Chris Rock continues his press run for Top Five with yet another piece of totally en fuego commentary, this time in the form of an essay for the Hollywood Reporter. In it, he’s just like, ripping down the curtain of political silence around Hollywood’s rampant racism, throwing said curtain on the ground and blasting it with a blowtorch before pissing on it. It’s awesome.
He begins the piece with anecdotes about helping younger black comedians around him, because he knows the infrastructure doesn’t exist in the same way it does for young white comedians. For example, he had a hand in getting Leslie Jones on Saturday Night Live: “She’s about as funny as a human being can be,” he writes, “but she didn’t go to Second City, she doesn’t do stand-up at The Cellar and she’s not in with Judd Apatow, so how the hell was she ever going to get through unless somebody like me says to Lorne Michaels, ‘Hey, look at this person’?”
After illuminating details of some sad truths that we all know exist—the lack of black people in Hollywood power, mostly—he hits his stride and just starts chucking the fuckshit out the window. On Mexicans in Hollywood:
You’re in L.A, you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans. It’s the most liberal town in the world, and there’s a part of it that’s kind of racist — not racist like “F— you, nigger” racist, but just an acceptance that there’s a slave state in L.A. There’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn’t exist anywhere else. I remember I was renting a house in Beverly Park while doing some movie, and you just see all of the Mexican people at 8 o’clock in the morning in a line driving into Beverly Park like it’s General Motors. It’s this weird town.
And on the racial double standard in casting black women:
[How] about True Detective? I never heard anyone go, “Is it going to be Amy Adams or Gabrielle Union?” for that show. I didn’t hear one black girl’s name on those lists. Not one. Literally everyone in town was up for that part, unless you were black. And I haven’t read the script, but something tells me if Gabrielle Union were Colin Farrell‘s wife, it wouldn’t change a thing. And there are almost no black women in film. You can go to whole movies and not see one black woman. They’ll throw a black guy a bone. OK, here’s a black guy. But is there a single black woman in Interstellar? Or Gone Girl? Birdman?The Purge? Neighbors? I’m not sure there are. I don’t remember them. I go to the movies almost every week, and I can go a month and not see a black woman having an actual speaking part in a movie. That’s the truth.
Such honesty is refreshing, unfortunately. Read the full piece here.
Image via Hollywood Reporter.