Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month — and if so, get in touch, I’m looking for apartments — you’ve probably heard something about the latest controversy surrounding superstar comedian Dave Chappelle. In his latest Netflix special, The Closer, Chappelle, who has previously drawn fire for his comments about transgender people, declared his solidarity with J.K. Rowling and other “TERFs” (slang for feminists who don’t believe transgender women are real women), remarked that rapper DaBaby, who was quasi-canceled over the summer for a live riff on gay people and AIDS, got in more trouble for these remarks than for shooting a man to death in a North Carolina Walmart, and made some unprintable (in this magazine) jokes comparing transgender women’s anatomy to vegetarian meat substitutes such as the Impossible Whopper.
The reaction to Chappelle’s special was swift. LGBT nonprofit groups, including GLAAD and the mysterious, AstroTurf-seeming National Black Justice Coalition, quickly put out statements condemning Chappelle’s “dangerous” remarks, with the latter calling on Netflix to cancel the show. Liberal media outlets largely followed suit, either directly quoting the activists or taking the opportunity to chin-stroke about how Chappelle was still rich and his special wasn’t that funny anyway. A group of Netflix employees pitched a fit and issued a list of demands familiar from similar campus controversies, forcing CEO Ted Sarandos to apologize to them shortly after telling them, in effect, to go jump in a lake. A bunch of internal documents were leaked, a walkout and a celebrity PSA were staged, Chappelle dug in, Caitlyn Jenner took his side, and the wheels of the take economy continued to churn.
I’ll duck the question of whether the whole Chappelle contretemps amounts to “cancel culture.” Chappelle, of course, still has his money, and his special is still on the air, but I suspect that Sarandos and other CEOs in his position might be more hesitant in the future to risk employee anger, leaks, bad PR, and potential unsafe work-environment lawsuits over controversial material, especially in cases in which the talent in question isn’t one of the most popular comedians in the world. The Closer wasn’t Chappelle’s best work, but nor was it some bigoted anti-transgender screed — his comments reflected the silent majority opinion that, on the one hand, the idea of transgenderism is a little confusing and that biological sex is obviously real, but also that it’s important to have empathy and that individuals should be free to do whatever floats their boat. The special ends with a tragic and funny account of Chappelle’s friendship with transgender comic Daphne Dorman and his decision to set up a trust fund for her daughter after Dorman committed suicide.
But the controversy is an interesting illustration of the tensions within the Democratic Party and the ways in which the ideology of wokeness is used, sometimes more successfully than others, to smooth these over. As I’ve written in these pages before, wokeness is best understood not as a series of literally true claims about the world but as an ideological strategy for holding together the Democratic coalition. How do you keep together a party run by affluent, socially liberal white professionals but that draws its electoral power from poorer, more socially conservative, and disproportionately minority voters? With a fuzzy social theory according to which all the problems affecting the disparate parts of your base — climate change, the glass ceiling, and anti-LGBT prejudice for the Brahmins; racism and a lack of economic opportunity for the rest — are the fault of the white, capitalist, cis- and hetero-sexist patriarchy, i.e., the Republican Party. Thus the importance, whenever a black entertainer says something that wouldn’t fly in Fort Greene, of rolling out some professional NGO types to accuse them of false consciousness and reiterate that it’s all one struggle against “oppressive systems.” (See also: Kevin Hart.)
Chappelle understands this dynamic. Again and again, he has depicted the criticism that he and figures like DaBaby have received as effectively a racial dispute, a case of rich white people picking on black men for failing to conform to white standards of sensitivity. And outside the precincts of the prestige media, there doesn’t seem to be much grassroots black outrage against Chappelle. On the popular morning radio show The Breakfast Club, host Charlamagne tha God, wearing a “Decrackafy America” T-shirt, seemed nonplussed, scoffing at assertions that audiences didn’t want the material, commenting that Chappelle’s “Impossible meat” quip had been a “good joke,” and advised critics, “If you don’t like it, just don’t listen.” The actor Damon Wayans went a little further, calling Chappelle a “Van Gogh” who “freed” the comedians who had been “slaves to PC culture.” And Tariq Nasheed, social media terrorist extraordinaire, launched a Twitter jihad against Chappelle’s black critics, accusing them of being sock puppets for white liberal interests.
None of this is meant to suggest that we are about to see some sort of exodus of black men from the Democratic Party, isolated examples such as Kanye West aside. But it is a good reminder, whenever these controversies bubble up, not to take all the claims repeated in news reports at face value. White liberals, on average, are not particularly comfortable with the social views of black men. Black men, on average, are not particularly invested in the various improving crusades of white liberals. And a lot of our most respected cultural commentary is very invested in obscuring this basic fact.
Park MacDougald is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
