Dave Chappelle is not crazy and neither am I!

A lot of times, people are called crazy for the right reasons. Other times, it’s out of dismissiveness. This dismissiveness can come from a variety of places. One way is defensiveness.

People often feel that other ways of life are direct challenges to theirs. Meaning, when a person does something you do not do, there is often an innate assumption that you should be doing the same thing, or that the ideas are competing.

To be clear, sometimes the ideas are at odds, but a lot of the time it’s just a result of a different perspective, choice, value systems, goals, origin background, history, etcetera.

So, we often jump to calling someone crazy who has made different choices. This does not have to happen on a conscious level. Our natural impulse is to feel that things that are different from us are wrong.

I’d like to quote Dave Chappelle, a sometimes philosopher king, who said, “calling someone crazy is the worst thing you can call them. It’s dismissive.”

This came after he had walked away from his $55 million television contract. Walking away from such vast sums of money is such an alien concept to a society that worships and idolizes money accumulation above most else.

So when we hear about someone voluntarily walking away from a fortune that they’ve been paid to pursue a passion of theirs, and then they’re going to go to Africa of all places, as was widely reported, there is only one explanation: they are crazy.

Dave Chappelle is someone we agree is brilliant and can do things we cannot do. Despite huge respect for his intellect, American society immediately jumped to call him crazy, overnight.

No further investigation is necessary; he didn’t take the money, open and shut case!

In reality, Dave Chappelle had become disillusioned with the process and product he was creating. He feared that the racial commentary he was crafting and popularizing was being enjoyed for the wrong reasons and often taken at face value instead of facetiously or satirically.

Instead of powerful satire, he feared he may be creating minstrel show-like caricatures, to be enjoyed by racists for the wrong reasons.

This is my assessment of what happened based on reading many articles and Dave Chappelle interviews on Inside the Actors Studio.

Dave had, as a Black man in America, risen to the top of his field and felt he’d crossed a line that did a disservice to his mission and people.

His deeper mission (I speculate) was to spread his ideas and racial satire through comedy. Instead, he felt he may be contributing to creating popularized racial caricatures that could be used for minstrel purposes.

This, coming with his peak earnings ever, could certainly prompt a principled and purposeful artist to take a step back. Dave Chappelle had no immediate need for money at that point, but he did have a need to step back, connect with his homeland, and reassess. This was a very sane thing to do. And as you may have noticed, he’s not financially struggling today.

He engaged in the "crazy" behavior of standing for his values.

Not only is that not crazy, it’s possible to look at the “sane” alternative of collecting massive amounts of money, doing a disservice to your life mission and people, as the crazy move.

Dave Chappelle is amazing. Despite being problematic, he is not crazy.

I do a lot of things that seem undeniably extreme or stupid. Sometimes they are, in fact, stupid or needless. This is without a doubt.

However, my history, perspective, and life’s purpose are driving me in an atypical direction. This direction and purpose, coupled with my perspective and way of thinking, make me seem insane. I am not crazy.

This blog post was going to inform y’all about some of the crazy things I do. But I’ll just do that one next week or so. Thanks for reading; I so appreciate you!