Where's Dave Chappelle When You Need Him?

By Stephen Marche:

With race relations back on the front burner and all eyes on a bunch of guys drinking beer in the White House, Stephen Marche wonders where all the angry black entertainers have gone. Here, an exclusive preview of his October column, A Thousand Words About Culture.

Nobody wants to hear it, but this fact is too important to ignore: So far, the first African-American presidency has been one of the worst ever for African-Americans. The economic crisis has predominantly hit non-white working class men; the collapse of the auto industry is threatening to destroy the basis of the Midwestern black middle class. Key matters for African-Americans languish — the overincarceration of young black men that makes a mockery of American justice being the number one example. Government aid? That goes to bankers in Connecticut. If the President were white, there would be riots. In this contradictory atmosphere — pregnant with the tension between symbolism and reality — the Henry Louis Gates Jr. scandal has landed with a force out of all proportion to what may or may not have happened in Cambridge. While the bizarre story of his arrest in his own home may seem like an anomaly, it has emerged from a deep national confusion evident everywhere in popular culture. Call it the Obama Discrepancy: Race is much less prominent as a subject while its effects are no less toxic.

Network television has somehow become even whiter since the inauguration, a nearly impossible feat. The Game is gone. Everybody Hates Chris is gone. In May, the Congressional Black Caucus sent a letter to the networks wondering why the Sunday morning talk shows weren't asking any of them to the grand festival of pompous palaver. Fred Armisen does blackface nearly every weekend on SNL, and the main objection to his performance is that he's not objectionable enough; he has no bite, no edge. To make matters worse, the first post-election crop of new shows starring African-American characters coming out this fall is dreadful. Cleveland, the black spun-off character from Seth MacFarlane's The Family Guy, loses every molecule of his funniness the moment he leaves Quahog. "We have a black president," Cleveland's new friends say. "It's about time we had a black friend. We can talk to him about the President." Fox's second offering in the we-have-a-new-president line is Brothers. It's just another dumb sitcom, but I guess I hoped the political transformation of the recent past would leave some mark. Nuthin'. Obama offers America a new model of black male power: become a lawyer, be nice to everybody, marry a good woman, be loyal to her, fight hard, and eventually you will be in charge of whether to blow up the world with the push of a button. The model of black power in Brothers? Play football well and your brother might open a restaurant. The comedy in Brothers is terminally dated; the jokes deflate before your eyes like a soufflé when the oven's been turned off unexpectedly.

One could argue that since the creators behind both Brothers and Cleveland are white, the shows never really had a chance: white people have never known how to talk about race, hiding their shame and fear behind silence or awkwardness. But African-Americans are beginning to retreat from race as well. Chris Rock — half-comic genius, half-prophet — has been keeping busy, and quiet, with a documentary about the culture of African-American hair. Dave Chappelle remains in hiding. Tyler Perry's oeuvre is, essentially, one long-running, feel good "yo momma" joke. The kind of monumentally new, staggeringly fresh hip-hop album the Obama Event seems to cry out for has not emerged. The Wire proved that virtually all the best actors in America are African-American. Why is Idris Elba not doing Othello on Broadway right now?

grant that the situation is tricky. Now that an urban African-American male is the world's most powerful person, the cultural symbols of race and disenfranchisement have become much more complicated to negotiate. The social context has been pulled out from under even the most sophisticated iconography. Take the case of Kehinde Wiley, one of my favorite new painters from the past decade. His most famous portraits present hip-hop stars in scenes culled from the Old Masters: Grandmaster Flash holding a scepter, Ice-T as Napoleon. His contrasts between the European and the African-American modes of projecting power are slippery and fascinating. Or rather they were. Now that Obama wears a crown, Wiley's work has moved from art into the realm of the art-historical. And he's only thirty-two. The problem is that every day, just by his existence in power, Obama makes race seem less relevant. Take any of his major decisions, good or bad. Iran? Closing Guantánamo? How have any of them been shaped by his race? The quantity of melanin in his pigmentation has not meaningfully affected the world. All of the best African-American comics used to do bits about the First Black President. It was a hilariously preposterous concept even a few years ago. Eddie Murphy imagined him giving all his speeches on the run to stay a moving target, Chris Tucker thought he wouldn't bother with bodyguards and just pack his own gun and Rock did a regrettable feature length film on the premise (Tag line: "The only thing white is the house"). To me, Chappelle's Black Bush was the finest of them all and the funniest skit in the whole show. ("Stankonia has said they're willing to drop bombs over Baghdad.") But last November, the world called their bluff, and the color of Obama's skin doesn't make a damn bit of difference in the daily business of running the world.

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It's easy for Eric Holder to say that America is "a nation of cowards" for not talking about race. He's the first African-American Attorney General in history, a figure of transcendence from the nausea and awfulness and brutishness of quotidian experience. Imagine a New York City subway car if it weren't filled with "cowards" but instead with honest and frank discussion of what everyone is really thinking. No one would get to work. Everyone would be murdered by the end of the ride. So why are we forcing Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley to have a beer together at the White House? Surely, this small gesture isn't going to accomplish anything and has to be one of the more preposterous, awkward bits of political theatre to emerge from recent media cycles. A little chat is not going to deal with the reality that a short, grey-haired and somewhat fragile old man was led out of his own house in handcuffs for absolutely no good reason. No. We need artists and entertainers to confront the nastiness that the rest of us don't want to confront. The difficulty and confusion of the present moment are bursting with potential. Let's not waste it.