On the Hierarchy of Oppression Part One: When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong

There’s a moment early on in Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, The Closer, where he remarks on the relative speed with which the LGBTQ movement gained social acceptance compared to the movement for Black civil rights. The punchline involves Chappelle doing a decent Martin Luther King impression and giving a new set of marching orders to civil rights activists.

“I want everybody to get up on them floats. Get your bodies good and shiny.”

It’s a funny joke. It’s also a very technically sound and precise bit of comedy. Chappelle creates tension by expressing jealousy on behalf of the Black community toward the LGBTQ movement and then releases that tension by conjuring the image of MLK at a pride parade. He is a very good comedian. Understandably, some find nothing wrong with Chappelle’s comedy, some people just want to laugh instead of think. But this abstract debate over the role of comedy and what it means to “push boundaries” elides the very substantive problem with what Dave is doing. There just isn’t a good reason to frame the objectives of marginalized people in opposition to each other. Comedy is fine, ignoring the substance of material oppressions in favor of the spectacle being edgy is just participating in a culture war that no one can hope to win.

If one cares about fighting against the marginalization of Black people in America, and Chappelle’s career seems to imply that he is, then it’s irresponsible to sabotage potential solidarities with other marginalized groups. Especially when there are a decent amount of Black people who are also non-heteronormative and live under threat not just from white America but the homophobic parts of the Black community as well. Potential allies might find the implication that LGTBQ activism started in the ’70s and experienced a rapid glide to complete social acceptance a bit insulting to history. Perhaps they might reject the idea that the ability of online activists to damage the careers of people who say homophobic things in any way makes up for the real violence that the LGTBQ community endures to this day. 

But we aren’t supposed to think about it that much. We are supposed to laugh at the well-constructed joke. Later on in his set, Chappelle offers a critique of the #MeToo movement. He argues that the prominent actresses who were the face of #MeToo were entirely focused on the aesthetics of resistance rather than making material change for women in the industry. He posits that a more effective strategy would have been for these actresses to fire their male agents and hire a woman to represent them all. He ridicules them for showing up to Golden Globes in all black and wearing pink pussy hats. The punchline again involves his passable Martin Luther King impersonation, but this time, the subversion of Dr. King's image is meant to imply that the civil rights movement would have been inert if the focus was on aesthetics.  

(in MLK voice) “I want everybody to keep riding the bus, but wear matching outfits.”

(normal voice) “You got to get off the bus and walk. It’s real talk. A real talk, that was a silly movement.”

(in MLK voice) “I want everybody to wear crocheted pussy hats so they know we are serious.” 

It’s not a direct contradiction of his earlier joke about King at a pride parade, but it feels a bit sloppy. Sloppy enough, that you might start to think too much again. Coordinated clothing within a social movement might be a little silly. It also might be a prominent feature of most social movements, including the ‘60s civil rights movement. We might want to have a conversation about what “getting off the bus” means. The mere act of going public with accusations against powerful men in their industry could be considered a substantial “get off the bus” moment. It wasn’t that long ago that revelations of sexual impropriety between powerful men and the women they worked with were far more likely to damage the woman and leave the man untouched. Never mind that the Alabama bus boycotts were started by a woman purposely not getting off the bus in an act of defiance. Never mind that even before Rosa Parks, bus sit-ins were employed by Bayard Rustin in 1942, Irene Morgan in 1944, perhaps most notably by Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith who together won a supreme court ruling by not “getting off the bus”. Maybe Chappelle’s strategy for the movement would have been a good idea to consider, but by implying that #metoo didn’t accomplish anything real and straight up ignoring history, he severely undercuts his point. 

But there we go again, thinking too much. We aren’t supposed to be taking this that seriously. It’s a joke. Elsewhere in the set, Dave refers to his comedy as art. Art has many definitions, including the old porn standard of “you know it when you see it”, but broadly it can be defined as a representation of a theme or idea, intended to make an audience think about said theme or idea and engender some sort of emotion. Chappelle is right that his comedy is an art and he certainly wants us to think about it. That much is clear when he makes very salient points about the sometimes fickle nature of white feminist allyship to the Black community or the ability for white gay men to slip back into their privilege when it suits them. The problem for Chappelle is that by inviting his audience to think, he invites them to find the glaring holes in his logic.

While he does support JK Rowling, identifies himself as a TERF, and asserts that “gender is real,” he only deadnames or misgenders trans people twice--once to make fun of Caitlin Jenner and once more as a part of what is meant to be an emotionally resonant punchline toward the end. He opposes the petty and malicious bathroom laws targeted at trans people. He repeatedly refers to himself as transphobic but he does so while telling anecdotes about his supportive interactions with trans people. And of course, he closes his set by telling an emotional and heartfelt story about his friendship with a trans woman who recently took her own life. 

Dave takes great care to not claim that the online abuse directed toward Daphne Dorman for defending him on Twitter is what caused her suicide. It’s the responsible way to talk about suicide and something that other programs on Netflix could stand to learn from. But it's clear that he believes it played a part. According to Chappelle, the kind of trans activism that targeted him over his jokes did little to help a person like Daphne, whose identity as a comedian allowed her to appreciate the jokes made at the expense of her identity as a trans woman. 

“I don’t know what the trans community did for her, but I don’t care, because I feel like she wasn’t their tribe. She was mine. She was a comedian in her soul.”

