Don’t Punch Down or Up, Stop Punching
After a night with friends on Friday night I sat down and watched all of the new Chappelle special “The Closer” on Netflix. The next day I listened and re-listened to a number of podcasts featuring the linguist John McWhorter. These two individuals are worlds apart in many ways but I’m writing about my reflections on both because there are some small through lines between the biggest points they are both arguing in the public stage. Briefly: Dave Chapelle is widely mentioned in the conversation of greatest stand-up comedian of all time and frequently forgotten as someone who built his career on misogynistic and racially insensitive skits on the Chappelle Show*. I loved the Chappelle Show, I hear the jokes differently now, but I do still enjoy watching the show. Throughout his last couple Netflix specials, Chappelle has been making more jokes at the expense of the trans community. In the past couple specials these statements have generally been an aside, not the centerpiece of the special. After watching “The Closer” I’m comfortable saying that the thrust of it is to establish some fraudulent differences in the freedom to denigrate, critique, scapegoat and kill black people relative to the freedom to denigrate, critique and scapegoat trans-people. This shit is not laugh out loud comedy, but Chappelle has made specials in the past that weren’t laugh out loud funny that I still thought were excellent. Chappelle’s thesis, which I don’t buy wholesale, doesn’t do enough to establish the fact that there are plenty of black trans people, who stand in a confusing relationship to Chappelle’s relatively cut and dry judgements.
Do these differences actually exist? Is saying something disparaging about a trans person or about transexuals as a group a third rail in public discourse in a way that saying something disparaging about a black person or a black people as a group not? One of Chappelle’s big tent poles is establishing that DaBaby killed a black man in a Walmart and the world didn’t blink, DaBaby’s cache didn’t really drop, but DaBaby rushed to backpedal when he spoke on stage at Rolling Loud saying negative things about gay and trans people. Based on my media consumption, Chappelle is right, I had to google DaBaby killing this black man (the charges have been dropped) but I was very familiar with DaBaby’s statement on stage at Rolling Loud. That stayed in the zeitgeist, but the killing did not.
An aside: I believe the Netflix employees are 100% in the right to walk-out and demand the Chappelle show to be removed. Whether they prevail or not, they cash a check from this organization and if they don’t like what’s coming out, they have every right to leverage their power to try to change that. Jaclyn Moore, a writer and showrunner on “Dear White People” said she wouldn’t work with Netflix. In the interview I saw she also went out of her way to say that Chapelle should be free to say whatever he wants, but she didn’t want to be a part of a company that put out the content. I find no issue with her doing that, and I find no issue with people critiquing her for doing it.
Chapelle has a point: what issues do we and don’t we make third rail issues. I think about this a lot in reference to Israel and Judaism. Many people in our world (but particularly in the US and Western Europe) like to equate a critique of Israel with Anti-Semitism. People get fired and forced into huge apologies for critiques that I think they have every right to make. Why can’t you critique Israel? They are a country. You can critique countries. But if you want to critique Israel you have to be ready to lose your job over it. I don’t think those are the right stakes. I don’t think the answer is creating more and more third rail issues that can’t be discussed. But making certain things third rails is a way that many of our workplaces, homes and public gathering spaces have become more inclusive, more inviting. Fifty years ago, ten years ago, five years ago— there were comments, actions, innuendo and disposition that I believe made the world a worse place. Creating these third rails improved things, but over enforcement of them, expansion of them, yes I think they could make things worse. These conclusions seem destined to be forever gray. There will never be clear lines that stay solid. Chappelle seems to be pointing out that it’s a lot riskier to walk on the third rail in regards to the trans community than to kill a black man. That’s not punching down in my opinion, it’s not comedy, but it’s within the realm of what Chapelle has presented in the past as a celebrated media personality.
But during the whole special Chapelle does all these ticky-tacky side jokes that are dismissive, unimaginative and truly tasteless. He checks every box, misgendering someone on purpose, tossing in tons of letters after LGBTQ+ to minimize this identifier. It’s shitty material. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t need to suppress laughter, it’s cold and it’s pathetic. And I think ticky-tacky side jokes like that about the black community would get you roasted. ROASTED. Chappelle, you have a point, you have a point that’s worth exploring. And you’ve crossed out the punchlines in previous specials when you had something to get across, why do you have to keep on throwing in this hateful, non-insightful shit?
And that’s where John McWhorter comes in. Briefly: McWhorter is on the short list of thinkers who get called up to provide a counter-narrative to the anti-racism positions of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. There’s plenty more to his work than that, but it is that work that is making the rounds right now. McWhorter is black and he speaks with more care than I often see in this space about the welfare of black people. A lot of anti-racist material is marketed, discussed and consumed by a white audience. I consider that in some ways a positive example of white people having an appetite to understand racism in a way that many of us don’t naturally gain an understanding of from our everyday actions. But McWhorter seems asks whether some of the cut and dry metrics that Kendi proposes for moving forward towards an anti-racist society will have negative impacts on the very populations it aims to support. GREAT JOHN. I enjoyed your points and I took a lot from it. Namely, I’ve always felt profoundly more upset about a police officer killing a black person than a civilian of any race killing a black person. I think some of that is reasonable, civilians don’t receive their income from my tax dollars. Civilians don’t kill people and have me pick up the cost of civil lawsuits. Civilians don’t kill people wearing a uniform emblazoned with municipal and county authority. I feel I have more control over the police than I do over civilians, so their misdeeds not only worry me more, they feel more changeable. But, if as a whole country we direct all of our ire, concern and protest against police killing black men are we doing a disservice to the black men and women who are killed by civilians or who will be killed by civilians in the coming years if nothing is done? I believe we can do both, but I do feel recalibrated by John McWhorter. But I wish McWhorter would stop making ticky-tacky little takedowns of writers and thinkers like Kendi and DiAngelo. I don’t expect McWhorter to be funny, it’s not in his job description but when he says things like “now I don’t have X for a middle name” he seems to just be attacking a person for fun, for kicks. But it’s also racialized right. He’s cutting down Kendi for having a tangibly righteous middle name. Come on John, it’s his middle name, keep rolling and keeping arguing for real. And why should you keep arguing? You’ve got a vital point against some of Kendi’s most fundamental arguments, why water them down with that BS? If you think it’s because it’s funny, you need a bigger circle.
McWhorter and Chapelle both seem to be establishing that there are new groups ascending to power and they both question their authority and their methods. For Chapelle he feels that influencers within America have prevailed in creating a protected class for trans people in media spaces in record time relative to black people. For McWhorter he feels that the new wave of anti-racist thinkers has created a singular view about race in America and it has become predominate not because it is right but because people fear speaking out against it. At their best both of these thinkers could be speaking truth to power. But by engaging in potshots and dehumanizing minimizations I fear they are watering down the validity of their most defensible points.
*This is not an out and out indictment of The Chappelle Show. I enjoyed that show when it was released, it formed a lot of my understanding of comedy and of Dave Chappelle. But I believe that it’s important to remember that Chappelle has pushed out controversial content in the past.