Jesus Christ, I’m Tired of Hearing About Dave Chappelle.

Gender’s not a fact. The man is transphobic. Can we move on?

Photo by Alex Green from Pexels

Can we move on? Please? I’m so tired.

Ever since The Closer dropped on October 5th, the internet has kind of sucked. More so than usual, anyway. The comedy special was immediately trending as one of the top programs on Netflix, and ever since I haven’t managed to escape it or Dave Chappelle.

Articles have been pouring out from Black people who can articulate the 10,000 nuances of racism and microaggressions when it comes to commentary on Blackness from white people. Somehow these same people fail to see how a cis man proclaiming himself to be trans-exclusionary is, in fact, transphobic.

Can I say I’m surprised? No. Homophobia and transphobia run rampant in the Black community. Even from the progressive people. Even from the “nice” ones. Every Black person defending Chappelle is trotting out the same tired excuses that they notably do not accept from white people on issues of racism:

“But he had a trans friend.”

“He’s a comedian. It’s a joke.”

“He’s Black.”

When it comes to Black queer people speaking out and voicing issues with Chappelle’s commentary, the weird ass response we get is: “He’s not talking to you.”

Yeah. That’s kind of the problem. And telling Black queer people to essentially shut-up with their criticism of him only perpetuates that problem.

All this has shown me that too many people are drawing hard lines in the sand between queerness and Blackness. “But of course, some queer people are Black,” they tack on at the end of a sentence that inherently assumes the default member of the LGBTQ community is white. This then gets followed up by falsely equivalent comparisons between the LGBTQ movement and the Black Lives Matter movement, and insinuations that gay people got what they wanted (marriage equality, apparently, was the whole list — and many a disabled person would argue that it even exists yet), so what about Black people? Because obviously we’re talking about entirely separate populations, right?