Chappelle’s thesis statement is as such: If more people could be like Daphne Dorman and look past perceived problematic remarks to focus on commonalities, then much more progress could be made. But the devil is in the details that Dave dismisses with an “I don’t care”. 

Toxic social media discourse is a problem within the trans community, it’s an issue that Natalie Wynn (aka Contrapoints) tackles with much more care and nuance than Chappelle does. But when it comes to the higher rates of suicide within the trans community it’s pretty clear the mitigating factor is social rejection. Dave and his defenders may scoff at the demands of trans people to be acknowledged as the gender they present, but it is literally a life or death issue for many. Declaring that trans women could never be “real” women isn’t just an honestly held personal belief, it's an excuse to commit assault and murder. J.K. Rowling isn’t just asserting gender is real, she is promoting the dangerous myth that accepting trans women as women will make it easier for men to assault women by dressing in women's clothes and entering the ladies' room. He’s expressing support for a woman who supports the same bathroom discrimination laws he just said were mean and stupid.  

But Dave doesn’t care.

If police are largely apathetic to, if not participating in, the alarming amount of violence directed at the trans community, then the next best option is to create and enforce a popular culture where the fluid and abstract nature of gender is a normalized concept and any discourse that says otherwise is reactionarily rejected. The small hope being that a new generation of people raised in that kind of cultural milieu won’t react with violent revulsion to the mere existence of those who are gender non-conforming.  

It’s clear now that Dave Chappelle wanted to use his art as a way to address what he saw as a lack of empathy within the LGBTQ community for those who haven’t kept up with the ever-evolving nomenclature and customs. But he fell short in extending empathy in return. He was only able to empathize with Daphne Dorman as a comedian first. That was good enough for Daphne but you might be surprised to find out that a very small percentage of the trans community are professional comedians. 

Dave Chappelle’s jokes about the LGBTQ movement aren’t rooted in hatred but in something maybe even worse. Within the broad coalition of identity-based political movements, there are internecine fissures that reveal themselves when groups have conflicting priorities. This is the hierarchy of oppression. J.K. Rowling and the TERF or (ahem) gender-critical movement is actually an example of this.

If you weren’t previously aware, TERF stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. The people who are associated with this movement prefer the term gender-critical and say that TERF is a slur. I wonder if they will cancel Chappelle for calling himself one. They are mostly second-wave feminists who resist acknowledging trans women as women because they have a conception of womanhood as sacred. For the gender-critical, womanhood must be a genetic reality, it simply cannot be a social construct. This is because they have essentialized the patriarchy. Men are the enemy, not all men of course, but all men benefit from the patriarchy and therefore they cannot be completely trusted. The trans movement contains people who were born men and therefore they cannot be completely trusted. 

The gender-critical feminist never asserts that being transgender is inherently wrong. They are not conservative Christians. Instead, they view trans acceptance as a threat to real women. Both metaphysically by unraveling what it means to be a woman, and physically with those imaginary bathroom infiltrators. For trans people to win, women must lose. For the gender-critical, women rank above trans people on the hierarchy of oppression, so they shouldn’t have to lose. 

Chappelle closes his set by taking a small step in the right direction. He promises to never tell another joke about the LGBTQ community until such a time as he can be sure that they are laughing together. Maybe if he had started from that premise, we wouldn’t be having yet another pointless culture war over comedy. But this promise doesn’t come without asking for something in return. Chappelle will refrain from mining conservative Twitter for his material, but he just humbly asks that the LGTBQ stop punching down on his people. 

The Closer, and indeed the three Netflix specials that preceded it, was all just an attempt at renegotiating the hierarchy of oppression. 

The question then becomes who are Dave’s “people''. A lot of people defending The Closer right now maintain that Dave is highlighting how Black people are still more marginalized than trans people. Some people even believe that there is more outrage directed toward Black comedians for saying something offensive about the LGBTQ community (and being paid handsomely to do so repeatedly on a global platform with impunity) than there is for Black people being murdered. In his set, he specifically mentions celebrities like Da Baby and Kevin Hart as examples of people who have unfairly met the wrath of the woke and lost something in the process. I understand why someone might think he is talking about Black people when he says “his people”. However, I don’t think that’s the case because not once during the set does he mention the existence of Black trans people, nor that Black trans people have a harder time navigating their marginalization or simply not being murdered. 

Also, J.K. Rowling isn’t black. 

No, I think what Dave meant when he said “his people” were successful entertainers who either through ignorance or prejudice have said harmful things about the LGBTQ community. That’s who he’s defending on the hierarchy of oppression. If it were about Black people, there is plenty to be said about how Black queer people are treated by their white counterparts. But Chappelle doesn’t seem to have any interest in that. He just wants to be able to say that men can’t be women because the parts don’t line up. And if you have a problem with that, it's not because you have valid concerns about what that kind of rhetoric leads to, it’s because you have a problem with “his people”. 

But I do understand why some would think Dave is standing up for Black people. It’s kind of been the through-line of his career. Chappelle has always used humor to comment on the absurdity of racial prejudices. Always with Black people as the protagonists. Unfortunately, defending Black people instead of wealthy entertainers on the hierarchy of oppression doesn’t make the enterprise any less counterproductive.

We’ll talk about why in part two.

Solidarity forever.