Me: Hey. You’re pretty gay.
Friend: That’s a great way to start a conversation.
Me: I’m trying to work through my feelings on something, and I’d like your opinion.
Friend, who is queer and Black: Motherfucker, you know I got opinions. Especially on your white ass
Me: Perfect!
Me: How do we feel about Dave Chappelle?
Friend: …
Friend: That’s…
Friend: Not really easy to break down.
Me: Yeah, I know. During quarantine I kind of fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of Chappelle sketches and stand-up, and it made me feel a lot of different things.
Friend: Talk to me. What things?
Me: Well. He sure says “bitch” a lot.
Friend: He does.
Me: And that seems wrong.
Friend: It is.
Me: And there’s the issue of the trans person Daphne Dorman, he made fun of, who later died by suicide*.
Friend: Ding-ding-ding!
Me: He acknowledged what he did, and that it was wrong, and he did so in a way that… wasn’t really an apology. And like, someone’s dead. You can’t undo dead.
Friend: Correct.
Me: I just can’t shake this feeling like… when he does talk about social justice, he’s really very insightful. He points out the absurdity of racism in a way that makes it accessible to a white audience, and that’s important work.
Friend: And that’s what makes it difficult to break him down, especially to a white person.
Me: Okay, hit me.
Friend: For me, personally, I never liked Chapelle. I don’t like the way he yells, he calls all women- especially Black women- bitches… I just don’t think he’s funny. But then, my other Black friends will shove their phones in my face like “ohhhh you gotta see this, Dave Chappelle is so funny haha”
Friend: And I don’t laugh, because I personally don’t like his brand of comedy. But it’s also fucking problematic, and I feel like nobody’s talking about it on a larger stage.
Friend: And then I see people defending his transphobia and his sexism because of the way he brings race issues to the conversation.
Friend: He advocates for some of us. He highlights some of us, but he doesn’t highlight all of us. I would call him selfish, and not really an ally to the overall movement of social justice.
Me: Well, what if we thought about it this way? Let’s say you’re a scientist or an engineer fighting climate change. Maybe you’ll focus on transitional fuels, or maybe you’ll focus on all the landfills filling up, or maybe you’re on the verge of discovering the next great innovation in carbon scrubbing. They’re all component parts of the larger whole, and they need specialists to work within that whole. But they’re all working against climate change, right? They’re all tackling the problem from different angles.
Me: Someone working on carbon scrubbing technology is still worried about landfills, or the garbage patch in the ocean, et cetera, and… oh, dear. I just disproved my own argument didn’t I?
Friend: Yes, you did.
Friend: Dave Chappelle is great, if you’re a Black man. He’ll speak for you then. Anything else, and you’re not his people. I’m not his people. Chapelle a’int never gonna do nothin’ for me except make jokes at me. And that’s not really advancing the cause, now is it?
Me: No, I suppose it isn’t.
Friend: That is how we feel about Dave Chappelle.
Me: Well I gotta say I don’t like that at all.
Friend: Great, welcome to the club.