As the parent of a toddler, my TV watching habits have lately tended more toward Peppa Pig and Ms. Rachel than Heated Rivalry or The Pitt. I would like to keep abreast of whatever the internet is buzzing about, but when my child finally gets to sleep at the end of the day, I am a shell of a middle-aged human who is only able to muster the attention span necessary to fall into an old familiar comfort watch. (Lately that’s Law & Order, though it does more watching me than I do it.)
Still, I always make room for The Traitors. I agree with Kelsey McKinney, who once declared it the best show on television, and I would further argue that this current season, Season 4, is the best yet. Not because the cast is better—though I was absolutely thrilled to see the inclusion of two of my all-time favorite Real Housewives, Candiace Dillard Bassett of Potomac, and Lisa fucking Rinna of Beverly Hills—or because they’ve improved the gameplay, or because Alan Cumming continues to dig deeper into the bit as a combination of campy philosopher and dominatrix. It’s because this season has delivered one of the greatest moments in TV history: the public humiliation of Michael Rapaport.
When last year's initial casting announcement included Rapaport, I wasn’t sure I would want to tune in. The one-time actor, now full-time piece of shit, has spent the past several years being a loud and proud racist in defense of Zionism, justifying the Israeli government's genocidal campaign that has forced millions of Palestinians into starvation, violated so-called “ceasefire” agreements, and killed more than 70,000 Palestinians. Wherever there has been defense of Palestinian life, whether on the Columbia University campus or the site formerly known as Twitter, you could be certain that Rapaport would show up to ensure there was someone present to give a full-throated defense of the slaughter. He’s posted numerous videos of himself online, becoming a Zionist influencer of sorts, espousing his views, sometimes with colorful titles such as “The Erotic Sick Dream of a Free Palestine whatever the fook that means ain’t happening ever.” He appeared in a video shared by the militant pro-Israel group Betar US, which last month agreed to halt operations in New York after the state Attorney General’s office determined that their ongoing harassment constituted a civil rights violation. In that video, Rapaport praised convicted terrorist Meir Kahane, saying, “Kahane was always right.” In recent months, you could find Rapaport disparaging vocal critics of Israel, like when he called New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a “shit stain,” or made light of Rep. Ilhan Omar after she was attacked at a town hall meeting.
I do not like Michael Rapaport. I haven’t liked him for a very long time. I didn’t like him when he was playing a skinhead in Higher Learning. I didn’t like him when he was playing a racist television executive in Bamboozled. I didn’t like him when he showed up on Talib Kweli’s Quality album, playing a music executive trying to get Kweli to make music with more commercial appeal. (I don’t much like Kweli these days either, but that’s another story.) This isn’t a case of not being able to separate the actor from the roles they play—John Turturro said “nigger” at least a dozen times in Do the Right Thing, and there’s little I wouldn’t do for that man. Rapaport, though, has never been a good enough actor to see any daylight between himself and the characters he plays. They are always a version of the same thing, and at a certain point you have to suspect that thing is him.
Off-screen, he’s a “down” white guy—or, to use the terminology the critic Craig Jenkins revived in his examination of Timothée Chalamet’s promotional run for Marty Supreme, a “wigga.” In fact, actors of Chalamet’s generation inherited the archetype built by Rapaport; before there was Eminem, there was Rapaport in Zebrahead, his first film, adopting black speech patterns, black mannerisms, and exhibiting fluency in hip-hop. Not that he doesn’t come by it honestly: He was raised in New York in the '70s and '80s, going to school with all black kids in Brooklyn. He’s a product of his peer relationships and the culture they were creating in the wasteland of Reaganomics and crack.
But Rapaport has always seemed like the type to not understand that he moves through black culture with, as the late great Greg Tate put it, everything but the burden. He thinks he represents some form of progress, a cultural exchange that would lead to greater racial harmony. In a 2001 interview with The Guardian, off the heels of his appearance in Bamboozled, he answered a question about the blurring of the color line with the following: “I think, because of the integration of hip-hop music into white culture so much these days, there are people walking around using the language and behaving like that. And it's good, in one sense, that kids are all listening to the same kind of music. But it's bad in the sense that everybody, black and white, is taking on some of the negative, stereotypical ways from that stuff.” There’s a lack of awareness of himself as a participant in the perpetuation of the “negative, stereotypical” expressions of blackness, and of himself as someone who is able to embody those negative stereotypes and gain from it, as opposed to having it limit his opportunities.
Being “down” isn’t itself a sin, but what Rapaport has been is the kind of “down” that is awestruck by the brilliance of black culture, and insensitive to the pain through which it has been forged. For me, this became clear when I saw Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, the 2011 documentary directed by Rapaport. Because of Phife Dawg’s unfortunate death in 2016, this is likely to be the documentary we have for posterity about hip-hop’s greatest group, and instead of something that explores the genius of their musical legacy, they’ll only get to hear Rapaport press and press and press to get to the bottom of the drama that led to their dissolution. He would like you to think he’s a huge fan trying to get to the bottom of a profound mystery, but he comes across more as a white interloper trying to claw into the black psyche to mine for more damage, and present it to the public for entertainment—not altogether different from his character in Bamboozled.
Rapaport has brought the same level of intellect to his Zionist advocacy. In one of those videos, he says: "Yo, if 20 American tourists—forget the 1,200 people that were murdered, slaughtered, civilians—if 20 American civilians, all African American, all Black, all ages were taken hostage, and 10 of them were murdered and raped, and there was 10 surviving American tourist hostages that were all Black, there’s not one motherfucker in this country that would be talking about ceasefire." Insulting on multiple levels, not least of all the Palestinians being subjected to an apartheid state in which they continue to be killed en masse, but also profoundly ignorant—ain’t nobody rallying the resources of the U.S. military to respond to the loss of black life, here or abroad.
In short: Michael Rapaport is an obnoxious clown who has traded on his connection to black culture to advance his (now floundering) career, while never caring a wit for the people whose culture he has been so eager to claim as his own, and has revealed himself to be the racist I believe he has always been. Also, he eats like a child.
And so it was, watching that fifth episode of The Traitors this season—after getting my child to bed, sacrificing an hour of my own sleep for television’s best show—when the Faithfuls decided to banish Rapaport, unconcerned whether he was a Traitor or not, and he revealed himself to be a Faithful and no one even batted an eye of remorse, that I let out the best laugh I have had in a long, long time.
Worth it. Absolutely worth it.
