Chappelle falls for old right-wing political device
“I have never had a problem with transgender people … my problem has always been with white people.”
In comedian Dave Chappelle’s mind, transgender people, and the LGBT community at large, is white.
This is the argument he uses to frame his decision to spend a vast majority of the stand-up special recently released on Netflix.
The celebrated comedian and Yellow Springs resident knows better than this, but this old trope is what he builds The Closer around, his final of five stand-up specials for the network.
But the LGBTQ community isn’t white, and it’s based on an old right-wing political device that was used to turn straight Black people away from supporting LGBTQ rights movements.
In the special, he talks about the transgender people and their loved ones who have directly confronted him in public about his past remarks. And he ignores the Black LGBTQ people who’ve critiqued his past work.
“Gay people are minorities until they need to be white again,” he says.
Chappelle’s sentiments are not new, and in fact seem to demonstrate the success of a 30-year-old campaign carried out by Christian Right groups to use LGBT rights as a cultural wedge issue with African-americans.
In 1993, the Traditional Values Coalition produced a short documentary called “Gay Rights, Special Rights,” which was mailed on VHS tapes to Black churches around the country.
The video showed footage of white gay men in leather BDSM gear at a pride parade juxtaposed with the voiceover of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, leaving conservative religious Black viewers with the fear that the Civil Rights Movement’s legacy was being appropriated by immoral people.
This campaign was successful.
It provided homophobic Black people with a rhetoric that cast lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people as somehow existing outside of the Black community, and not deserving of civil and legal protections, and any criticisms of Black pastors, comedians or hip-hop artists as inherently racist, as if Black LGBTQ people don’t exist and aren’t a part of the chorus of people raising their concerns.
Lots of Chappelle’s material in this special is directly tied to this idea that queer people didn’t experience chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation or racial violence.
It’s as if James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and others who fought both for Black freedom against white supremacist forces within the Civil Rights and Black Power movements but also challenged the feminist and LGBTQ movements on issues of racism as well.
Chappelle, the child of academics, is too smart to not know this.
But Black LGBTQ people have long had to fight racism within the LGBTQ community, and at the same time fight homophobia and transphobia in the Black community.
Chappelle mentions actual Black queer people only once or twice in the special because to deal with us specifically, he would have to rethink a lot of the thrust of his argument that we’re just being sensitive, and that the LGBTQ community is just a white Twitter mafia going after poor little millionaire comedians like himself and Kevin Hart – whom Chappelle specifically mentions as an example of LGBTQ people going too far when he was forced out of hosting the Academy Awards in 2019 for homophobic/ transphobic remarks.
Chappelle even tries to cloak himself as a feminist to eschew any critiques of his homophobic/transphobic sentiments, talking about how Black abolitionist Sojourner Truth challenged the Women’s Suffrage Movement around their exclusion of Black women from the fight for women’s rights to vote.
If Chappelle believes so strongly in Truth’s 1851 Akron speech “Ain’t I a woman?” to white feminists, why doesn’t he think LGBTQ people are Black too?
Kenyon Farrow is a Black gay activist and writer based in Cleveland Heights. He serves on the board of the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland.