The Funky Academic
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Richard Pryor was hilarious.
I grew up in the 70’s, but was well into my adulthood before I realized he called out things like in OP pretty often.
And an entire bit that sounds like it could have been written last year.
And an SNL skit I just saw for the first time that had me rolling.
Now I need to go get my hands on some of his old albums. 😁
I watched a 1976 Pryor stand-up in 2020 and I couldn’t laugh at all. The country was reeling over the murder of George Floyd and Pryor’s jokes were all about police officers murdering black people. That’s when it finally hit me that despite all the outward progress we’ve made, the exact same problems are plaguing BPOC still, 47 years later. Like what in the actual fuck? I guess his audience laughed because of the shock value of it, nobody before him had the courage to outright say the things he was saying, but watching it 47 years later while the exact same problems are happening wasn’t funny, it was depressing and infuriating.
I had that exact awakening during the same timeframe.
Like holy shit - I have been laughing at Chapelle, and Rock, and Pryor, and others, thinking these were just jokes. No, they were never just jokes.
I felt ridiculous that I’d grown up in such a bubble that my reaction had been to think these were solved problems that were being made fun of just because they were sort of part of the zeitgeist a that point.
So much respect for these guys putting it out there, but I feel a little ashamed of how long it took me to start realizing these were NOT solved problems.
That second clip hits hard. He starts to get into the cycle of violence, and the stress of being black; either intentionally or just by observation.
Yeah it kinda hit me during 2020 (and I’m ashamed it took that long) that black entertainers (not exclusively, but in particular) have been ringing the bell about this for decades. It really drove home that these are not recent problems, they are only recently (in my experience) getting mainstream coverage.
I rewatched all episodes of Chappelle’s Show during 2020 (in between watching the daily livestream of police cracking skulls) - and realized that even where there wasn’t a skit about police brutality, there was at least a one liner in his monologue about it - without fail.
I also recognize that police brutality is but one symptom and doesn’t really get at root causes, but it’s a symptom I admit to being blind to for a good chunk of my life, so it really tends to grab my attention now. I grew up in a bubble of “these problems were solved before you were born” and was definitely one of those “the cops must have a had a reason” folks for longer than I want to admit. Pretty sure I had members in my extended family who would have responded just like the woman in your clip from OP.
Cutting myself short here before this becomes a novel. I’ll summarize as, it’s sad to see how little things have changed in some ways.
Pretty much the same as you. It happened to me while trying to understand the support for Trump. Now I’m overwhelmed and frustrated that this knowledge was suppressed for most of my life.
That last line in the video. That’s exactly what happens when they finally realize you caught them in the racist/revisionist shit. They go on the attack with something absolutely inane.
She has troubling coping with not being the one directing the narrative.
We all do at times. I struggle to listen. Listen to the people around you, they say more than just words. Usually when people are angry, it’s because something else is bothering them, but they can’t recognize or communicate it.
True. We all share the same vulnerability, but I think it is one remarkably germane to the structural criticisms of the “white liberal”.
Notice Pryor’s clever tactics for exposing Fuldheim’s indifference to any contribution that may validate the substantive or lived experiences of anyone marginalized.
(Pryor of course is Black American, and also was raised in abject poverty.)
Just found this guy last night. He has some great insights you might enjoy. I’m trying to understand liberal psychology, ie, harm reduction and maintaining the status quo. Any starting points you can think of that might help me would be appreciated.
Liberal psychology is based on a collective delusion that alienates an ideal, presented as universal, from any immediate experience, such that all meaningful experience by an individual alienates the individual from the rest of society, who perceives only the ideal.
Thus, all unity from shared experience is annihilated by servility to the abstract.
Thanks. I think this was a theme in Adam Curtis’s Century of Self, although it’s not very explicit.
Marx and Durkheim have laid the groundwork for psychological transformations under liberal society.
Postmodernist authors have tried to address the issues more comprehensively, to varying degrees of coherence and reliability.
The Spectacle of the Situationists, and capitalist realism of Mark Fisher, interrogate the extreme alienation of postmodernity.
Nice username. Embracing and owning the insult, rendering it powerless.
I can’t take credit. My son kept calling me boomer. I asked him what my username should be, this was his answer.
