CNN’s Don Lemon, fed up with inaction from celebrities on the George Floyd protests, opined on May 30: “What about Hollywood? Strangely quiet. Why aren’t they helping these young people? These young people are out there standing on a platform on the edge of an abyss by themselves.”
You have to have a particularly warped view of political change and power to think that, in a moment of such great pain and angst, there was a hunger for more A-list celebrities to speak up.
Lemon got what he asked for this week, including comedian Dave Chappelle laying into him in a comedy set dropped onto Netflix overnight titled 8:46.
Named for the amount of time Floyd’s neck was knelt on by a Minneapolis police officer before he died, 8:46 lists the abuses of black people at the hands of police officers in a truly devastating monologue. The set was dedicated in spirit to the likes of Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and John Crawford III. Chappelle recalled how he had been pulled over and let off with a warning by the police officer in Beavercreek, Ohio, who would gun down Crawford the very next day inside a Walmart.
Chappelle shouted to the socially distanced audience before him that he didn’t need to say anything to the public “because David Chappelle understands what the f— he is seeing and these streets will speak for themselves, whether I am alive or dead.”
Looking around the country at what has been happening, between the protests, the riots, and the acts of civil disobedience all the way to unlawful violence, how could you be so blind as to think that the people need Hollywood to speak for them?
When you think of power and privilege in the Lemon mindset, you deceive yourself into believing that because actress Julia Roberts has a platform, little people do not. You get these strange campaigns online such as #ShareTheMicNow, with the self-defeating premise that “when the world listens to women, it listens to white women.” So, in the spirit of change, Roberts will share her social media account with a woman of color on the same week Business Insider released a brutally true video explainer on Hollywood’s obsession with white savior narratives. Then enter the white guilt complex, with the widely panned #ITakeResponsibility video montage of celebrities such as Debra Messing, Kristen Bell, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Aaron Paul delivering their best on-camera performances in an acknowledgment that racism is partly their fault.
regret to inform you the celebs are at it again pic.twitter.com/pfORBiqvrX
— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) June 11, 2020
Chappelle shuts it all down as he often does. It can’t be a coincidence that the Washington, D.C., native connects across so many different cross-sections of the country, simply from the rebellious act of choosing to live in small-town Ohio. Chappelle sticks to his usual routine of being lewd, crude, and still true. But it’s the autobiographical part of his set that strikes hardest.
8:46 is so short in length for a Chappelle set that it’s hard to justify not taking the time to watch it. Clocking in at 27 minutes, it doesn’t feel nearly as long as sitting through the raw video of Floyd’s death face-down in a Minneapolis street.
Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) is the spokesman for Young Voices, the host of the Beltway Banthas podcast, and a contributor for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
