Dave Chapelle breaks it down plain and simple

greedybitchcafe:

“I think America needs an honest discourse with itself. It’s like the greatest country in the world by default, you know what I mean, but I think it could be the greatest country that ever existed if we were just honest about who we are and what we are and where we wanna go if we learned how to have that discourse. Things like racism are institutionalized. It’s systemic. You might not know any biggots, you feel like ‘Well I don’t hate black people so I’m not a racist’  -but you benefit from racism just by the merit of the color of your skin. There’s oppurtunities that you have, you’re privileged in ways that you may not have even realized because you haven’t been deprived of certain things. We need to talk about these things in order for them to change.”

from his 2005 Inside the Actor’s Studio interview