Chris Rock was interviewed by Hadley Freeman at The Guardian last week, where he spoke on everything from his divorce, to new Daily Show host Trevor Noah, and of course, racism.
Rock seems to think that police violence is just a part of everyday life for young black men, and that “white kids” are never victims of police brutality:
“It’s not that it’s gotten worse, it’s just that it’s part of the 24-hour news cycle. What’s weird is that it never happens to white kids. There’s no evidence that white youngsters are any less belligerent, you know? We can go to any Wall Street bar and they are way bigger assholes than in any other black bar. But will I see cops stop shooting black kids in my lifetime? Probably not."
His reaction to six Baltimore officers charged with manslaughter and the murder of Freddie Gray also reeked of racial suspicion: “I am kinda surprised, and you know, unfortunately it may have something to do with the black mayor and the black police chief and all that stuff. But, hey, charged and convicted are different – so we’ll see.”
Rock later explained he was happy to have daughters instead of sons, since that girls don’t have to worry about getting beat up by the cops, because “nothing generally happens to girls.” With two daughters of his own, Rock doesn’t believe the fact that there’s a black family in the White House hasn’t really affected black kids, rather “white people’s kids:
“It’s white people who have made progress,” he said. “To call it black progress suggests we deserved everything that happened to us: the kids my kids grow up with won’t have a hard time picturing my daughters in an executive capacity — that’s progress, you know what I mean?”
So, it’s all white people’s fault if progress hasn’t been made. He also thinks Obama is still a marvel: “Oh yeah – he’s been good. Great, even. He wasn’t going to solve America, but the country was off the rails and he was like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, you know? He really sorted s--t out.”
Last month, Rock went off on Major League Baseball, with a commentary on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel that the black community has completely “given up on baseball” because baseball is “stuck in the past” on everything from “old white announcers” to the organ music, and how the game is played:
“Every club is building a stadium that’s supposed to remind people of the ‘good ol’ days,’” he said. “You know, the ‘good ol’ days’ of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Emmett Till…“It’s the only sport where they’re a ‘right way to play the game’ — and it’s ‘the white way…the way it was played 100 years ago, when only whites were allowed to play.”
Rock noted that five out of six baseball fans are white with an average age of 53 –stating that wasn’t an audience, rather, “a Tea Party rally.”
He also took issue with the fact that there were no black players on the San Francisco Giants team that won the 2014 World Series, and doesn’t count black Latino baseball players as, well, black players. From Sporting News:
“One of the zingers Rock flung MLB’s way prompted my memory of interviewing Cepeda. To illustrate his point about the disappearance of black ballplayers from MLB, Rock decried that the Giants won the 2014 World Series without a single black player. That statement surely must have surprised Pablo Sandoval, a black Latino from Venezuela. Sandoval, moreover, was not the lone Latino Giant who, had he played in the era when a color line determined opportunity in baseball, would have more likely been Negro Leaguers than major leaguers.”
These are just the most recent comments on race that Rock has made. In December, Rock mad a few other incendiary comments about white people and Ferguson:
"To say Obama is progress is saying that he's the first black person that is qualified to be president. That's not black progress. That's white progress. There's been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years... The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let's hope America keeps producing nicer white people."
And on Ferguson, he said:
“Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.”
For someone who constantly focuses on racial injustice, Rock seems to forget that he is just as guilty of the same kind of racism he often accuses others of having.
Pot, meet kettle.
