Dave Chappelle is one of the great comedic minds and social critics of our generation, particularly when it comes to race in America. I recently watched an interview with him with Christiane Amanpour of CNN, along with John Stewart. Stewart and Chappelle had a comedy tour together and Amanpour was asking questions about it, and American politics. In the interview, when asked about the 2016 presidential election of Trump and when asked about the Russia investigation, Chappelle said something profound:
Amanpour: “Do you think the division is more acute right now?”
Chapelle: “The division? No, man, no. In fact, some of the things they say, even when they say, the Russians influenced the election, it’s kind of like… Is Russia making us racist? Is that who’s doing it? OK. Oh my god, thank goodness, I thought it was us.”
Amanpour: “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” (changes subject)
Source: Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle talk Trump and comedy tour
When Trump was elected I experienced it as a kind of trauma. It was a moment in which I was forced to confront just how ideologically fucked America was, and how racist and misogynist it is. Trump ran on a blatantly racist, nationalist platform, particularly targeting Latinx and Muslim people. There was no way to miss or ignore this fact, it was the central issue of his campaign, and has continued to dominate his policy making in the White House.
There is a group of white people on the left who absolutely do not want to internalize this fact, preferring to talk about ‘Economic Anxiety’. They don’t want to know what the fact that this worked and continues to work tells us about America. Importantly, if you asked Black Americans, even right after the election, they were not surprised by the election result. They know how racist America is, how powerfully motivated by racial fear and hatred our country is. The fact that someone like Trump could ride that wave to power was not surprising to them. Many whites of the left, particularly those who were more moderate or institutionally inclined, members of the Democratic party and so on, truly did not want to know this. They wanted to see Trump as a kind of aberration. A freakish result! Totally strange!
We heard again and again as Trump instituted flagrantly racist policy after policy “This is not America!” But of course it is, and has been, all the way back to the beginning. Perhaps this was not the America that you were forced to encounter daily, perhaps this was not an America that happened to ‘people like us’. But now that dark side of American white supremacy has leapt out of the shadows onto center stage and is beating it’s chest and howling for blood. For many American whites, who want to fundamentally believe that the institutions of white America are mostly good, this is unknowable. So there must be another reason. And they found one: Russia.
To be clear: I am not saying that the Russians did NOT interfere in the election. They probably did. Just as the US government has interfered, and still interferes, in countless elections around the world. And Trump may well have conspired with them, or done business with them, or something. But fundamentally, Trump won because he ran on a racist, reactionary, nationalist platform which told American whites that the reason their life was so fucked was someone else’s fault. The desire to believe that this was some out-of-character, totally unfathomable event for America that was only possible due to malign interference is willful self delusion. Not coincidentally this is something that we Americans are great at.
