David Zurawick, via Richard Prince, asks whether the cancellation of DL Hughley's CNN show and David Allen Grier's Chocolate News means that Eric Holder was right:
But here is the question that matters for us: Were they just awful shows, or does their failure say we are not such a great and progressive nation ready to embark on a more meaningful and open discussion of race?I don't mean to hurt any feelings, because I have a friend who worked on one of these shows, but they were both wack. Hughley is a comedian, not a newsman, and he really had no more business hosting a news show than Glenn Beck does. The fact that Hughley isn't deranged doesn't mean he should have a show on CNN. Hughley's finest, and perhaps only memorable moment on the show came last week when he interviewed Michael Steele, right before the cancellation announcement.Or how about the more extreme version of that question: Were one or both of the shows offensive to blacks, as some have claimed (on this blog and elsewhere), or are we the nation of "cowards" when it comes to when talking about race that Attorney General Eric Holder recently called us?
Chocolate News was an attempt at a Chapelle's Show lite, much like the ill-fated show hosted by Carlos Mencia that originally filled that slot. Grier's "racial insights" were neither original nor very funny. The most frequent and recurring joke seemed to be that Grier is really good at making white people uncomfortable. Which can be funny in and of itself, but not if it's the only joke on a 30-minute show. Grier, whose humor is unaccountably mean-spirited, made the same hackneyed and obvious jokes about race, featuring skits ragging on Maya Angelou's accent and the fact that she is old (exp date: 1993) or how hip-hop is no longer politically conscious and a parody of itself (exp date: 1997). The shows weren't good. Plain and simple.
The cancellation of these shows doesn't suggest we aren't ready to talk about race, rather the content of the shows themselves shows that we're stuck talking about race pretty much the same way we have for a while. It's not so much that we're not talking about it, it's that these shows weren't saying anything new.
-- A. Serwer
