I just finished the Chapelle special. The obvious problems with him remain obvious. His varying complicities and commitment to transphobia are a badge of honor for him at this point. I did have another thought that kept recurring throughout:
Chapelle is absolutely great at his particular craft and the model of greatness that Chapelle represents is dead.
For those who remain wedded to his model of greatness, they will continue to call him the greatest because he represents the apex of that model. Chapelle is a zombie now and so is the model he represents. Dead, but does not seem to know it's dead.
For Chapelle, greatness is the rich black man or the unstoppable nigger as he names his special after. The true joke of the special is that he believes the rich black man is somehow dangerous to white power -- an unstoppable nigger that demands policing. His villains are the rich white liberals he is in cultural proximity to. He conflates the violence of the state -- police and FBI -- with these liberal white people. He confuses the racist anxieties of white liberals with being actually dangerous to empire. He already serves capital and empire of his own choosing. He is prideful about his status as capitalist. He begins the special saying, "I have no guilt." He seems to have little understanding that his success may generate anxiety, but is not an actual material danger.
He comes from a Black Studies family. He does not seem to know he is a zombie of black multiculturalism, the cooption of black study. His greatness is the tradition of black integrationism and the anxieties that arise from being black in rich white spaces. He is an excellent observer of these anxieties and their complicities. He seems to think these anxieties free him of any complicity. His analysis is a zombie race man tradition. Many of us still believe in this tradition and its complicities. This model of greatness still walks around, but for what purpose? It is empty except for the desire to consume its own aggrandizement.
The unstoppable nigger he reveres is a joke of US empire and he gladly sells it for the laughs that he devotes his craft to. He is very good at this empty craft, of making himself seem dangerous as he serves capital and empire. He reveals the emptiness of the particular craft of black manhood that views our voice as representative of a black community still seeking entrance into empire. The model of greatness he represents is dead and all those who revere it make themselves zombies along with him.
Nicholas Brady is a Black writer from Baltimore and an Assistant Professor of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. His scholarly work investigates the ways that Black flesh conceptually disturbs normative understandings of technology, machine intelligence, the political, the urban, ecology, sexuality, communication, and social change. He is currently at work on a monograph exploring the relationship between blackness, sound, and artificial intelligence. You can find more of his work: https://lnk.bio/nicholasbrady