to fix the heat in Baltimore City Schools. That requires boring, long-term work to improve a system of acquisitions and accounting. The way we are talking about race now in America lacks the seriousness necessary to accomplish goals like these.
I still believe that, and I think it's necessary for thoughtful people to be bold in shattering the icons held dear by those who seem to be dominating a lot of the conversation. But that doesn't mean I feel like I got everything right that I've said.
What I messed up last year
I now wish I'd either not posted this piece on football players not standing for the National Anthem or written it differently. At the time I was thinking something like this: Although I agree that it's shameful how not everyone is able to share in the full bounty of America's wealth, I am also worried that we are fracturing enough as a country that if we aren't careful, we will soon have a lot less wealth to figure out how to distribute. Democracies can be fragile, and if we lose all signifiers that bind us together, the whole thing can fall apart.
However, looking back on it, even a moderate call to suggest players might want to rethink kneeling overlooked something far more important. Colin Kaepernick is not a perfect person. It was stupid of him to wear those pig socks. But he's a brave person and I admire him. The easy, cowardly, approach would have been to just stand for the anthem without meaning it. He gave up a ton of money to take a stand for something he believed in.
The fact that enough people--mostly white--were incensed enough by his very mild kneeling protests that they terrified NFL owners into not hiring a capable quarterback says an awful lot about America. Mostly, it says Kaepernick was not wrong to call out systemic racism.
It is really difficult to stand on a stage--or in front of a computer--and say something that is creative, audacious, and also true. But that's what any artist or thinker has to do. To do that, you have to be fearless. Chapelle noted in his special that he doesn't ever feel bad for anything he says on stage. I'm not by nature the kind of person who can really say I don't give a damn what others think and mean it, but I am resolved to try to become more of that kind of person. The best way to become more fearless is to keep trying to speak the truth as I see it. As I do that, I'll make mistakes. I will try to learn from them and do better, but I'm really going to try not to feel bad about them.
You can't please everyone, so you might as well please yourself (if only you weren't an asshole who's never satisfied)
Even if you do say everything right, someone can always take it the wrong way. Truth shares a property line with falsehood, and the minute you start trying to talk about the part of truth's domain that isn't dead in the center, others will start telling you that you're headed over the line. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes from a perspective of wanting young black people to not feel that the deplorable condition of many of their peers is their own fault, so he writes about systemic injustice, both historic and present. Some of his critics immediately counter that this narrative removes agency from young black people, that by focusing on the obstacles before them, Coates makes it impossible for them to overcome those obstacles. Because Coates is trying to put up a gazeebo on the part of the lawn where few people go, some are saying he must have gone over the property line. But he hasn't, for the most part. He wants to use the full value of truth's property, which means going up to the edge. That doesn't mean he's a bad neighbor.
And just because I am willing to criticize liberal racial rhetoric doesn't mean I am siding with bootstraps-type conservatives. The Dudley Randall poem we all learned in school, the one pitting Booker T.'s pragmatism against W.E.B. Dubois's idealism, is sort of a false dichotomy. We need both. We need the academy and the trade school. We need political activism and economic activism. That's the point I am usually trying to make when I write about race.
I am resolving to continue to be as bold as I can be as a writer. But I also have to continue to look at the elephant, to see if anything has changed as I've (hopefully) gained perspective in life. For me, I think I'll always face a temptation to try for the overly clever interpretation. It's a pitfall for a lot of academics, artists, and public intellectuals. That's what I'll resolve to try to guard in myself.
But I'm not sorry for what I've said. I'm just going to keep trying to do better.
There's a real danger in the "I don't care what others think" approach. We live in a society now where folks only care what others think if it reinforces their own beliefs, but apart from that the world is invited to shut up. The notion of pure autonomy, a perverse application of sovereignty to the personal sphere (see Elshatiain's Sovereingty) is fundamentally anti-social. Worse, it's parasitic. It is an ethos that wants all the goods that society offers, while conceding nothing and engaging in zero reciprocity. Yet society (see Arendt's Human Condition) is fundamentally based on reciprocity. At some level, we should have a moment of reflection about our actions and we should take the good and the bad that people give us, just as we will offer them the good and the bad of our own views. That is the kind of negotiation that moves ideas forward and transforms. It is also the kind of negotiation that undergird ideas of forgiveness, which few nowadays seem to consider anything but a quaint notion. We are not all just islands in the midst of everyone else qua society. And people are not our objects: free to reinforce our self-esteem or shut up. But I do honestly fear that we are beyond this and that nothing but storms lurk on the horizon.
ReplyDeleteJake, I doubt there's anything more useful than thinking through an issue, then thinking through it again, and again, at different points of time. It's sort of the individual version of Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis (I've been thwacking my way through Hegel over the past few days for an upcoming Pushcart story post, so forgive me if I'm stuck there). Unfortunately, there's a tendency today to dig our heels in and refuse to budge an inch. I think historically, the Right has been better at this lack of compromise than the left, which leads to frustration as the same issues keep getting set back to zero, and there are populations - like African Americans, and Native Americans, and women - who've been coaxed to sacrifice their rights in the interests of patience for too long, which has brought us where we are, where you're either in 100% or you're out.
ReplyDeleteThere's room for nuance when we talk about race, about harrassment, about abortion, about taxes, about education, about war, peace, etc. But in a 240-character world with 3-second newsbites, it's incredibly hard to get there. You're setting a good example.