Dave Chappelle's Dilemma
Dave Chappelle has a dilemma.
In his most recent comedy special, ‘The Closer,” presently airing on Netflix, Chappelle openly calls out what has now become the de facto uncritique-able sacred cow of our present day and age: the LGBTQ community.
In his act, Chappelle unabashedly jokes about some of the more egregious claims of transgenderist ideology as well as the excessive demandingness of the LGBTQ community. Noting the drastically disproportionate degree of social outrage brought against rapper Da Baby with respect to Da Baby’s shooting and killing of a man in a Walmart versus his recent on-stage criticisms of homosexuality, as well as defending writer, J.K. Rowling, for her vocal rejection of transgender ideology, Chappelle now finds himself square in the crosshairs of the LGBTQ ideologues.
This recent state of affairs now puts Chappelle in a very tricky dilemma;
How can he simultaneously stand up for free speech and no-holds-barred comedy without thereby aligning himself with the free-speech Right whom he has made a career standing in opposition against?
Conversely, how can he continue to align himself with Black progressives on the Left without thereby inheriting, now part and parcel with the new Left, the ideology of LGBT which he has just openly rejected?
Like Luke, Leia, and Han Solo trapped in that weird crusher thing at the end of the original Star Wars, the perpetually cannibalizing wall of cancel culture, trans, intersectionality, and Leftism more generally is now closing in on Chappelle as he finds himself increasingly backing up against the other wall of traditional American values that he has spent a lifetime and a career rebelling against.
Chappelle’s particular dilemma at this particular moment in American history, however, is not unique to him as it is largely a surface expression of a much larger and much deeper form of ideological schizophrenia presently occurring on the liberal Left and within the liberal mind more generally as it struggles to accommodate the ever-expanding set of contradictions and inconsistencies generated by transgenderism, LGBTQIAAP+ (where the ‘+’ is a placeholder for a potential infinite set of yet to be named oppressed groups), and the ideology of intersectionality more broadly.
Intersectionality, first coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, is a theory that conceives of certain persons and groups as being discriminated against, oppressed, or marginalized along an intersecting and overlapping set of axes, features, and criteria. For example, a Black woman who is disabled might be marginalized in part because of her race, in part because she is female, and in part because of her disability. And while there may be no law or social rule explicitly calling to marginalize such persons, the aggregation of these features nonetheless results in that person’s severe marginalization. Proponents of intersectionality then often make the further claim that on account of these intersectional features of oppression such oppressed persons are thereby entitled to certain public goods or positions of power within society (traditionally denied to them) and that non-oppressed persons and groups thereby have a corresponding positive duty to accommodate such entitlements. Since all persons can be described as being potentially oppressed along a potential infinite set of descriptions; (from race, to religion, to sex, to class, to sexual preference, to age, to height, to weight, etc.) the very logic of intersectionality virtually guarantees a perpetual state of instability, cannibalization, and victim one upmanship as persons and groups jockey for the heights of social status and institutional power achieved by securing the title of ‘most oppressed.’
Chappelle, a Muslim, a father, a family man, a Black community leader, a rural, Red-State, gun-owner, and an American citizen, therefore now finds himself politically intertwined with a set of increasingly strange bedfellows, ones increasingly hostile and increasingly antithetical to those very values. Indeed, the tenets of intersectionality now dictate that the hard-fought gains for Black Americans during Civil Rights, those achieved by ‘cis-hetero-male’, Christian, Martin Luther King Jr., and ‘cis-hereto-male’, Muslim, Malcolm X, now be handed over to the new Marxist lesbian leadership of Black Lives Matter, committed to the explicit goal of the ‘disruption of the nuclear family,’ as well as to the new leadership of LGBTQ+. It is unclear, however, how commitment to these new values are supposed to help Black Americans exactly especially when contrasted against the more traditional values of God, Family, Country, merit, citizenship, personal responsibility, free speech, etc.. It is in that space of conceptual tension where both Chappelle and the vast majority of liberals presently find themselves.
Towards the end of his act, Chappelle reiterated that this would be his last comedy special for a while and that he, “won’t be doing anymore jokes about the LGBTQ community until he is sure that both him and the community are laughing together.” While on the surface, such a statement appears to be an adequate compromise, the cannibalizing spirit of the Left, exacerbated by the inherent contradictions of transgenderism and intersectionality, can only be ignored for so long, for both Chappelle and for liberals more generally. Indeed, something has got to give.
Picture by Gerd Altmann from PixaBay