Chris Rock has talked about racial issues his entire professional career. Over the history of stand-up comedy, in particular, you’d be hard-pressed to find a comedian that has tackled racism, racial politics, and the Black experience more than Rock. So, when he talks about his disdain for Civil Rights films, it might be a little shocking.
However, speaking on the “How Neal Feel” podcast, Chris Rock did just that. The comedian-turned-actor-turned-filmmaker opened up about his hatred of Civil Rights films. And no, he’s not saying that they’re fundamentally bad, but that the examples of popular films in this subgenre of historical pictures seem to focus on how to “fix” racism versus how brutal and horrific the racism of that era actually was.
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“I hate all Civil Rights movies,” Rock explained. “Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the effort and they should exist. The problem is they only show the back of the bus and the lunch counter. They actually make racism look very fixable. They don’t really get into how dysfunctional the relationships were.”
He continued, “In the ’40s and ’50s, white men would just walk in your house and take your food…it’s a predator-prey relationship. Do you think when it was time to rape, [white men] were raping white women? No—they would go and rape the women they could actually rape without going to jail for.”
He would go on to explain the crux of his argument, which is that racism is much worse than is actually shown in some of the Civil Rights movies that aim to teach people about the history of the United States.
“This shit is so much…dirtier than any movie ever shows,” Rock added. “….My mother used to get her teeth taken out at the vet because you weren’t allowed to go to the dentist. No movie shows you that.”
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Obviously, whenever we talk about quotes from comedians, especially when there are controversial opinions involved, it’s important to understand the context. Is he being hyperbolic by saying “all” Civil Rights films are terrible? Probably. But then again, we only have his words to go by and he seemed very sincere in his teardown of the genre. And given his very personal story that he shares at the end, who’s to tell him that he’s wrong?
