For today’s Sketch spotlight we wanted to drop a classic; The Black White Supremacist from The Chappelle Show.
The Black White Supremacist is the best Chappelle’s Show sketch of all-time. Period. It is a sketch that Dave Chappelle introduced after admitting he was shocked that the show hadn’t been pulled from the air, and that one of his friends told him he was “setting black people back” by writing it.
Clayton Bigsby, a blind black Klansman raised to believe he was white, transcended the sketch that gave him life. There are critiques of white appropriation of the n-word. There is commentary on the fluid and arbitrary social nature of race. There is even a much-appreciated spoofing of the investigative series “Frontline.” To write a sketch this profound and unafraid this early in the show’s life is a marker of Chappelle’s genius. To take a legacy of terror created by the Ku Klux Klan, and spin it into a series of jokes that lampoons the very nature of white supremacy is something only Dave Chappelle could have pulled off.
Watch it below;
