“To turn his back on Hollywood, to walk away from the spotlight because it was turning him into a man he didn’t want to be—a man without dignity—was a move that was, in a way, Chappelle’s birthright, his own unwieldy kind of Negritude.”
Featured in this month’s Believer is Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s essay on the 10-year anniversary of Dave Chappelle’s departure from his self-titled show. It’s not just an exceptional meditation on one of the most popular sketch comedy television series ever but a raw reflection on the impact of race in the comedy world, and Chappelle’s role in being “the world’s most famous interlocutor in a conversation about race—the one conversation no one likes having.”
