Comic legend Dave Chappelle, who famously had a sketch on his Comedy Central show about the racial draft, has weighed on Rachel Dolezal — the white woman posing as a black woman and heading the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP — and you might be surprised by what Chappelle thinks.
“We would take her all day, right?” Chappelle said, according to the Washington Post, referring to how blacks would choose Dolezal in a racial draft.
Chappelle was speaking to students at his high school alma mater, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where he delivered the commencement address yesterday and he weighed in on the controversy surrounding Rachel Dolezal.
“The world’s become ridiculous,” he told the awestruck grads at George Washington University’s Lisner auditorium. “There’s a white lady posing as a black lady. There is not one thing that woman accomplished that she couldn’t have done as a white woman. There’s no reason! She just needed the braids! I don’t know what she was doing.”
That said, Chappelle said backstage after the commencement that he does not plan on doing any jokes about Dolezal anytime soon, suggesting that the political atmosphere around her is charged for both black and white people. In fact, Chappelle was reserved in his opinion of Dolezal, opting against a divisive hot take:
“The thing that the media’s gotta be real careful about, that they’re kind of overlooking, is the emotional context of what she means,” Chappelle said thoughtfully, between drags of American Spirit cigarettes. “There’s something that’s very nuanced where she’s highlighting the difference between personal feeling and what’s construct as far as racism is concerned. I don’t know what her agenda is, but there’s an emotional context for black people when they see her and white people when they see her. There’s a lot of feelings that are going to come out behind what’s happening with this lady. And she’s just a person, no matter how we feel about her.”
Meanwhile, Chappelle also revealed to the Washington Post that he has been taping many of his stand-up performances, but declined to say whether a stand-up special is forthcoming.
(Via Washington Post)
