(AllHipHop News) Chris Rock isn’t upset by Jimmy Fallon’s blackface impersonation of him on an old episode of “Saturday Night Live” as he doesn’t believe his pal’s intentions were malicious.
The “Tonight Show” host Fallon apologized earlier this year for the 20-year-old sketch, in which he wore blackface makeup to play the “New Jack City” star.
However, Chris says he wasn’t offended by the scandal surrounding the sketch – as he doesn’t believe his friend had racist intent.
“Hey, man, I’m friends with Jimmy. Jimmy’s a great guy,” he told The New York Times. “And he didn’t mean anything. A lot of people want to say intention doesn’t matter, but it does. And I don’t think Jimmy Fallon intended to hurt me. And he didn’t.”
Chris is more bothered about the death of African-Americans at the hands of police – an issue he highlighted in his 2018 special “Tamborine” – two years before the Black Lives Matter movement became a global phenomenon following protests against the death of Minnesota man George Floyd.
In the special, Chris said: “Whenever the cops gun down an innocent black man, they always say the same thing: ‘Well, it’s not most cops. It’s just a few bad apples.’ I know being a cop is hard. But some jobs can’t have bad apples. You know, American Airlines can’t be like, ‘Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'”
Reflecting on the set now, he says it’s strange seeing his points get international attention, due to politicians like President Trump using similar language.
“I remember when ‘Tamborine’ dropped, I got a lot of flak over that cop thing,” he recalled. “There was a lot of people trying to start a fire that never really picked up. It’s so weird that, two years later, it’s right on. I remember watching the news and Trump said ‘bad apples.’ It was like, you did it! You did it!”
However, Chris also noted that Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Marvin Gaye had spoken up long before he did – and the issue is “not going away.”
