Abraham Ramirez: Dave Chappelle’s SNL 2016 Election Night skit explains America so clearly. In the skit, after Trump wins the election, a white woman suddenly awakens from a colorblind slumber, “Oh my god! I think America is racist!” To which Chappelle responds, “Oh my god! You know, I remember my great-grandfather told me something like that. But he was like a slave or something, I don’t know.” It is not that Chappelle supports racism in America, it is that a black man in America knows Trump; and more precisely, Trumpism. In the eyes of the frightened and fierce immigrant, the face of every ICE agent looks like Trump. It has been this way for decades.
“At the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery.”
Césaire, much like Chappelle’s skit, mocks the idea that Hitler and Nazism were exceptions to the standard practices of Europe in particular, and Western civilization, in general. “Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside of him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.” More here.