Banana peel toss not representative of New Mexico

Santa Fe is known for many things — but being known as a place where an audience member throws a banana peel at an African-American comic is not an image we welcome.

Yet that’s the story that shot around the nation, and even the world, after Christian Englander, 30, pulled the peel from his back pocket and tossed it at Dave Chappelle during a performance last week at the Lensic.

The peel-tossing veered way too close to how racist soccer fans in Europe throw bananas at black players on the pitch. One headline on the web called the Santa Fe tosser a “racist idiot.”

We don’t know for sure if Englander of Santa Fe was being racist, stupid or drunk — or some combination of all three. In an interview, he came across as a free-spirited hipster, saying Chappelle was his “comic hero” and he didn’t intend to be racist. Asked if he was drunk, which the police say he was, he acknowledged feeling “warm and fuzzy.”

He says he considers tossing the peel in the tradition of acceptable heckling and compared it to throwing a rotten tomato. “I thought the joker could take a joke,” he said. Englander maintains it had to be explained to him later why the banana reference could be taken as racist when the target was black.

If Englander is a racist, he’s a new version. He says he’s a jokester and artist. When an Albuquerque Journal reporter found him at home for an interview, he was wearing loose, brightly colored West African clothing and a red article around his neck that looked a woven version of a feather boa, with a flower and joker playing card tucked under his backward baseball cap. He had a banana in his pocket.

“If I was racially trying to imply that he (Chappelle) was a monkey, I would have thrown him a full banana, not my banana peel,” he said. “I’m the monkey. I’m the drunken monkey.”

Perhaps the best thing for Santa Fe to do is to push the incident aside and take pride in that moment after the banana peel was tossed, when the crowd applauded loudly to a woman’s shout-out of “that guy does not represent Santa Fe.”

— Albuquerque Journal