[S4E15] Robert's Rodeo [UPDATED]
Robert gets gored in the rear by a bull and has to stay with Marie and Frank for a while. In order to go Go-Carting with friends, Ray lies to Robert about having to work. Robert decides to work an extra shift with the police and gets gored by a bull while trying to shut down an illegal rodeo. Because of his injury he has to move back in with his parents. The guilt drives Ray to confess to Robert and help him with the bandages.
[S4E15] Robert's Rodeo
Sergeant Judy: All right, back it up. Let's back up a little. Some guys were running a rodeo, and we got the call to shut them down.Ray: Wait a minute, rodeo? What is that, police talk for whorehouse?Robert: No, it was a real rodeo. A rootin'-tootin' rodeo.Debra: In New York?Sergeant Judy: In Queens. It was an illegal rodeo. These guys set them up in parking lots, with animals, rides, music.Frank: This city's got everything!
Robert T. Chase: So Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in their film where they go to prison and perform in a rodeo. I mean, there's a whole thing to talk about there with performance of Blackness in public space and these prison rodeos. One in Angola, in Louisiana, which was known as the worst, baddest farm. And I mean bad in a bad way for being violent. And then one in Texas, which operated all the way until the early 1980s. But the performance that was going on there, for instance, there was a greased pig contest where African American prisoners, principally women, would be forced to catch this pig or 'convict poker' where they released an angry bull, and the prisoner that sits the longest at that poker table gets the money. It's a kind of public minstrelsy that is performing the condemnation of Blackness in public space as criminal and worthy not of human empathy, but of degradation and also of mockery. 041b061a72